Norman M. Lorentzsen Narrator

James E. Fogerty Interviewer

Interviewed on August 16 and September 13, 2005 at the Minnesota Historical Society Saint Paul, Minnesota

Norman Lorentzsen - NL James E. Fogerty - JF II

JF: Today is August 16, 2005. I am James Fogerty ofGeneration the Minnesota Historical Society. Today, I am interviewing Norman M. Lorentzsen, retired PresidentPart and C.E.O of Burlington Northern, Incorporated. The interview is taking place at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. Society

I’m delighted to have this opportunity to talk with you. I suspect that we won’t get through it all in the first session, because you’ve had a long and illustrious career. There are a lot of things I’d like to talk Greatestto you about,Project: including your life experiences and your career in business. I’ll be particularly interested, when we get on in the interview, to talk with you about the growth and development of Burlington Northern, and about the American economy in general, which you saw from the pinnacle of one of the biggest companies in the country. Historical

NL: You ask the questions andHistory I’ll do some talking.

JF: Sounds good to me. Let’s just start at the beginning. Talk a little, if you would, about your parents and whereOral you were born. Minnesota's NL: My parents were immigrants from Norway. They were married over there on September 9, 1900. TheyMinnesota left Norway on March 1, 1901, and had a ticket from Trondheim to Englevale, North Dakota. Englevale was not a very big spot then; it’s not a very big spot now. It’s south and west of Fargo about sixty-five miles.

My dad had about an equivalent of about a third grade education. He had served in the military. Why did they leave Norway? He was the oldest, and under the rules there, the oldest son normally got the home place. They lived north of a little town called Nesna, which is just about fifty-five miles south of the Arctic Circle. There were nine children, but one of them died in infancy, about four years old. So he would have been responsible 25 for taking care of not only the parents but also those siblings. I think that that was one of the factors why they left.

My mother was born on the other side of this mountain that was between the fjord Sjona and the fjord Rana. In fact, her parents’ place was right on the Rana. Even today, the only way you can get there is by boat. It’s about an hour’s time by boat from the town of Nesna. Her parents drowned when she was nineteen years old. They had gone out to tend their nets that particular day, which was April 7, 1891. The children could see them out in the fjord after their boat had been capsized. But the water is so cold that being in the water probably twenty-five to thirty minutes; your body temperature drops so far that you can’t recover. The children could see them from time to time as the waves were going up and down. If anyone had tried to rescue them they probably would have ended their life.

My mother was the oldest of five children. The youngest one was six. TheyII eventually moved into Nesna, and they sold their place. It’s probably one of the most beautiful places you could ever imagine. You look up on the mountainside and there’s a stream that flows down from the mountaintop. I remember myGeneration mother telling about how the water would roar in the springtime. I’d say there are seventy bathtubsPart up there cut out of the rocks. You can have whatever size bathtub you want, and the temperature of the water, of course, is governed by the amount of sun in the rock’s face,Society so you can have a sauna or you can have a real chilly one. Making a living there was difficult. They had cows and chickens but nothing else. They did have a small garden. Of the remnants of the home, the only thing that is left is the brick chimney. It showed that the oven was part of the brick chimney. There was an GreatestundergroundProject: cellar, outside and detached from the main house. The roof of the house was a sod roof, and there was a tree growing up there when they were living in it, a little tree, and when we were there in 1972, it was a great big tree, but it still marked where the house stood right alongside that chimney. We’ve been there several times, including that time in 1972. Historical

JF: Does anyone live on the propertyHistory today?

NL: No. The property was sold once to a person who eventually took his life up there, a single man. I don’tOral know what his background was. He jumped off the cliff. On the fjord Rana, Minnesota'sit’s such a vertical rock face, and the depth of the water is sixteen fathoms where they were taking the boat up out of the water and putting it up on higher ground. For some reason or other, heMinnesota supposedly jumped off the top of that rock face, and they found his body there.

After him, another person bought it, and now the son of that fellow owns it. We have met him. In Norway, a lot of the people have what they call their hytti, h-y-t-t-i. Some people spell it with an i and some with an e. It is a cabin up in the mountains. For the people down south, it’s a cabin on the seashore. They go there and spend time in the winter . . . with skiing and tobogganing and that kind of thing. In the summertime, it’s a place they go and just relax. 26 JF: So sort of a weekend home?

NL: A weekend home, yes. The first time we were there, the cabin he had was about the size of . . . maybe a little bit bigger than this room, maybe the size of what you’d have for an old Model T car garage. The second time we were there, he had doubled the size of it, and he had put some conveniences in that weren’t there the first time. As far as I know, that person still owns that property.

