[Break]

 

BG:  To go back to this situation in Cicero, at that point, your position was as assistant superintendent?

 

WG:  Correct.   

 

BG:  Yeah. Were there other troubleshooting…Uh, that's quite the first day on the job.

WG:  Yeah.  There were a total of 18 of us that were brought in and that happened to be my particular job was that one.  But you know, we got the place turned around in a matter of eight weeks.

 

BG:  Well, I think that part, that time in the country was a big turning point as far as race relations were concerned.  I think about the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, as quite a big transition going on.  I’d imagine in the railroad industry as far as labor was concerned, that was, could be quite a tense time.  I don't know how you saw it.

 

WG:  Yeah, it was very tense at the time.  And it was so hard to deal with, you know.  I got my first experience before that though, when I was in Lincoln as assistant train master.  I hired what might have been the first black employee in train service.  I just wanted to, you know.  I wanted to get somebody, get going a little bit.  We didn't have any mandate or anything at that time.  It caused me a lot of problems, because the union came in and said, “We want individual hotel rooms for everybody to stay in.”  See, at that time, they teamed up.  They'd stay two to a room.  They said, “we want a new agreement and individual rooms to stay in because…”

 

BG:  Because you had a...? 

 

WG:  Yeah.  I believed in this guy, except he had the problem of coming to work on time and calling in sick or one thing or another.  And I just kept working with him, working with him, working with him.  I finally got him, you know, to where he was self-disciplined; learned how to get up on time, come to work on time.  And incidentally, I got a note from him when he retired. 

 

BG:  Had he stayed with railroad?

 

WG:  He stayed with the railroad his whole career.

 

BG:  What was his name?

 

WG:  Oh, I can't even remember now.  But he's stayed in the railroad for 30 years. 

 

BG:  And he wrote a note to you? 

 

WG:  Wrote a note to me, yeah.  So now I'm in Cicero, and this is not one person.  It’s 150 of them, you know.  Oh gee, you know I mean, it was so hard.  We fired, we wound up firing, gosh I don’t know, 120 people, something like that, as a way to get the place running. 

 

BG:  Black and white?

 

WG:  Well, almost all black, because those were all the new employees that weren’t coming to work on time.  So, we had a step process, you know, first offense, you know, you talk to them.  Second offense, you hold an investigation, you mark their record.  Third offense, you give them another chance.  Fourth offense, you’re fired.  So, I call this one guy, and I said, “You've got only one more chance.”  I said, “Every time I talk to you, you have to have off because your grandmother died.”  And I say this while holding up the paper, “Here’s four grandmothers that died in the last three months with you.”  I said, you know, “How many grandmothers do you have?”   “Oh, I have a lot more,” he said.  So, he ultimately failed to come to work one day, and that was it.  And it was just so difficult.  We did the best we could.  Later on, we got a class action lawsuit over it, and we lost. 

 

BG:  Oh, really.  Over the firings?

 

WG:  Yeah.  Well, I say ‘lost.’  They settled.  They didn’t want the publicity.

 

BG:  Who was the plaintiff?  Who sued you?

 

WG:  Oh, some plaintiff’s lawyer is all I know. 

 

BG:  Not an organization?

 

WG:  No, no, on behalf of all those people that I fired. So…

 

BG:  You settled that.

 

WG:  Yeah.  That was some years later that took place.  But the important thing is we got the place back up and running.  And I had one other incident that took place where I almost got fired again.  We were short of power, that's locomotives, to run and make our deliveries at night to other railroads.  And, you know, we're backed up and congested as a result.  And every night I’d talk to power control, which was a place in St.  Paul that managed all the locomotives on the railroad.  Big board, you know, with magnets, showing every locomotive.  We probably had 3,000 locomotives at the time.  And the guy would say to me, you know, “You've got three or four units there in the diesel shop in Cicero.  Why don’t you just take those?” 

 

WG:  I said, “No.”  I said, “We don't have any down there.” And so, he said, “Well, I show you got three that are okay.”  So, I went down to the diesel shop and looked at their records; didn’t ask anybody, I just went.  I look at the records, and they didn’t match what the people at St. Paul had at all.  I couldn’t figure out why, but I’d tell them, “Okay, here are the locomotives that they really have that are not ready and they're working on, but they told you they’re ready.”  I did that every night, and I got power.  They then would give me power, you know, to allocate power from some other source to make my deliveries.  That went on for about three weeks.  One morning, about 7:00 a.m., the superintendent comes in, Charlie Keck.  He says, “You and I have to go downtown.”  That's where general manager's office was.  And I said, “What for?”  He says, “I don't know, but we’re in trouble for something.  You have any ideas?”  “No, I don’t have any idea.”

 

So, we went to the general manager’s office, a guy by the name of Jack Hamer.  The guy next to him was the head of the mechanical department, Chuck [inaudible], head of maintenance.  I walked in the office with Charlie Keck.  The guy that was the head of maintenance says, “I got you stopped Greenwood! I'm going to get you fired. You stay out of our business.”  I thought, “Oh, boy.  What’s this about?”; still didn’t know.  So, Jack Hamer was sitting at his desk, started talking, “Now look, we all work together as a team.  We have these goals to make.  And if we make these goals, we all get a bonus.  Locomotive readiness is one of the goals.  And you are ruining it by telling them that these locomotives aren’t ready!  Well, we're reporting them as ready because we want that bonus!”

