When the natural gas boom of 1930-31 subsided, Columbia Gas & Electric Corp. had become allied with the Morgan-Bonbright-Drexel utilities, had (through an affiliate) connected its 29,000-mi. Midwest system with the Texas Panhandle. That year (1931) it earned $22,331,000. The next year it formed a joint company with the Rockefellers to develop gas fields in north central Pennsylvania and western New York. But Columbia Gas had bank loans of $43,500,000, mostly the result of its expansion. The demand for natural gas had already fallen off when Columbia’s President Philip Green Gossler set out to pay his debts.
The first thing he did was to stop cash dividends, pay in stock instead. Then he collected $8,915,000 in cash owed by an Ohio subsidiary, added $4,000,000 from the sale of an interest in the Seaboard Division to the Standard Oil of New Jersey, and $11,000,000 from earnings. By December 1932 bank loans had been cut $24,000,000. That year the company earned $17,204,000. Between January and June 1933 he paid off another $9,500,000 out of earnings. Last month two more subsidiaries each paid obligations of $6,000,000 to the parent company by the private sale of guaranteed notes. Last week, when Columbia Gas announced 1933 earnings of $12,496,000, Mr. Gossler proudly informed his stockholders that their company was now entirely out of debt to the banks.
No financier by early training, Mr. Gossler is an electrical engineer, graduate of Pennsylvania State College. At 21 he was an engineering assistant of United Electric Light & Power Co. (New York), later a superintendent for Montreal’s Royal Electric Co. He became master of Columbia Gas in 1912, when it was a West Virginia utility, helped merge it with Ohio Fuel Corp. systems in 1926 to form the present Columbia Gas & Electric Corp., biggest distributor of natural gas in the U. S.