My dad had family members that stayed in Norway, three sisters. Also, my mother had one sister, and a brother came over here and was in the state of Washington six years and then went back to Norway to marry his girlfriend that he’d left behind. They had all their tickets and everything needed to leave Norway and came down to Trondheim. And when they were going up the gangway to get on board this ship, she began to cry. I don’t know what happened and none of the children knew what happened, but her cryingII eventually ended up with going back down and getting off the ship’s gangway and never coming to America. Generation JF: They stayed in Norway? Part

NL: Stayed in Norway. Society

JF: It must have been difficult for your mother raising her siblings after her parents died.

NL: Well, yes. They all came intoGreatest Nesna, andProject: she got a job with a family that owned a store. They also had, they called it a gård, a farm, and she worked for them. She’d work in the store or on this gård, wherever was necessary. Her brother, who was next to her— he’s the one who went to Washington eventually and came back there—got a job in town. Then the sister stayed there and got work and eventuallyHistorical married. I don’t know what went on with the next to the youngest, but he must have been mistreated by the people, because my mother said many times thatHistory it was so good that he left. He was actually the first one to leave Norway. He came over in 1900.

Then a younger brother,Oral who was only six years old at the time of the drownings, came about Minnesota'sfour years later. They brought over several relatives. I don’t know how much help they gave, but many of those people came to our folks’ place and lived there for a period of time until they got aMinnesota job. Then they would go out on their own . . . like one sister went out to Washington and got married out there, and another sister got married in the town of Horace, where I was born, and had a son. Then she got tuberculosis and passed away. My dad had another brother who came also to Englevale, North Dakota, and then he went out to Oregon and married and then he went to California. He was in California for the rest of his life. He was involved in shipbuilding out there.

JF: There must have been already a fair-sized Norwegian community in North Dakota. That’s why your parents went there? 27 NL: Yes. The Northern Pacific [NP] started selling northern Europeans on coming to America, and the Great Northern [GN], also, later on. NP had over 250 immigration agents working for the person who was in charge in London. They organized towns, and then tried to get people to leave Norway, traveling via ship. In many cases, they named the town, and they decided who was going to be the mayor or the council president or whatever. That structure was the same wherever they went. Bismarck is a good example of that. In the case of Bismarck, they came mostly from Germany. But there’s a town called Norway in North Dakota, and there are towns with all kinds of names related to where the settlers came from.

These people started over 1,100 churches in North Dakota. Two or three things stand out. One of them is they wanted the children to have an education, so they started schools and colleges. At one time, there were, I think, twenty-three colleges in the northwestern states – Wisconsin to Washington and Oregon. Many of them folded eventually.II Concordia [College] is the successor to a college at Fergus Falls, it was called Park Regent College. They bought the Episcopalian Bishop Whipple Hall in Moorhead and it became one of the first buildings for Concordia. There were other schoolsGeneration that were started in different locations. The thing was their religion, their faith, colleges, schools,Part education for the children. It seemed like they were just focused on that. Society JF: Did most of them go into farming, Mr. Lorentzsen, when they got to North Dakota?

NL: Yes. The other deal that the NP offered was that if they didn’t have money to pay their fare, they just could sign upGreatest and say, “WProject:e’ll come,” and the NP would give them a job and then they could pay their fare back. Then, from there, they would go and file for land under the Homestead Act. If you were married, you could get only 160 acres, but if you weren’t married, the girl could get 160 acres and the guy could get 160, so you were getting a half a section. There was a lot of thatHistorical that went on. But farming was predominant. Two of my dad’s uncles were farmers around Lisbon and La Moure [North Dakota] and he had cousins whoHistory were farmers out in the western part of North Dakota.

JF: What did your father do when he got to North Dakota? Oral NL: TheyMinnesota's came in March, 1901 and he got a job on the N.P. railroad the first year there working as a laborer. Then he was laid off in the fall. All of those guys, the Norwegian guys—or Swedish, too,Minnesota I suppose—went up to Duluth, to the woods, as they called it. So he went up there two winters, but he came back each time. Then he finally got seniority as a laborer in 1902 and seniority as a foreman in 1906.

JF: So he worked those winters that he went up to Duluth as a lumberjack in the forest?

NL: Yes.

JF: And your mother stayed behind in North Dakota? 28 NL: Yes. They finally built a home. They had rented a house in Verona, but then they built a home in 1908. I know what they paid for . . . They had three lots. Have you ever been in one of those old county offices where they keep those records?

JF: Yes.

NL: Have you seen one of those books?

JF: The plat books. Yes.

NL: I went in there one day with my brother and a cousin. We asked the lady if she could help us. She said, “I know just where it is.” And she went and got that big book and pulled it out and flipped the pages, and there it was. The record indicated what they paid for it, and when they built their house, and who they sold it to, and what theyII got for it.

JF: That was in Horace? Generation NL: No, that was Verona. My dad went to Horace in 1909 and Partmy mother moved in 1910. The three oldest were born in Verona, and then my brother next to me and I were born in Horace. Society

JF: Did your father move to Horace because of the railroad work that he was doing?