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG: “And you understand!” I didn’t say anything, and he said, “You better understand, or you’re gone!” And I said, “Yes, sir.” And as I walked out, this other guy, Tom Cotner, he looked at me, and he said, “I got you.  And I’m going to watch you from now on.”

 

BG:  So how did you resolve that? 

 

WG: I quit going down to the office to see what the records were! (Laughs.)

 

BG:  Did you get your bonus? 

 

WG: It wasn’t my bonus!  It was their bonus!  (Laughs.) 

 

BG:  So, do you think that that was a common practice, and that that multiplied through the system could make it really pretty, pretty inefficient? 

 

WG:  Oh, absolutely.  Yeah.  Yeah, no.  That's right.  And so, I complied, you know.  But on the other hand, about two months after this, I get a call and said, “We're promoting you to staff assistant of the regional vice president.”  And so, I left Cicero and went to the downtown regional office in Chicago, working with the same guy who was going to fire me. 

 

BG: This is ‘73, ‘74? 

 

WG: ’74, yeah; end of ’74.

 

BG:  So how long did you stay there? 

 

WG:  Well, I was there about a year.  I did a lot of things there.  You know, it's like all jobs I went on.  They tell me my job is one thing, and it's mundane, you know.  It’s looking at records or one thing or another.  But I’d see opportunities.  Now, I knew from my days as a traveling car agent, another thing we’d been doing, we had this new big coal businesses that was about to emerge.  And every region was supposed to come up with an operating plan.  Our region didn’t have one yet.  So, I just took it on myself to develop a region plan for what had to be done.  And, and so we did, and Jack Hamer, I said, “I need to make a trip around the region to get people a certain kind of information.  Would you, you know, set that up for me?”  He says, “Better yet, I'll go with you.”  So, we went. We high-rode the whole region.  Got the stuff I needed, put a big plan together.  Then we go to all the operating people in the whole region, and I made a presentation.  It turned out we now had the best plan of any of the five regions.  You know, Jack Hamer, and our regional vice president proudly took our plan to St. Paul to show what they, what they had done.  So, about three weeks after that, I get a call.  They wanted to promote me to director of strategic planning for the whole railroad.  So, I packed up and moved to St.  Paul.  Now I’m director of strategic planning for the whole railroad. 

 

BG:  For the whole Burlington line?

 

WG: Yeah, all of Burlington Northern.  Now I'm working for the guy who’s vice president of strategic planning.  I was a director.  I tell you I was in so much over my head.  I didn't know anything.  I mean, all these guys that worked for me, they were bright MBAs, you know, who were educated way different than me. 

 

BG:  So, by this time, you're not quite 40.  You’re not 40 years old at that point. 

 

WG:  No, not yet.  So, I remember we had three presidents that were over different divisions.  One president of the railroad grew up speaking a Norwegian language of some sort, you know, couldn’t speak English well at all.  So, one of my jobs was to write a board speech for this guy.  So, I wrote a board speech.  I wrote an outline for a board speech and sent it to him; said, “Call me if you have any questions.”  Right after the board meeting, Tom Lambert, another president came in, “I hear you wrote this speech for Lawrence.”  I say, “That’s right.”  He says, “Look, he gave a speech where you said, ‘I sent him a draft.’  He got up there and said, “Point Roman numeral one A; this is B; this is C…” (laughs)

 

So, I got called out for that.  He said, if you do that again, I’ll fire you.  So anyway, I wrote another for the next board meeting.  I made sure I went to his office and talked to him, showed him what I had and sent him the whole speech.  He liked it.  Tom Lambert comes in after that.  “You idiot!  Don’t you know he can’t pronounce ‘th’? You can’t use ‘th’ in a speech for him.”  Speechwriting was definitely not one of my best skills. 

 

So um, now the railroad has got, while I’m on that job, they’re negotiating a new Amtrak contract, first time ever, for any railroad in the industry.  Amtrak chose Burlington Northern as the first railroad to negotiate with, and the negotiations weren’t going anywhere.  So somehow or other I got called on to be in charge of the negotiating team for Amtrak.  And I remember I had to go to the attorney that was in charge of everything else, and these people were so learned, you know.  Here I am, this country trainmaster coming in and leading this Amtrak negotiation.

 

BG:  Did you have any counsel with you?

 

WG:  Yeah, him. (Laughs) I was put over him, and so anyway, that wound up with me spending six months in Washington, DC, negotiating the Amtrak contract.   And they were hard, really tough, because we had to negotiate it within the framework of the law that was passed creating Amtrak that gave them all kinds of power and authority.  And, um, they were hard negotiations.  And the negotiating team for Amtrak, they’d have a cheering squad.  They’d be sitting in the back of the room, and anytime anyone makes a point that wasn’t in favor of them, they’d jeer, you know.  Yell, “Booooo!” 

 

BG:  During negotiations?

​

WG:  Oh, yeah.  During negotiations! 

 

BG:  And this was negotiating over the use of the track, freight versus passengers?

 

WG:  Right. Yeah, anyway it got down to about 100 points to solve, and we got maybe all but about five or six major ones solved.  This was an important contract.  It was going to be the boilerplate for the whole industry.  So, the next group to come in to help me finally close it out was the operating vice president, chief financial officer, the general counsel, five vice presidents, and they came to work with me on it.  And we did.  After about a week in Washington, DC, of tense negotiating, we finally got a contract signed.  And the operating Vice President looked at me, and he said, “I not only like what you did, but I like the way you did it.” I thought that was nice.  So um, I go back to St.  Paul now to continue to be Director of Strategic Planning.

