Hearing no noise from him, others went inside the bag and dragged him out. He was revived in a short while.
From Mule Driver to Superintendent of Car System.
“Play straight and keep at it.”
This is the only formula of success followed by William W. Weatherwax, who rose from a “mule driver” at one dollar and a half a day to be a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year street-car superintendent.
Weatherwax told the story of his remarkable rise to Chicago’s street railway board of arbitration at a recent session.
He entered the service of the Chicago City Railways Company as a boy of twenty. His work was driving horses hitched to cars. His pay was one dollar and fifty cents a day. He was known as a “mule boy.”
From that beginning, by steady, persevering work, Weatherwax worked steadily upward. To-day he is in charge of the operation of the surface lines of Chicago.[Pg 64]
Asked to account for his success, Weatherwax said he “guessed it just happened.”
“I worked hard and played straight—that was all there was to it,” he said. “I left school when I was thirteen years old. I got a job with a street-car company at Troy, N. Y., my home town. I started with the Chicago company in 1886. I have been in its employ ever since.”
Weatherwax’s progress from the bottom up ran through these stages. Driver, horse tender, hay-hoist operator in car barn, cable-car conductor, assistant barn foreman, division superintendent, general superintendent of transportation.