NL: A job there became open forGreatest a foreman. HeProject: had been an extra foreman where he’d fill in vacancies and when that opened as a foreman, he bid on it and was the oldest guy as far as seniority was concerned. They had sections about every ten or eleven miles on the branch lines then. Eventually, that job was abolished during the Depression in 1932. I remember my mother . . . I came home and myHistorical dad was trying to console my mother, and my mother was crying, and I didn’t know what it was all about. I thought maybe something happened that I shouldn’tHistory get involved with, so I didn’t listen. But, later on that day, I found out that he had gotten a notice that said, “Section 22 is abolished, effective April 1.” This was on Good Friday. Then he elected to go to Dilworth [Minnesota]. By thatOral time, he was number six on the roster, so he could go most anyplace he wantedMinnesota's to. That was a good thing. While the job didn’t pay so much, he had lots of overtime. It was a railroad terminal. Minnesota JF: How long did you live in Horace?

NL: Until I was . . . in 1932, I was fifteen. I was sixteen that fall.

JF: You lived there for quite a little while.

NL: Yes.

29 JF: Tell me about growing up. What was the town like?

NL: There were eighty-seven people, mostly farmers. The road in Horace runs from West Fargo and south. On the east side of that road, the people were French who came from Canada. The grocery store on that side was run by a Frenchman. On the west side, the grocery store was run by a Norwegian. Now, there is some mixing between them but, on the whole, it never really mixed. I knew of one inter-marriage while I was there. After World War II, that changed. At the time I was there, you would never see one of the French guys at Concordia College. Today, I go there and here I see all these names . . . Savageau and Cossett and Fugeres at Concordia. [Chuckles] Concordia is a Lutheran school and that’s the number one group there, and number two group is the Catholics, and mostly French people from the Horace and Fargo area.

JF: Times change, don’t they? II

NL: Yes. In fact, you may never have heard of Joe [Joseph L.] Knutson, but he was the president [of Concordia College] for a long time. HisGeneration granddaughter is married to a French boy. She grew up around Alexandria [Minnesota]. I knowPart her and I know her parents very well. Society JF: What was the economy in Horace based on?

NL: Farming. GreatestProject: JF: And the railroad. Of course, it was a served by the railroad.

NL: Yes. Historical JF: So that was good. History NL: Actually, the railroad varied from four to eight people working there, and they also had a station agent. Oral JF: WhatMinnesota's did you do while you were growing up? You lived in town, so did you have any jobs in town as you grew up? Minnesota NL: Well, they didn’t know about child labor in those days. [Chuckles]

We started working sometimes doing special jobs for farmers even when we were eight or ten years old. I remember on a couple of occasions we pulled mustard out of flax fields. We did some other things in fields of potatoes. But when I was eleven years old I started working for the whole summer, by the month. That involved cultivating, shocking grain, hauling hay, stacking hay, mowing and hauling grain. The first year, we got fifteen dollars a month, outside of harvest. At harvest, you got thirty dollars. So in the 30 summertime you could make, maybe with a full month of harvest or a little bit more, seventy to eighty dollars. I worked on that first farm one summer, and then I worked on the farm where all this development is now the second year. Then I went back and worked on that first farm a second year, and then back to this other farm in 1931 a second time. That’s the guy that couldn’t pay me. When I got done, he didn’t have enough money to pay me, so I got a couple of turkeys, a turkey for Thanksgiving and turkey for Christmas. And he charged me three and a half bucks for each one. It came off his bill. [Chuckles]

JF: That was a bit of a surprise, I bet?

NL: Well, I didn’t know what he was doing. I remember the lady; I knew her very well, and she was very nice. She used to pack big lunches for me, and not for him, because he chewed tobacco, so she wouldn’t pack a lunch for him. The last year I wasII there, she was pregnant, and she had a big garden. She grew tomatoes and she would sell these tomatoes for a dollar a bushel. She had me carry the tomatoes from the garden to the gate where the people would come by. She’d heap the basket, oneGeneration of those pear baskets. I don’t know if you know what they are? They’re made out of slats of woodPart with handles on. They hold a bushel if they’re full. She’d fill it with heaping full, a bushel and a third anyway, and sell them for a buck. When she had sold forty-two of those,Society she told me one day, “That’s enough to pay for the doctor and the hospital for the baby.” Her brother, who was born after her, passed away. He was on that farm until he died. He had never been married. But he left, in his will, part of the farm to the church. His mother always sang in the choir. She had a very Greatestnice voice. Project:

The other things we used to do in that town . . . They had a swimming hole down there on the Sheyenne River. We never used a bathing suit ever. Who would think of a bathing suit? What was it? [Laughter] I remember skatHistoricaling on that river. Then there were several other ponds where the old riverbed had been where we could skate. The schoolhouse was a two-room schoolhouse, upstairsHistory and downstair s, four grades on each one. The teachers were so-so, some of them very good, some of them were not so good. Most of the time, not always but quite frequently, the teachers in first grade were Norse. The French kids who came to schoolOral couldn’t talk English and some Norwegian kids came and couldn’t talk English.Minnesota's So if you had a Norwegian teacher, it was kind of a break for the Norse kids. Minnesota JF: Did you have any jobs during the school year or did you mainly work in the summer out on the farm?