 

BG:  Let me interrupt one second.  Do you remember what was the biggest point of contention between…I mean of these hundred items, what was an example of one of the thorniest problems, because this still is a problem today, the sharing the tracks and the right of way.

 

WG:  The biggest problem was that we wanted to, that we agreed to an incentive being paid to us if we provided on-time performance, and we wanted that, and they agreed to it.  We won.  What I wanted was for them to be responsible for delays to the freight trains that are caused by Amtrak, and they wouldn’t.  They said, “That is a non-starter.” Well, I left it on the list anyway, and that was the hardest one, and we lost that one, but it was on the list. 

 

BG:  So, then you go back to St.  Paul. 

 

WG:  Yeah, I go back to St. Paul.  Now I’m back in this environment of, ‘Well, what do I do now?’ (Laughs.)  But the Operating Vice President saw that, and he wound up promoting me to terminal superintendent for a brand-new yard that just opened up in Minneapolis, a classification yard.  And so, that was my next job.  It uh, again you know, I had to put a team together of people, and a team that I liked.  I had to fight with the regional vice president because he liked people who were dopes, in my estimation. (Laughs.)   

 

BG:  So, you had to reach into the…

 

WG: Yeah, I had to fight him on this stuff.

 

BG:  How big of a yard was it?  How many tracks?

 

WG:  Well, it was the largest in the country at the time, but it was before North Platte got as big as it is for the UP, but it was the largest in our railroad.

 

BG:  Was it 20, 30 tracks?

 

WG: I believe it was 63 classification tracks.

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG: And yeah, probably, yeah, eight receiver tracks.  It was a big yard, the most modern in the world, and as a result, I was giving tours.  Every day somebody came out to that yard, including Russians.  And I have a funny story on that.  The Russian railroad system was run by 12 superintendents, the top guys of the railroad, very Russian, spoke through an interpreter.   And, uh, I had to welcome them out on the tower.  We had it staged, ready to go.  We had the train ready to start humping so they could see how it was automatic.  We had a distance decoupling feature.  We knew how much to retard the wheels of the car to hold the cars at the right speed over the hump.  We had wind resistance; we measured the wind.  We had routing.  Cars were automatically routed by the car number being in a punch card, and it was run from the yard office across the tracks. 

 

Anyway, we said ‘Go.’  So, our locomotives were pushing them up over the hump.  You know, they don’t really sit in there because the computer also runs the locomotive.  And about three cars get up over the top of the hump, start down the other side.  All of a sudden, everything freezes up.  The retarders freeze up and stop the cars.  The locomotive stops moving.   Bells and whistles are going off in the tower.  Something’s wrong, and we don’t know what it is, and everybody’s panicking.  And the head Russian guy looked to me and he said, “In Soviet, you go to Siberia!  Ha, ha, ha, ha!” (Laughs.)

 

BG:  Was he kidding? 

 

WG:  Noooo, he was serious!  And it turned out that the clerk in the yard office loaded the cards backwards, so our edit systems picked up that these cars weren’t the right matching weight.  They weren’t the right destination.  And so that’s why it froze up.  Took them half an hour to figure out what the problem was, but got it solved.  Then we impressed them after that, but they lied about everything that they had.  “Oh, this is nothing. You switch two thousand cars a day.  We hump four thousand cars a day at our yard.”

 

BG:  I’m interested in the design of this new facility.  Who would do the design?  Did you have a union engineering unit that just designed classifications yards and things like that?

 

WG:  We had an engineering unit to oversee it, but they contracted that out, the actual design.

 

BG:  That’s quite a special niche.

 

WG:  Oh yeah, I don’t remember who it was they had do it, but there were a lot of startup issues with that place. 

 

BG:  And your title there was?

 

WG:   Terminal Superintendent.

 

BG: Terminal Superintendent.

 

WG: Yes, I was there on that job for a couple years, and then in 1979 the phone rang again from the state operating vice president that I was with on those Amtrak negotiations, John Mertog, wonderful guy, and he says, “I’m sending you to Alliance.”  He said, “We’ve got a terrible situation there.”   He said, “Gridlock.  We’ve got to build new railroad, we’ve got to maintain railroad, we’ve got to run trains, and we can’t seem to do either well at all.”  And I said okay.  So, I went to Alliance.

 

BG: This was 1979?

 

WG:  1979.  First day in there, I say to one of the train masters, “Let’s go for a high rail trip.”  The high rail will take us up as far as Hannaford.  Couldn’t go any further than that because the sun would go down, and you don’t high rail any at night.  We get halfway there, and I get called on the radio, “New Superintendent Greenwood? Call so-and-so on a private phone.”  So, I called, and he said, “There is a walkout, a sickout occurring.  We’ve had 26 engineers call in sick in the last hour.”  And he said, “They’re sending you a message, the new guy.” 

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG:  So, I turn around, high rail back, and I call up the very first engine I see in the yard.  I introduce myself, and I says, “I know what’s going on.”  I said, “I’m going back to my hotel room.  Here’s my room number.  Tell ‘em I’m ready to talk, whoever wants to talk.” And 2:00 a.m. there’s a knock on my door, and these two scraggly looking guys come in.  Oh, my gosh. I had a lot lower cut of people than I’m used to dealing with on those jobs.  And anyway, we talk for two or three hours, and I agreed to meet by myself with all the union people in the union hall that night after dinner. 

