To provide the necessary facilities for car cleaning, the company maintains a cleaning force in two hundred and twenty-five principal yards, and, in addition, at one hundred and fifty-eight outlying points. These yards require the service of over four thousand cleaners.

Stationed throughout the United States, in nearly every city of prominence, are six superintendents, thirty-nine district superintendents and thirty agents. These men each week make personal inspection of cars in operation with the sole purpose of keeping the service up to the highest standard. In addition, a corps of electrical and mechanical inspectors constantly inspect and test the cars and their devices, at various places, and another corps of local inspectors carefully examine every departing and every incoming train with particular attention to the appearance and deportment of the car employees and the apparatus for heating, lighting and water.

The Pullman Company is today the greatest single employer of colored labor in the world. Trained as a race by years of personal service in various capacities, and by nature adapted faithfully to perform their duties under circumstances which necessitate unfailing good nature, solicitude, and faithfulness, the Pullman porters occupy a unique place in the great fields of employment. There are porters who for over forty years have been employed by the company, and of all the porters employed, an army of nearly eight thousand, twenty-five per cent have been for over ten years in continuous service. The reputation of any company depends in a large measure on the character of its employees, and particularly in those concerns which render a personal service to the general public is it necessary that the standards of the employees be exceptionally high. Such standards of personal service cannot be quickly developed; they can be achieved only through years of experience and the close personal study of the wide range of requirements of those who are to be served.

To inspire in the car employees, conductors as well as porters, the ambition to satisfy and please the passenger, rewards of extra pay are made for unblemished records of courtesy; pensions are provided for the years that follow their retirement from active service; provision is made for sick relief, and at regular intervals increases in pay are awarded with respect to the number of years of continuous and satisfactory employment.

One characteristic of the Pullman business that is peculiarly significant is the average length of service of the employees. In a general way it may truly be said that from the car porter to the highest official every man who enters the business enters it as a life work. In most lines of business there is a variety of concerns operating along similar lines, and it is a natural step for a man to pass up from one company to another. But the unique position held by the Pullman Company has eliminated such a situation, and a man entering its employ looks forward to a personal development in this one concern.

JOHN S. RUNNELLS
President of the Pullman Company

During the half-century which has seen the sure and perfect development of this vast and complicated organization it is but natural to expect among the names of those who have guided its destiny many that must rank high in the business history of the country. A glance at the list of past and present Directors of the company confirms the expectation. Here are the names of men who have found high places in a variety of business activities not only in Chicago but in other great cities. The list includes:

In this same period but three men have occupied the office of president: George M. Pullman, the founder of the company, who held office from 1867, the year of incorporation, until his death in 1897, and Robert T. Lincoln until 1911, when John S. Runnells, the present president, was elected.