NL: Well, I had jobs at home. We used [railroad] ties, burned ties, for heat. Except my dad would buy some hard coal for our hard coal heater, which was anthracite. I recall the price of that was twenty-three dollars a ton. He’d only buy two tons and the rest of it was all ties, and that included the kitchen stove. So you always had to carry a lot of wood, maybe six hundred ties in the course of a winter. 31 There was a lot of sports and recreation: sledding and tobogganing and skating on the river. I had a dog; always had a dog, and a couple of the other kids had dogs. Some of the dogs would pull sleds. We did a lot of things with our sleds. I look back and think it wasn’t a very good idea, but cars would come in and pick up groceries, and we’d have a sled and we’d hang on to the car’s bumper. Like on a Ford, you could hang on with your left hand, and go behind them. They didn’t go too fast. There was snow flying, so you had to watch that you didn’t get banged in the head with a chunk of ice or something.

JF: It sounds like a really healthy outdoor life though.

NL: Yes. A lot of farmers came in with their horses and sleds, and that was easier to hang on to them.

There was always something going on. The social life of the church was probablyII the focus, both for the Catholics and the Lutherans. They had what they called the young people’s group. Well, the young people was everybody. [Chuckles] There was no distinction of age. Everybody came. And they alwaysGeneration had something to eat. The other thing my dad did, since he was in town all the time, he was, forPart want of a better word, the janitor for the church, and that included tending gas lights and an old furnace that burned lignite. I don’t know if you know what lignite is? Society

JF: Yes, I do.

NL: He would do that. We, my brotherGreatest and I,Project: frequently helped him. One of the things we had to do was . . . on Christmas Eve, they always rang the bell at six o'clock. There were two hammers on the bell, one that went back and forth with the bell, and then a stationary hammer. Then on New Year’s Eve, starting about 11:45, you would ring the bell maybe as an announcement that it was goiHistoricalng to be New Year’s, and you’d use the regular hammer that swung back and forth. Then, starting at five minutes to 12:00, every thirty seconds you would whamHistory the thing with that stationary hammer. It was all right when my older brother was there . . . not so bad, but when he was off to high school, then I would go down there by myself. Somewhere and another, you could imagine seeing ghosts any place youOral looked. [Laughter] Just before midnight, you had about a minute of silence,Minnesota's and then you would bang it a couple, two, three times right at midnight.

JF: Those are wonderfulMinnesota memories. So you had to climb up there yourself?

NL: You went up in the balcony, and there were ropes hanging down. You had two ropes: one for the bell that rotated and one for the stationary hammer. They had church every Sunday night. And the Ladies Aid always brought food, lots of food. You know, kids like that.

JF: It was a real community center there. How old were you when you moved to Dilworth then? 32 NL: Fifteen. One of the bad things about living there [in Horace] was for high school; you had to go to Fargo. It was like going to college. You had to pay tuition, buy books and board and room. It was exactly the same cost as if you were a freshman in college. My dad couldn’t afford two of us there at one time, so I ended up having to stay out a year. Then when we moved to Dilworth, everything was free. I don’t know how many people or children today realize how important that is. Everything was free. The only thing was, the first year, I played football, you had to buy your own football shoes. I think I paid three dollars and forty-five cents. They had those old leather cleats with nails in them. After that, the school bought them.

JF: So that was one big advantage of moving to Dilworth: your education.

NL: I’ve said many times that the best thing in the world that ever happened is that. I didn’t know very many kids when I started school. I knew the newspaper IIboy, and a couple of others, and that was it. The teacher on the first day would tell us what we could expect and who would be our teachers and so on and what the hourly class schedule was. Then, all of a sudden, she left us, but before she left sheGeneration said, “Now you can elect your officers for your class.” Lo and behold, those kids elected me president.Part Then they wanted me to make a speech, and I was looking for a place to hide. I never made a speech. I was so embarrassed. Oh, I just wanted to get out of the room.Society

JF: But they elected you president, nonetheless.

