UTILITIES: Death in Philadelphia

To Henry Latham Doherty, off to a business career at twelve as an office boy for the Columbus (Ohio) Gas Co., the world of the eighties was an oyster and he held the shucking knife. By the turn of the century he was a crack western public utility man, and by the time he moved into Manhattan at 35 to set up Henry L. Doherty & Co. (utilities investments) he was a millionaire and had feathered his chin with a goatish beard to impress Wall Streeters. The beard failed to work, and Mr. Doherty had to borrow money in Europe until Wall Street got to know him better.

In the next 30-odd years Henry Doherty’s Cities Service Co. spread from public utilities into the oil business, became as variegated a holding company as the country had ever seen, with assets reckoned (1938) at $1,080,068,703. Meanwhile Mr. Doherty was all over the place. He was director in 123 corporations, owned hotels in Florida (Miami Beach’s Roney Plaza, Palm Beach’s Biltmore, etc.) and Nassau, operated country clubs, staged golf tournaments to publicize his real estate, organized cooking schools to cash in on his slogan “Cook with Gas,” sponsored birth day balls for the President and poliomyelitis.

In his skyscraper apartment in New York City’s financial district, he slept in a bed powered with a motor to trundle him to the open air, organized a campaign to put down mosquitoes in Manhattan, pushed the fund-raising campaign that got floodlighting for the Statue of Liberty. At 58 he found time to marry 40-year-old Mrs. Percy Frank Eames, relict of an International Harvester official. He reputedly spent $250,000 on the Washington debut of his stepdaughter in the depth of Depression I. Sickly, he twice explained profitable sales of his Cities Service stock, once during a bear raid, and again to his employes, by intimating in Government investigations and in court that he was in fear of death, wanted his affairs in order.

For the past three years, as “Edward H. Eggleston” he lived in Philadelphia’s Temple University Hospital, ailing from arthritis, under treatment by famed Dr. Chevalier Jackson for a throat obstruction. Cities Service’s affairs more & more fell into the capable hands of its husky First Vice President William Alton Jones. Last week to canny, mercurial Henry Doherty, reputedly worth $200,000,000 in 1929, still a multimillionaire, death came at 69. Faithful W. A. Jones, at his bedside when the end came, was regarded as the one & only choice for Henry Doherty’s job.