 

BG: So, this would be your second day on the job.

 

WG: Yeah, so I went to the union hall all by myself, and I’m telling you, they had the wives, the children, the union people.  And their complaints were they can’t get off work.  And if they get off work, they hold an investigation on them, and they’re being treated unfairly, and there just aren’t enough people, one thing and another.  I made notes.  But the spouses were the ones who just hated me, screamed at me all the time.

 

BG:  Wow!

 

WG:  Yeah.

 

BG:  So, Alliance was totally a railroad town?

 

WG:  Yeah, totally a railroad town.

 

BG:  And totally a Burlington Northern town?

 

WG:  Totally Burlington Northern.

 

BG:  So, were you surprised by all of this?

 

WG:  Yes.  Uh, I knew.  I was told it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad, you know.  So anyway, I promised everybody that I would get going on all these problems we had talked about.  And I said, “Well, I’ll solve it.”  I had no idea how I’m gonna do it.  I worried about it a lot the next couple days.  They were genuine problems. 

 

Meanwhile, the place had just terrible congestion.  Nothing happened right.   Derailments; two or three derailments every day all over the division.  So, I had a board of directors’ special that was scheduled to come through Alliance, um, like four days, five days later.  I thought to myself, ‘I’m gonna go for broke.’  I’m gonna put together a plan for resources I need.  I’m gonna present it to all the highest-ranking officials on the railroad on that train, and if they don’t give it to me, uh, I can’t stay here.  I can’t do this unless I get resources. 

 

So, I want this board train to be handled right, and so I got everybody together.  I got the engineering department together, and I went over where I want to stop, for example; twelve, fifteen cars.  And I had the engineering department draw up a diagram where the cars would be, where I want to stop, where the locomotive would stop.  And then I had an officer -- division officer -- stationed at each door way all the way back, and I had them paint on the platform an X, for the number, so everyone knew what their assignment was and who was going to be on that car.  “You’re nuts!” they said.  “We have board specials down here all the time, and we don’t do all this.” I said, “Well you’re gonna do it now.”

 

So, we went off perfectly, and we stop, went to the Alliance Country Club, had a big dinner for them, and then came back, got on the train.  And I got on the train with them, and I’m gonna ride as far as I have to, to get my message to every senior officer on the railroad.  I start with Lou Menke, Chairman of the board.  And his response…what I asked for, I want 27 new division officers.  I need more train masters and assistant superintendents.  I want to set up a control center for running the division.  I had all kinds of stuff.  Menke says, “Why is it anytime anybody new goes somewhere they got to add more people?” 

 

BG:  This is Lou Menke? 

 

WG:  Lou Menke, uh huh.  And then I went to Norm Lawrenson, who was one of the presidents.  I went to Tom Lambert, another president.  I went to the CFO, well everybody; talked to everybody.  Nobody said yes, but nobody said no.  So, when I got back into Alliance the following day, I wrote a letter to my boss in Denver, the assistant Vice President of Operations.  I said, “I’ve made this presentation to the board, and they’ve approved it.” 

 

BG: [Laughs.] Because nobody said no.

 

WG:  Nobody said no!  And he called me on the phone and said, “That’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever seen.  Nobody’s gonna approve anything like that.” I said, “Well they did.”  I said, “By the way, here’s Lou Menke’s phone number.  You wanna call him and ask him?” 

 

BG:  So, you got it.  You got it.

 

WG:  Well, not through him, I didn’t.  In the meantime, I had a couple friends that worked in the Vice President of Operations Office in St. Paul.  I sent them the same letter, too.  I said, “You’re going to hear something on this,” and this is what’s happening.  I told them the real story, the truth, but they were supportive of me.  So anyway, one of them picked up the phone.  He said, he called this guy, my boss, said, “Say, we’re supposed to get a new operating plan from the Alliance division.  We haven't seen it yet, do you have it?”  So, I got my people.

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG:  Yeah, yeah.  Made all the difference in the world.  We went from loading two coal trains a day to 12 almost overnight.  Our derailments went way down.  Our productivity went way up.  I mean everything.  Our safety record was the worst in the industry.  Our safety record we had a ratio, a frequency severity ratio over 100, which means every employee gets hurt more than once a year.  And we brought that down in the first year, down to about 18, which is still the worst in the industry but a good direction.

 

BG:  And this was all because you got more resources?

 

WG:  Yeah, and I put together a plan as to how they work and what they would do.  I created a control center; took the control of the railroad away from the dispatchers and gave it to this new control center, staff, and train masters.  It was beautiful, worked wonderful.

 

BG:  Did it become a model for other divisions?

 

WG:  No, because no other division had this problem like we did.

 

BG:  I see.

 

WG:  Yeah, it was a big, huge success.

 

BG:  In creating that team that you brought in there, were these insiders within the company, or did you pick them from other companies?

 

WG:  They were inside the company.  First of all, nobody wants to come to Alliance.

 

BG:  Well where is Alliance?