NL: I thought they’d change theirGreatest minds, but Project:they didn’t. I was class president when I was a senior. Our class wasn’t very big. We were only twenty-four kids. I played football and I played basketball, too, but I was not very good at that. I remember how the teachers would go so much out of their way to help you. That was a really fantastic faculty, completely different than what we’d had at Horace.Historical We had a teacher who was also in the library, and she could never do enough good to help you. The guy who was the basketball coach spent hours with me tryingHistory to get me to learn how to do something. I saw a basketball once before, and I didn’t know what a football was until a guy from the university who was our next-door neighbor came home and he had that thing and said it was a football. Oral Minnesota's JF: That was in Dilworth? Minnesota NL: No, I saw the football in Horace. I played end, but then in my senior year, because of my size, the coaches had me at tackle, but the next thing was I’d call signals from tackle position, which I never understood why. But that’s the way it was. We had a so-so team. We played the schools like Hawley and Lake Park and Pelican Rapids and Frazee.

JF: Did you enjoy living in Dilworth?

NL: Yes. 33 JF: Was your father there for quite a while?

NL: He went there in 1932 and he retired in 1946. He had a crew and it varied from probably the lowest would be a dozen men up to as many as a hundred or more. The majority of the regular crew were Italians and there was an Irishman, and an Englishman, and a fellow who was part Indian, and a couple of Greeks. Wonderful people. He had an Italian who signed his paycheck with an “X,” but he was very, very good. He had a knack for memorizing things. So if you asked him to lay out a switch, he just knew exactly what to do with it, all from memory.

JF: What was your father’s position with the railroad when he moved to Dilworth?

NL: He was the foreman. In Dilworth, they called him a terminal foreman. II I spent a lot of time working on the section. On the section, besides the track work, you were involved in icing perishable cars and heaters in the winter. I worked as a switchman a time or two. I found out you could make more moneyGeneration as a brakeman, so I applied for that. I started as a brakeman in 1938 and I got seniority in 1939,Part and by that time I was a junior in college. Actually, I ran out of money when I was a junior and stayed out a year from college and came back in the fall of 1940. I made around $1,100Society in that time period, so I came back with a checkbook when most college kids didn’t know what a checkbook was.

As a senior, I missed a whole weekGreatest of school.Project: We had a bad snowstorm on March 15, 1941. I was going to go to school Monday morning. I always caught a train going over to Moorhead and if the engineer saw me, he would slow up going through Moorhead so I could get off. If he didn’t see me, he went through Moorhead too fast to get off. Then I’d have to run back over the bridge by St. John’s HistoricalHospital to go to college. If you ran, it was about ten, twelve minutes. In addition to that, I hitchhiked. There was a Mrs. Ernest Schroeder who had a beautifulHistory farm east of D ilworth a little over two and a half miles. She would be in town buying groceries or something and going home around 3:30 to 4:00. She never failed to stop and always pick me up. So in the course of the four years, I think she probablyOral gave me maybe three hundred rides or more. Minnesota's JF: You started working for the railroad after you moved to Dilworth? Minnesota NL: Yes. You had to be eighteen. On the Great Northern, you could start earlier, so I went over there to apply for a job as a fireman. You could start there, I think, at sixteen or seventeen. I applied for a job there as a fireman, but I never got any work, so I gave up on that and went back to the NP. You had to be twenty-one to apply for a brakeman’s job. So I did that. By the time I was a senior, that storm on March 15, I missed a whole week of school. I made seventy dollars and some cents in five days.

JF: Which was a lot of money. 34 NL: Most people wouldn’t make that in a month. They had a derailment up north of Valley City.

JF: So you, literally, worked full time, that week.

NL: Yes.

JF: When you went to college, did you know what you wanted to do? Did you have some idea what you wanted to major in? How did you decide what you wanted to do?

NL: I wanted to be possibly a lawyer. I wanted to fly. I look back at some of my papers and I had all kinds of material from the Boeing Flight School. But going to flight school—it was out in Seattle—was very expensive. It was just out of the question. The other idea of being a lawyer never kind of left my mind, but that, again, involvedII money. The third thing was to teach and coach, and that’s really what I studied for all the time I was in college. I graduated with that in mind, but I also took a lot of business classes, money and banking, pre-law, that kind of thing. TodayGeneration they call it business administration. Then I took Scout courses, so if I went to teach,Part I could be a Scoutmaster.

When the business of the war came along and I had that draft numberSociety 555, instead of going practice teaching, that just abruptly changed my mind. So I did not do that. I really, actually, never got qualified to teach, because, under the law in North Dakota, you’ve got to have your certification as a practice teacher as part of your college training. You go out and practice teach at some high schoolGreatest for sixProject: weeks, I guess it is. I don’t know whether Minnesota law required that or not, but they’d go practice teaching there, too. So I never did do that. With my draft number being the way it was and knowing I was going to be drafted, I decided to enlist in the Naval Air Corps. That was the other thing I wanted to do, as I said earlier, to be a pilot. Historical

JF: What made you interestedHistory in that? Here you are growing up in North Dakota, in Minnesota, out on the prairie, what made you interested in flying?

