WORK WAS TOO EASY.
That Was Why the Man Who Was to
Build the Subway Resigned His
Position as a Municipal Clerk.
John B. McDonald, the builder of the New York City Subway, began work in the New York office of the Registry of Deeds. The work was easy and the pay was fairly good. On the whole, it was just such a place as thousands would look upon as highly desirable. McDonald thought otherwise, and during his spare time he studied hard at scientific subjects. He had been in the place a year when he came home one night with the announcement:
"I've thrown up my job."
"Why?"
"I want real work, and I'm going to have it."
He got it as timekeeper at the building of Boyd's Dam, part of the Croton water system. The work was just what he wanted, and it was not long before he became a foreman. Here his real ability showed itself, and he made such progress that when he was twenty-three he was inspector of masonry on the New York Central tunnel. Here he made his first bid for a sub-contract, and it was accepted. The first work he ever did as a builder was the big arch at Ninety-Sixth Street. He got other big contracts on the Boston and Hoosac Tunnel, the building of the Lackawanna road from Binghamton to Buffalo, the Georgian Bay branch of the Canadian Pacific, and a dozen other roads in various parts of the country.
All this was easy for him, and it was not until he began the tunnel under Baltimore for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that he got the real work he wanted. It was a tunnel through mud and quicksands, a tunnel that subterranean streams threatened constantly to destroy. Every day, in rubber coat and hip-boots, for five years, he worked at it, surmounting one obstacle after another, and finished a winner, having carried through one of the hardest underground jobs ever attempted.
While he was doing this he built the Jerome Park Reservoir—so as to keep himself busy, he said.
When he put in a bid five million dollars lower than his next competitor for the building of the New York Subway there was at first some hitch over the seven-million-dollar security demanded, and his rival was asked if he expected to get the contract by default.
"No," he said, "McDonald has that contract and he'll keep it. He never lets go."