 

WG:  It’s in the panhandle of Nebraska.  It’s close to the Colorado-Wyoming border.  So, I arrive there and every officer that’s there wants out.  It’s just they’re burned out, and I learned very quickly that no one’s gonna come, so I put out a word to all my...I never worked through personnel.  I always worked directly with my own network.  “If you’ve got anyone in the ranks that you’ve been wanting to promote, that’s good, that you have a lot of confidence in, I’ll take ‘em”, and I said, “The older the better.”  So, I got a bunch of old guys, and they were really, really good; guys that were in their fifties.  And then I got a bunch of young guys just off the training program.  So, the older guys were the mentors to these new young guys.  It worked wonderful. And um, and I wouldn’t take anybody who wasn’t of the style of management that I was.  A popular style at the time was beating ‘em up, motivating by fear.  That’s not my style.   

 

BG:  So, you were more collaborative.

 

WG:  Collaborative, yeah.  Work as a team. 

 

BG:  That’s a tough culture to overcome if you have a culture that’s so embedded, and you’re talking about a company that was at that point 100 years old or more, yeah. 

 

WG:  Yeah.  Very definitely.

 

BG:  So, what made you know that that was the right approach?  I mean, that was so contrary to everything else that was going on there.  What did you attribute that to?

 

WG:  Well, I had to solve a problem.  I only knew, I knew that if I didn’t solve the problem, I was done. You know, toast.

 

BG:   So, you had the fear.

 

WG: Yeah. Right. (Laughs.)

 

BG:  You didn’t translate that to…

 

WG:  I wouldn’t have been done.  They wouldn’t have fired me.  But that’d be my career and my job, and I’d be sent up to where my predecessor was sent to -- some unknown place in the iron region of Minnesota.  So uh, I had a major, major problem on the division, uh, alcohol abuse.  They were so short of people, they were hiring anybody that could breathe, practically, and most of them were kids -- 19 years old, 20 years old.  And uh, my predecessor held his meetings with the union guys at the American Legion Club in the evening.  (Laughs.)

 

BG:  I can imagine what that was like. 

 

WG:  He never fired one single person on Rule G the whole time he was there.  Rule G is about drugs and alcohol abuse.  So, you know what our team did?  We fired 160 people for alcohol abuse in the first, probably 90 days I was there. 

 

BG:  In your division.

 

WG:  Yeah, yeah. 

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG:  It was awful.

 

BG:  Yeah. 

 

WG:  I remember…and they weren’t complying with all the rules of safe operations, you know, and it was totally out of control.

 

BG:  Wow.

​

WG:  People just wouldn’t believe, these new people I brought in, what kinds of things were happening.  So, when we solved the drug and alcohol problem, at least to the degree that we solved it, I had two…I asked part of the team of people, 27, I wanted two drug abuse, alcohol abuse, counselors on my staff.  So, I had two of them on the division.  No other division had their own counselors.  I wanted two because I knew I had this problem.  I remember one time I was high railing after I’d been on the division about six months.  And it was over on Gillette, and we were waiting for some trains to move, and this guy came off the locomotive that was parked near us, and he said, “Are you Mr.  Greenwood?” I said, “Yes sir.”  He said, “I just want to thank you.  You’re a man of Jesus, I can tell.  Everybody knows you have to be that way because of the way you have handled this alcohol problem we had.  God bless you.  God bless you!”

 

BG:  And at this point, was this a totally a white male culture, right?  Very few women, if any?

 

WG:  No, I had women. 

 

BG:  In management?

 

WG:  Uh, no, but I had women brakemen.  Women were new you know, which was a real social problem in itself.  Lots of fights would break out, you know, over whose woman, whose man do they belong to, stuff like that.  But there were a number of social issues on the Division because they were so young, and just things you never dreamed of happening would happen all the time. 

 

One time -- I’d been there a while, at least a year -- and my secretary came in to see me one night at 5 o’clock, time to go home, and said, “Mr.  Greenwood, can you come into the conference room, please?  The women of the office want to talk to you.” Now, I had a male chief clerk and working for him was about, I would say, 12 women clerks that worked for him.  So, I go in and here’s all these stone-faced women sitting in this conference room, and I thought, ‘Uh, oh.’  So, I walk in and sit down. And my secretary tells me where to sit, so she sits in the first seat to my left over here.  She said, “Each one of these women have a story they want to tell you,” and it was about the chief clerk.  They start about something he had done.  Not ‘done’; he didn’t do anything physical.  It was what he said and what he suggested, and everyone, after they’d tell their story, they’d cry. 

 

BG:  Wow.

 

WG:  I sat there and listened to all of these, everyone, you know.  And I thanked them, and I said, “I'll take care of the problem for you.  You will not see him again.”  And so, I went home, and I called this guy.  Well, I called him before I left work, called him at his house.  He was a nice guy, you know.  Really.  I had no indication there would be a problem like this.  I said, “Why don’t you come to my house, and meet me in the living room?”  I asked Colleen to get the kids and everybody else out for a while.  So, I relate to him what had happened.  And I said, “I want your resignation.”  And, uh, he said, “I’m not resigning!” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what.  Here’s your choice.  If you don't resign, I'm going to have a formal investigation.  I'm going to march all 12 of these women in, and they're all going to tell their story with you sitting there.  And this is going to be a matter of a record that will be permanent.” He gave his letter of resignation.

 

BG:  Wow.  And that's a fascinating story, I think, and you know, it's true.  You still read about it today.  It's a timeless issue in the workplace.  But in railroads, in particular, which is such a male culture…

 

WG:  Yeah.

 

BG:  I imagine it must have been particularly challenging. 

