Business: On to Lebanon

Last week Manhattanite directors of Ulen & Co., international engineers, traveled to Lebanon, Ind., in a specially chartered Ulen & Co. car. There Henry Charles (“HC”) Ulen extended them the hospitality of Lebanon’s Ulen-built country club, entertained them in his Florentine mansion at Ulen, suburb of Lebanon, and held a directors’ meeting at which was declared the company’s first common dividend — 40¢ for the quarter on a $1.60 annual basis. It was also announced that the company’s first quarter net was $231,235 and that the year had begun with the company’s books showing more than $40,000,000 in uncompleted work. Unusual seemed the western pilgrimage of such Manhattan Ulen-men as Matthew Chauncey Brush and Harry A. Arthur of American International Corp.; of Bayard F. Pope and George O. Muhlfeld of Stone & Webster; of Gordon H. Balch of Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. The trip was also taken by Chicago Ulen-men Marshall Field and Edward P. Currier, of Field, Glore & Co. Whoever is a Ulen director must go to Lebanon for his company’s meetings for Mr. Ulen is filled with Lebanon civic-pride. In May 1929 he invited his entire office force, then working at No. 120 Broadway, Manhattan, to move in a body, and at his expense, to Lebanon, where work would be over at 4 p.m. and no one would have to ride home on a sub way. Grateful, 75% of Ulen employees accepted the offer, made Lebanon the Ulen capital. But not midwestern are Ulen & Co. activities: Ulen engineers today are work ing upon three dams in Chile, a $23,000,000 land-reclamation project in northern Greece, the construction of Persia’s only trunk-line railroad, and the operation of Brazilian public utilities. Monumental Ulen works are the Shandaken Tunnel through the Catskills (longest — 18 mi. — -hydraulic tunnel in the world, five miles longer than the Swiss Simplon tunnel), finished in 1922, and the Marathon Dam, completed last fall, supplying water for the city of Athens, and overlooking the famed battlefield where the Greeks defeated the Persians in 490 B. C. The dam is faced with marble from Mt. Pentelicon (which also supplied the marble for the classic temples of the Acropolis) and the water from its reservoir travels a portion of its route to Athens via the old Hadrian Aqueduct, constructed some 2,000 years ago. Largely interested in Ulen & Co. is Matthew Chauncey Brush’s American International Corp. and Charles Augustus Stone’s and Edwin Sibley Webster’s Stone & Webster, Inc.

Lebanon’s bad boy and Ulen family’s black sheep was Henry Charles Ulen in his youthful days. From 14 to 18 he “hopped” freights, worked in dining car kitchen as railroad candy butcher, sold newspapers in railroad stations, was barker at country fairs. He married (at 19) a Lebanon girl; so opposed to him were the wife’s parents that the couple eloped, were married in a neighboring town. But “Hank” finally settled down, studied law, practiced in Lebanon for seven years. One of his clients was an Indianapolis contractor who fell down on a job which Ulen took over and finished. Then, with $125 in cash and $1,200 in debts he went to Indianapolis, began his own contracting firm. Today a packed bag is always by his desk in his New York, Chicago and Lebanon offices. He is known as the man who made U. S. engineering famous in South America.