NL: Oh, I got all thatOral material from Boeing Flight School about how great a career it was and allMinnesota's the opportunity. I had lots of that stuff. You know, it sounded pretty neat.

I came back to school afterMinnesota that fall and I talked to the draft board chairman. He said, “Well, you’ll be drafted somewhere between January and February, or maybe even earlier.” This was 1941. So I said, “Well, if I go to school now, what happens then?” He said, “We’ll let you stay in school until June and graduate, but after that you’re going to be drafted.” That made up my mind right there. Way back in 1937, I enlisted in the Army Air Corps. I took my examination down here at Holman [Air Field, St. Paul]. There were eight of us and I was the only guy who passed the physical.

35 So for the next two and a half years, they were giving me a day to go on duty, and I hadn’t finished college yet, so I kept stalling them off. Finally, they told me that I’d have to take the exam over again. By that time, it was maybe 1940. Also, by that time, everybody at Concordia, for the most part, were going into the Naval Air Corps. A couple, two or three of the football players that I had played football with there, that’s where they went. One graduated in 1936, and by 1939 he was already a senior grade lieutenant. You know, that was enticing. Anyway, that’s what happened. I went down then and enlisted in the Navy and passed my physical in March of 1941 and came back. They asked when I wanted to go on duty, and I said, “Anytime after June 15.” But I never got on active duty until November 6, 1941 because, I presume, they had lots of people volunteering at that time.

JF: So you were able to graduate? II NL: Yes.

JF: What did you do during the summer while you wereGeneration waiting? Part NL: By that time, my seniority was such that I could work on some of the better jobs as a brakeman. I worked all that summer. Most of that work was from DilworthSociety to Jamestown and that’s where Helen [Broten] was, so I could see her during the course of that summer. She went teaching that fall at Morgan, Minnesota, and was there for two years, until we got married. So I kept working. My sister who lived in Iowa—her husband had a drugstore down there—invited usGreatest down for thProject:e last weekend before I went on active duty. I picked up Helen and we drove down on a Friday night and spent Saturday and then came back Sunday. The next day was November 4, and I worked that day on one of the branch jobs. They called it the Casselton Branch. I was the head brakeman and I had not had very much sleep, so I asked the fireman if HistoricalI could fire the engine to stay awake, and I did that, and he supervised my operation. That was the highest paying brakeman’s job there was, like $15.76 for a day,History back in 1941. So I worked that day and then on November 5, I got ready to pack up and left for the Navy.

JF: Were you livingOral in Dilworth at that time? Minnesota's NL: Yes. Minnesota JF: What did your parents think about your enlistment?

NL: My mother, due to the fact that her parents had drowned, she did not like my going into the Navy. Her younger brother, who was six when their parents drowned, was out in Idaho. And on a Sunday afternoon, he and another buddy decided to go fishing. Well, they had a rowboat and the place they were going fishing was some distance. About that time, as they were getting ready to go, a barge came along and said, “You guys want to tow?” and they said, “Yes.” So they threw them a line. This uncle got up in the boat and 36 was rocking the boat back and forth and, all of a sudden, the towline went tight and the boat tipped over. Both of them, the two guys, went into the water. They found the other guy; but never got my uncle. So he drowned. He was twenty-three years and two days old.

JF: Oh!

NL: He was a foreman of a telegraph crew for the railroad. My cousin out in Everett, Washington, got into genealogy and she got, from the local newspaper, copies of the two papers that had this big story about what happened.

JF: That must have been quite a shock for your mother, too.

NL: That was enough for the water. She never wanted to go back to NorwayII ever, in spite of the fact she had a sister and a brother there. My dad would have gone at the jump of a hat, but she just didn’t want anything to do with it. Of course, in those days, you went by ship rather than by air. Generation Part JF: And here you were joining the Navy. Society NL: Yes. She thought that was the end. But the Navy was a wonderful experience.

JF: When you went, where did you go first? What was your first reporting station? GreatestProject: NL: I came down to Wold Chamberlain. We went through what they called E-base, Elimination training. That’s before they took you in as a cadet. You were a Seaman Second Class and got thirty-six dollars a month, but because you were flying, you got fifty percent flight pay. So you were getting fifty-fourHistorical [dollars]. It was supposed to be almost a two-year deal when I originally signed up. That’s before the war started. But we were here from November 6 Historyuntil January 5. We were supposed to have been here at least three months and we weren’t.

Then you went to groundOral school, and that was supposed to be a three or four month deal. We wentMinnesota's down to New Orleans and we were there three weeks. Then we went to Corpus Christi. When you left here, you became a cadet, and you got seventy-five dollars a month, so you had a bigMinnesota raise in pay. We went to Corpus Christi and then you got into basic flight training and then instruments. Beside flight training, you also had training for navigation, using bombsights and Navy procedures. You could decide what type of plane you would prefer, whether fighters or multi-engine, single engine, or whatever. I asked for multi-engine. Well, most of that was in seaplanes at that time, PBY [Patrol Bomber, Catalina aircraft]. They didn’t have PBMs [Patrol Search Plane, Mariner aircraft] yet. And they had torpedo planes. A lot of them were seaplanes, but single engine. I got my certificate on September 1, 1942.