 

WG:  It was. Every place I went.  I skipped over a bunch of other stories that happened prior to this, but I had issues like that all the time.   When I was terminal superintendent northbound, I had a girl…We were short of people, so I said anybody had to call me if they wanted to lay off.  So, this girl called.  She said, “I can't come into work.” And I said, “Well, why can't you come into work?” She said, “I can't come into work because I got raped over the weekend by one of my coworkers.”

 

BG: Wow.

 

WG: So, I said, “Would you come in and talk with me please?”  And she said, “Yes.”  So, into the office walks this really, very pretty young lady.  She’s probably 5’10”, and she had a backpack on her back.  So, she told me her story.  And it was before Labor Day weekend, something like that.  And so, there's another employee, a black employee, who discovered they both lived near Lake Harriet and had nothing to do over the Labor Day weekend, so they’d get together and ride their bikes around Lake Harriet.  They’d go hiking together and go to a movie together.  And one of the nights he came back before they went to the movie.  She took him to her apartment and asked him to wait while she changed clothes to go to a movie.  When she came out, her story, he grabbed her and raped her on the sofa.  His story is, she came out and came on to him, you know, and was scantily clad, let her robe drop.  And so, yeah, “We had sex that was very consensual.”  So, when she told me her story, I said “Did you go to the police?”  She says, “Yes.”  I said “When?”   She says, “Well, three days later.” And I said, “What’d they tell you?”  Said, “Well, they can’t do anything three days later.”

 

So anyway, I got two different stories to deal with.  What do I do?  So, I told him that I didn't want him bidding on her shift anymore.  He’d have a lot of other options. He said, “I don't want to do that.  She's lying!  Why should I not work when I want to work?” Well, let's be frank.  I said, “You're one of only a handful of blacks that work here.  And if you work around here, imagine if she starts telling anybody.  I got a promise from her that she'll never ever tell anyone.” 

 

[Break]

 

BG:  So, where we were, was that you had given this employee the option of bidding on other assignments, you know, but outside of her jurisdiction. 

 

WG:  So, I said, “Look, I've got an agreement from her that she's not going to tell anybody.” And, and I said, “You’ve got to be realistic that if she doesn't get what she wants, you're going to have to deal with all these other people. Who knows what they might do or say to you?  You, you don't want to have that happen to you.”  So, we talked it through, and I was able to successfully talk him into not ever bidding on her job again.  I called her back, had her come in, told her the arrangement we had.  And I said, “This whole thing depends on your honesty and that you will never tell anybody.”  And I said, “I will check from time to time, even if I leave here.  I will check to make sure you’ve never told anybody.”

 

BG:  Well, I mean, what you've described is a very personal style.  In the absence of formal rules and formal protocols, you just did what was right, what made common sense, right?  And that, that often drove you maybe sometimes to not worry about what was in the rule book or what was a protocol.  But that seems to be an approach that works for you, you know.   It could’ve backfired, but it sounds like it worked. 

 

WG:  Yeah, I know I'm a little bit off where, we were in Alliance, but…

 

BG:  No.  I think it's relevant, I really do, and I want to get into the work in Alliance…

 

WG:  Also, I want to tell you one more story on Northtown.

 

WG:  So again, I got the appointment to go to Northtown as Terminal Superintendent.  I hadn’t been there but a month, and there was a headline in the Minneapolis Northeast Edition newspaper that said, ‘Neighbors Want Burlington Northern Out Of Town.’  And so, and they quoted this one alderman, um, 50 times in this article.  So, I call this alderman, and didn’t get anywhere, but I agreed to appear before the community, if he’d get them together for a town hall kind of meeting.  So, I called the law department to tell them what I was doing.  So, they said, “We are going to send an attorney with you; make sure you don't say the wrong things,” you know.

 

So, sat there in this town hall; probably 300, 400 people showed up.  Oh!  They told us terrible stories about all the noise we're making, and the lights, you know, and they can't sleep; one thing right after another.

 

And some guy, after this had gone on for about an hour, said, “Burlington Northern!  Let’s go get them!”  And people started coming up from the audience!  They were so full of hate, you know?  And this is my style, I don't run away.  I just walked out with the mic in my hand, came off the stage, and said, “Tell me what you want!”  They start peeling people off one at a time like this.  And I got through them all.  So, I turned around to talk to my attorney friend, and he was gone!  He never came back!  (Laughs.)

 

So, I went back up on the stage, and I promised everybody that I’d solve the problem.  I said, “Give me the time, but I'll solve it.”  And so, what I did, I put together all our officers on the terminal, and said “We're going to call on every neighbor we have up there.”  You know, our yard was four miles long. 

 

BG:  This is in your new yard?

 

WG:  Yeah, our new yard. 

 

WG:  Here's what we want to do.  Main complaints are noise and lights.  Let's see what we can do.  Listen carefully, tell them you’re gonna solve it.  And if you find a way that the lights are blinding them, we’ll redirect the lights.  And then you go back, and make sure they're happy with it.  We did that over the course of about six months.  And a new headline came out in the Minneapolis newspaper.  It said, “Burlington Northern Proves They Are A Good Neighbor.”

 

BG: Wow.

 

WG: And our HR department submitted this whole thing to some competition that exists in the country.  We came in second place in the United States for the best PR program.  PR, hell!   It was just our guys going out calling on them.  (Laughs.)

 

BG:  Interesting.

 

WG:  Yeah, and we only came in behind the Love Canal project.

