Business: Death of Andrus

He was supposed to be one of the ten richest men in the U. S. But when Death came to John Emory Andrus at 93 last week, the best the Press could do was to identify him as the “millionaire straphanger.” Indeed the Press never heard of the financier-philanthropist until he was past 60. And then it spotted him, a shy, parsimonious, white-bearded old gentleman, because he always rode the subway to his Manhattan office until he was 86. A few oldsters remembered that the First Citizen of Yonkers, N. Y. had served four consecutive terms in the House of Representatives a quarter century ago.

How John E. Andrus made his money was and still is something of a mystery. “I have never borrowed a dollar but I have loaned millions,” he once told a reporter. Late in the 1920-5, the Press estimated his fortune at from $100,000,000 to $800,000,000. It was undoubtedly far, far less. The only clue, misleading as it may be, is the Andrus Federal income tax in 1924, when the Treasury opened its files to the public. That year he paid a tax of $165,000, indicating an income of some $300,000, a capital of some $6,000,000. In the same year John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid $7,400,000, and George Fisher Baker and his son each paid more than $600,000. But Mr. Andrus’ tax was not dwarfed by Vincent Astor’s $285,000 and it far outstripped William Randolph Hearst’s $40,000.

A contemporary of John Davison Rockefeller, John Pierpont Morgan and Russell Sage, John Andrus made his first dollar selling a mess of fresh-caught trout to Horace Greeley, who, angling near the Andrus farm in Pleasantville, N. Y., feared to return empty handed to the editorial offices of the New York Tribune. Like most of the shrewd men who reaped richly from the U. S. industrial expansion of the 19th Century, Andrus did not hotfoot for the front in the Civil War. He caught pneumonia drilling in the rain at Hartford, Conn., was promptly discharged from the Army.

After graduation from Wesleyan University in 1862, he taught school, investing his savings on the side. About the time that Grant was fighting it out in the Wilderness, Andrus bought ten shares of Singer Manufacturing Co. stock at $65 per share. He used Singer dividends to buy more Singer stock and by 1928 his Singer holdings were worth $2,500,000.

In 1868 when oil refineries were having trouble buying plant locations because of their smoke and stench, Andrus plowed all his free capital into New Jersey waterfront property. Then he went to old Standard Oil Co. saying: ”The prevailing winds are from the northwest and any smoke will be blown over to the New York side. The people there, being outside of New Jersey, won’t be able to do anything about it.”

Quite as slick as Andrus, the Rockefellers promptly bought all the Jersey waterfront property they could lay their hands on—but not from Andrus. When Andrus remonstrated, Standard Oil offered him stock to be” paid for out of dividends. Said Andrus a few years ago: “I soon owned the stock outright, and oh! how those shares have grown.”

Other Andrus interests included a big chemical concern, mining and timber investments in the Far West, real estate holdings from Florida to Alaska. Andrus liked to tell graduating classes that the secret of success was hard work. But John Emory Andrus made his money by never selling the U. S. short when that was good advice.

He always polished his own shoes, seldom spent more than 20¢ for his lunches. When a dog killed one of his pigs in 1933, he insisted on collecting $7.50 damages from the City of Yonkers, of which he was once mayor. His mausoleum, a Greek temple, cost $500,000.

To Wesleyan University, of which he was trustee for years, he gave large sums. He was a pillar of the Methodist Church and gave $100,000 for the maintenance of London’s City Road Chapel where lie the bones of John Wesley. He established Surdna (Andrus backward) Foundation in memory of his wife, a Swiss orphan who had been adopted by a family for whom he once worked as a farmhand. When she died in 1909 her husband could not recall her real name. Lately he converted his former Yonkers estate into a huge orphanage at a cost of about $3,000,000.

Andrus was director of New York Life Insurance Co., his only major outside business connection. Last week President Thomas A. Buckner said of him: “He was a really great character.”