37 JF: So your flight training was down in Texas?

NL: Corpus Christi. The education you get is really very good. You learn a lot about the weather. You learn a lot about the stars. You learn about airplane structures and the engines involved. You would think there is not very much application between that and the job I had, but really, there’s a substantial amount. You had ground school all the time while you were there. When we first were there at Corpus, school was seven days a week. The only time you had off was after one o'clock on Sunday. Then the flight surgeon, who was a very unusual guy, let us watch surgeries. We were in a glass enclosure, outside. He always made a point of telling what he was doing as he did his surgery. I used to go down and watch him. Because of the number of fatalities they were having, he just kept telling the officers in charge, “You’ve got to stop this seven-day-a-week thing.” They finally went down to five days, and then Saturday morning. So we had Saturday afternoon and Sunday off. That was a big change. II

You had to be out for muster at 7:00 a.m. regardless of what, and you had to be at bed check at 10:00 p.m., and you had to be dressed. Once,Generation we went for calisthenics or something and I came back. I was on short time to get dressed forPart dinner. I didn’t get my shirt collar buttoned. It was starched and I had trouble buttoning it. So I tried to push my tie up. The guy who was the cadet commander saw that it wasn’t two-blocked.Society Do you know what that means?

JF: No. GreatestProject: NL: When you hoist your flag, two block is when it’s snug up as high as it can go. That’s the way my tie . . . it wasn’t snug up there. So he put me on report and I had to do fifteen hours of marching. [Chuckles] Historical JF: Oh, Lord! History NL: He later became one of my students. [Laughter] I asked him if remembered me!

[Laughter] Oral Minnesota's JF: After your training, did they ship you out immediately then? Minnesota NL: You got a month off to go home. Then I was assigned to Norfolk. When we got to Norfolk, I was attached to TTSA, which is Transition Training Squadron, Atlantic [Fleet]. The next thing I knew, we went to Banana River, Florida. That’s just next door to Cape Canaveral. We got down there and I think they had about six or eight PBMs, not very many, and they were their first PBMs. You were down there to learn to be a first pilot, which means you can fly the plane in daylight, and then also to keep on going until you got to be a patrol plane commander. Or if you were on a land base, you’d be a plane commander and that’s when you could fly instruments in all kinds of weather. I went 38 through that there. They had so many PBMs coming out eventually, and so many pilots coming down there for training, that they were short on instructors. So they kept about ten of us there, and I was one of those people.

In early 1943, they were creating squadrons for PBMs, and they brought regular naval academy graduates back from sea duty, sent them through flight training, and then made them squadron skippers. I had about three or four of those fellows. One of them in particular, a guy by the name of Jack Dougherty, was my student more than anyone else. Another fellow and myself had been trying to get out of there because we did not want to stay there all the time. He knew that and he said, “I know a guy in personnel and I can get you assigned when I get a squadron.” The next thing I knew, the two of us got transferred up to Norfolk again and from Norfolk to Harvey Point, North Carolina. That’s where these squadrons that were being organized. I got to Harvey Point and was there for about four weeks and here comes this skipper. He’s been assigned a squadron, VPB-21,II and he said, “It’s going to be a week or two before you’ll be assigned to my unit,” and it was. So we got into that squadron. Generation This other fellow and I were the only two fellows that ever stayedPart together from almost start to finish during over four years. He started two weeks before I did at Minneapolis, and then he ended up being in a little bit longer and came out. But otherSociety than that, we were together. I called him the Dean of foreign students at the University of Minnesota and that’s where he was. He had all these foreign students. He wasn’t the dean, but he was in charge of foreign students. He’s still living here in the [Twin] Cities. So we were together almost all the way for theGreatest entire war.Project: I got out earlier than he did, because my father-in-law had fallen off a water tower, one that he was building, and was in the hospital. But he came out of it. At one time, they said he wouldn’t be able to walk, but he did and recovered fully. He was in the hospital here in St. Paul. We came back here and then went to Fargo. Historical

JF: When you were assignedHistory to North Carolina, where did you go from there in the war?

NL: I went into VPB-21, and we finished our training there and then took off for San Diego and Alameda.Oral We flew these seaplanes out over land, normally in sections of three. Minnesota'sWe had a lead pilot. We had a couple places we could land if we got in trouble. One of them was Lake Worth, Texas. Another one was Salton Sea [California]. We would fly out for Alameda.Minnesota If we had to, we could land at San Diego, too. We were there for about three weeks, and that was getting the final organization for the squadron. Then we took out again in sections of three for Hawaii, Kaneohe. At Kaneohe we were there about three weeks, and we had a lot of simulation work with submarines. We were equipped with depth charges or bombs, depending on whatever the target was. We also had torpedoes. If we were fully loaded, we could be up to something like 70,000-plus pounds. At that time, we had Wright engines. The Wright engines, I would say, were okay, but they had lots of little problems with them that could show up from time to time.