 

BG:  Which had a long way…

 

WG:  Oh, yeah.  Right.  Yeah. But in terms of the…

 

BG:  But you know what's interesting is they knew going in when you were building this thing that it was going to have an impact.  I mean, it sounds like it shouldn't have been any surprise, but…

 

WG:  It is, you know, and most things, most of the complaints about noise came from the dynamite that was used.  We had to cut back a big cliff.  So, they had dynamite explosions every day for weeks. 

 

BG:  But wasn't that like a one-time thing? 

 

WG:  Yeah.

 

BG:  It wasn't going to be repeated.

 

WG:  I know, but they were still mad. I said, “We will stop that dynamite.” [Laughter}

 

BG:  Which you had to do anyhow.

 

WG: Which was way past!  (Laughter) No more dynamite.

 

BG: So, let's talk about Alliance a little bit in terms of where the industry was at that moment, 1979.  It's, uh…the energy crisis is really big.

 

WG: Yeah.

 

BG:  We're not that far off from the gas lines that were surrounding every community.  And ‘Where we going to get energy from?’  Where we're going to…’We’re too oil dependent.’  Now, the Powder River Basin comes into existence or is discovered, and that was really your, one of your big opportunities. 

 

WG:  Yeah.  And, now the…it was always known that the coal was there, but it was so far away from the market.  And the BT unit -- British thermal units, uh, energy -- was so low that the coal was never competitive.  But the Energy Act of 1966, amended in ‘68, ’69, and the ‘70s -- each amendment to the Energy Act made it more attractive. Now it got to the point that everybody wanted this low-sulfur coal from Wyoming.  And so, we had mines opening up right left, and we had to haul it a thousand miles, 1,500 miles, 1,800 miles, all over the Southeast, and the South, and the Midwest.   Everywhere.   And we couldn't handle it all.  We didn't have the capacity.  So, we had to not only rebuild the railroad that was there, because it was a secondary railroad.  It was built to haul fill sand.  And we had to add much more capacity.  And then double track, more crossovers, signaling, and we had to build 100 miles of new railroad, uh, basically between…well, I’ll call it Gillette, and near Casper, and places between Casper and two names you wouldn’t recognize.  Donkey Creek is one. (Laughs.)

 

But uh, anyhow, it was a monumental task. And uh, one of the stories I tell is that Wall Street was creeping down on us.  And we had two board members that resigned in protest over this big investment that was being made.  And one of the board members went to the Wall Street Journal and the Interstate Commerce Commission saying that we were making a dumb investment; we were betting the shareholders’ money.  And Lou Menke, coming down on an elevator after one of those contentious board meetings, said to one of the presidents of the company, said, “Bob, you and I better be right about this Powder Basin thing, because we're toast if we're not right.” And for the first time in the history of our company – if you use the Burlington railroad’s history -- we had to pass on a dividend.  We did not pay a dividend in 1974, because we were out of cash.

 

BG:  And this is ’74?

 

WG:  ’74.  Yeah. 

 

WG: But just to show you, the company bet the balance sheet against all of the expert opinions, against everything Wall Street wanted us to do; what some members of the board didn't want us to do.  They said it’s too risky.  Turned out to be a huge payoff.  Excellent, excellent, Investment to make.

 

BG:  Wow, and a lot of that was coming out of your division?

 

WG:  All of it.

 

BG:  Yeah. 

 

WG:  All of it. Yeah.  So, it was uh... 

 

BG: So, you were building up this infrastructure…

 

WG: Yeah.

 

BG: …that didn’t exist to serve this new market, this new source of, uh…And then transporting it over hundreds and thousands of miles.   

 

WG:  Right. Yeah. 

 

BG:  How long did that go on?  And at the same time, that's when -- and we're going to get into the Staggers Act at some point, when that gets passed.  Were you involved at all in the negotiation over coming up with the details of that legislation?

 

WG:  I was just an operating guy.  I’d never heard of it before. I didn't know anything about it.  So, in 1981…uh, let’s see, ’81?  Yeah, ’81. Um, I get one of those calls, you know, “We're creating these new business units.  And I want you to run one of them.  And it's called piggyback.”  And so, I later on figured out I got picked because I was just another dumb operating guy, that the guy who was picking to run business units, he wanted someone from operating to run intermodal because it's more of an operating thing.  And you want to make sure that this piggyback stuff wouldn’t take business out of boxcars and put it in piggyback, because he wanted to stay in boxcars.  I didn't know that until much later. And uh, so, one of these kind of first-day-on-the-job kind of things, you know, I take my, uh… 

 

BG:  So, you were still based in Alliance?

 

WG:  Uh, well now I’ve been transferred in St. Paul.  It was one of those deals, I had one week to get there.

 

BG:  I see.

 

WG:  In St. Paul.  So, I take my team of marketing people out to lunch.  And they all ordered martinis.  (Laughs.)

 

BG:  They all ordered what?

 

WG:  Martinis!

 

BG:  Martinis.  Yeah, yeah.

 

WG:  I just got through firing people for two years for that.  It was so uncomfortable.  And then, some of them ordered two martinis.  And some decided not to go back to the office with me because they wanted another drink!  Oh, here we go again.  (Laughter) So, um, I called a couple of them in.  I said, “You need to go through treatment. You stop.  You can’t do it. I’ll help you through treatment, and you won’t lose your job.  But if you don't do it, you’ll lose your job, especially if you keep drinking on the job.” So, a couple people took me up on it and went through treatment.  It worked good. 

