TRANSPORTATION: The Hound Steps Out

As boss of the Greyhound Corp., Orville Swan Caesar, 61, heads the biggest transportation system in the world (10.6 billion passenger-miles traveled last year). But he is still not satisfied. Last week he announced “the start of a new era,” ushered in by a new bus. Next month the first of 500 Scenicruisers, costing $25 million, will start rolling off the line at General Motors Corp. and go into service between New York and Miami.

On the drawing boards since early in World War II, the $50,000 Scenicruiser incorporates some features first intro duced last year in Greyhound’s Highway Traveler (6-ft., nonglare picture win dows, a compressed-air suspension system for easy riding), adds some brand-new ones of its own. The 40-ft. long, split-level bus carries 43 passengers, has a washroom, a new air-conditioning and heating system and twin diesel engines.

With his new buses, Caesar plans to push Greyhound’s fast-growing special services such as charter buses, package express shipments and all-expense tours around the U.S. A fortnight ago, he started his first sleeping service between San Francisco and Chicago, which includes four overnight hotel stops in the fare. Price: $69.40 with a single room, $62.90 in a double room.

The spending for the new buses is on top of an $82 million postwar modernization and expansion program, including $34 million for buying new companies and lines and $48 million for new terminals.

The prize is the $10 million bus terminal in Chicago, hub of Greyhound’s 96.010-mile web of lines. The results of Greyhound’s expansion program showed up in last year’s record sales of $245 million, up 7%, and a gain in net income from $13.6 million in 1952 to $13.8 million.

Jitney Beginning. Orville Caesar, a mechanic turned executive, still likes to tinker with machinery in his home workshop in Harrington, Ill. He invented the Tropic-Aire hot-water heater to replace the dangerous and smelly exhaust-pipe system for heating buses, saw it become the standard for passenger cars. The son of a Swedish blacksmith, Caesar went to work in an auto-repair shop in his teens, later started a small bus service. In 1925 he joined forces with the late Eric Wickman, who had been building up a bus system in Minnesota since 1914, when he started with a single jitney bus.

Caesar and Wickman began gobbling up or buying into bus lines all over the country with cash from stock sales and from railroads farsighted enough to see that bus routes could take over unprofitable train runs and serve as feeder lines.

75% of the Goal. With a Greyhound System spread over the U.S., Caesar began to buy out the partially owned lines and his railroad partners. He is now ready to spend $25.8 million on such deals (in addition to the $82 million already spent postwar) when ICC approves.

This would give him the 1,130-mile Blue Ridge System, the 997-mile Tennessee Coach Co., and buy out two of his last four big railroad partners, the Pennsylvania and the Southern Pacific, who now have big holdings in Pennsylvania Greyhound and Pacific Greyhound. Greyhound would then be getting three-fourths of its revenues from bus lines that it wholly owns. But for Caesar, 75% is just a way stop. His goal is to make Greyhound sole owner of all its lines, a transport system covering all 48 states.