 

So, everybody's talking a language I don't understand.  They’re talking about TCF territory in this territory, and that pricing thing and this pricing meeting.  It's all pre-deregulation stuff, where the government controlled everything.  I couldn't participate in discussions because I didn't know what they were talking about.  And anyway, I started reading up on this new thing called ‘deregulation.’  And before it was actually going to take effect for intermodal traffic, back then called the piggyback traffic, on February 1, 1981, I believe it is.  And I thought, “Oh, my gosh,” you know, “We aren’t ready for this.”  And I called the guys in, “What's this mean?”  And they said, “Well, it doesn’t mean hardly anything.”  “Well it’s gotta mean something!” (Laughs.)

 

And so, I started calling the people that I knew that might know something about it.  And nobody knew much of anything.  I couldn’t find anybody inside our own company that did.  And I started doing some reading and a couple of young guys, you know, said, “Hey, there’s a big opportunity;” management training types.  I listened to them.  I believed them. 

 

Then I called our biggest piggyback shipper, guy by the name of R.C. Manning.  I said, “RC, have you been reading up on deregulation and what it means for you?” “Yeah,” he says, “I have.” I said, “I think it's a huge opportunity for us.”  I said, “Let’s get together.” So, we got together, he said, “I tell you what.  If you will write me a one-page contract, I will guarantee you ten new trailer loads of business a day from Chicago to Seattle and back, and here’s the price I have to have it at.”  Now at the present time, our price was something like $3,000 for a load coming east, and it was like $100…no, it was $3,000 coming east.  I think it was almost $6,000 round trip, is what I recall.  Well he wanted a price of, I think, $3,000 round trip, something like that.  Well, I went through the math and thought, “Well hell, we don’t have any business now at the prices we have, so what difference does it make what the price is?

 

BG:  What was his role in the company? 

 

WG:  Uh, he wasn't in the company.  He had a third-party logistics company…

 

BG:  I see.

 

WG: …called National Piggyback.  And so, anyway, we wrote the elements of the contract that we thought we had to have in it on my back porch in my home near Minneapolis, and I took it to our law department.  And they said, you know, there's no such thing as one-page contract in our business.  I said, “Well let's try.”  And a guy by the name of Doug Babb who was like the number two lawyer -- good guy -- he worked with me on it.  He gave us a one-page contract.  And, so we got that approved.  Within a month we're handling 100 trailers a day of business between Chicago and Seattle, round trip.  A hundred! 

 

BG:  And these would be trailers that came off of trucks or coming off of boats?  These are the containers…

 

WG: Yeah.

 

BG: These are the containers.  And that was the big thing with intermodal was that obviously…

 

WG: Yeah.

 

BG: …But it seems so obvious now, looking back at it, that that was going to be the way to move freight around the country and around the world.

 

WG: Yeah.

 

BG: But no one saw it. 

 

WG:  No, and no one saw it for a good four or five years.  And it was the beginning of so much to start taking place.  And I knew that I had, I had to replace the people I had that were working in there with people that were a little more…not, not saddled with some of this. 

 

BG:  So, would that have happened if the deregulation hadn’t passed? 

 

WG:  Nope.  No.

 

BG:  So, deregulation made…

 

WG:  You couldn't write contracts until deregulation.  Deregulation allowed us to write contracts, and before that you had to go to the government to get approval for the price changes.  Twenty railroads would meet, a hundred people would meet at the Union League in Chicago to debate what the price is that we could charge from Chicago to Seattle. 

 

I gave a talk, after about only being on the job six months, to the National Association of Commerce Attorneys -- and that was their title, ‘commerce attorney’.  That's all they did was handle issues for railroads and shippers at these meetings that would take place all the time about what the price ought to be.  And again, I’m kind of ignorant, so I’m giving this talk, and oh, the first question a guy asked, “You know what you just said?  You just told us we’re all out of a job.”  You want to know something?  There were 10,000 in Minneapolis for their convention.  Five years later there were zero commerce attorneys left.

 

BG:  Zero what? 

 

WG:  Commerce lawyers.

 

BG:  Commerce lawyers, wow.

 

WG:  Yeah, zero. 

 

BG:  Because they didn’t need them.

 

WG:  That's what a dramatic change it had.  And so, I gave a lot of talks.  I was asked.  I’d kind of been getting known for shaking things up in the marketplace.  And so, I was getting a lot of invitations to talk about it, but I’m still ignorant.  I don't know much about this stuff.  I had a talk at the Union League Club in Chicago.  I gave a talk there about all the things we’re gonna look at doing and what the future is of this thing called piggyback on the Burlington Northern.  And a guy came up to me.  He was the founder of HUB, and uh, I forgot his name for the moment.  Anyway, he came up to me afterwards.  And he said, “You know, I didn’t like anything you had to say.  You basically told me you don’t need me.” And I told him, “Well, no, I need you.”  I don’t know why, but you know… (Laughter) Anyway, so I got to develop a relationship with him, you know, over why he felt what I was saying was going to happen to him, so.  These were channels of distribution issues.  How we were going to channel ourselves and our place in the marketplace.  And I was talking about us having our own channel.  We managed ourselves all the way to the customer.  The piggyback was totally third-party people.  We sold to third party people, and they brokered.  They were our brokers.