39 We finally got Pratt and Whitney R-2800s, which are the same engines that they had on the F-6F and the P-47, a wonderful engine. Even with them, when you’re fully loaded, if the sea was smooth, it was difficult to get them off. So then they had JATO [Jet Assisted Take Off], which are some bottles you attach to the side of a plane out of the hatch. You’d get your engines going at maximum power settings and if you were still mushing along, you’d kick those things in, and that’d give you about 450 horsepower for about forty-five seconds. It just lifted the plane right up and from there right off the water. Then you could drop the JATO bottles after you got up in the air.

Those torpedoes, I think we had fifty-some torpedoes on board ship, and we couldn’t wait to get rid of them. Whenever you had to do a torpedo drop you would always use the sun to make your attack. Obviously, you didn’t want to get too close. You’d drop them off maybe five to six miles, but they were self-directed. The big thing was once you dropped them to get out of there, still taking advantage of the sun. They couldn’t takeII a good look at you, which is different than now, of course, with the guns and the sights they have.

JF: How long would you be in the air for an average Generationmission when you went out? Part NL: Oh, from six to twelve hours. It would depend on the segment assignment. One of the longer flights I ever had was probably ten, eleven hours. It was aSociety terrible weather night.

When we left Kaneohe we went aboard ship, and we were on a couple of different ships. The first ones were small seaplaneGreatest tenders. ThenProject: we finally got on the [USS] Chandeleur which is a large seaplane tender. I was never on a ship under way. Whenever we went from one place to the other, we flew. We were on those smaller ships when we were up around Wake Island. We had flights go to Wake Island every day, because they were monitoring Japanese activity there. Then we wentHistorical from there to Kwajalain [Islands] and Eniwetok [Island]. We flew about every other day. Depending on what happens, you might have to fly two days inHistory a row. Eventual ly, as we left Kwajalain, this fellow I talked about earlier who was together with me all during the war, he became the flight officer and I was the operations officer. From the standpoint of flying people, we were the third and fourth in line inOral the part of seniority. He would set up the schedules the day that I was flyingMinnesota's and I would set up the schedules and operations for the day that he was flying. So we alternated. We never knew exactly what assignments we might get because we were being told what’s happeningMinnesota and it could change from one day to the next.

Let me tell you about the one flight that I mentioned earlier. It was terrible weather and I got down around Formosa and we picked up a target. You have IF gear, Identification Friend or Foe. We had that on, and we couldn’t get a response. I tried on the voice to call on the assigned frequency you have. No answer. Obviously, it was a Japanese sub. We started making a run, and just as we got down—we were so close to dropping that bomb, it wasn’t funny—all of a sudden a guy fired a Very pistol. He was up on deck. The sub was on top of the water. He fired a Very pistol [which shoots a flare], and of course we 40 didn’t drop our bombs, because the Very pistol is an identification for saying that they’re a friend. Then I got back on voice again. Finally, they answered and he said they had four seamen washed overboard. They were still looking for three of them. You couldn’t see anything. It was just terrible weather. So I asked if we could help, and he said, “Well, if you have flares, that would be a big help.” So we stayed there about three hours, and we dropped all of our flares, and they found two of those guys.

After we’d had some more conversation with them, we took off and went back on our mission. We had not had a fix on where we were, except we knew we left Formosa. [Chuckles] About four hours later, the wind was just howling and blowing and everything else and we had no visibility whatsoever, so I started to let down a little bit to find out where we were at. All of a sudden, here we were over the top of a city with gobs of lights. It was Shanghai. I didn’t want to be there. So we got out of there and went back and got out to sea. We finally came back to base the next morning. We mustII have been up in the air eleven hours.

JF: And you were flying off of a ship at that time? Generation Part NL: No, off the water but based on a ship. I can’t recall exactly how many times we got involved with the enemy. We dropped bombs on many transport ships,Society and then as the war was beginning to turn favorably for us, we were permitted to pick up smaller targets on shore. So one day, another pilot said (we had the same flight, the same area),“Why don’t we meet and we’ll drop some bombs on a place called Sasebo,” which is a big naval station in Japan, probably likeGreatest San DiegoProject: is for the U.S. So we found out that they had a couple things in there that the ACI—that’s Air Combat Information—knew about. It tells you a lot. So we decided to drop bombs on them and we did.

On the second run, they shot out the starboard Historicalengine and we couldn’t feather the propeller. We got down to fifty feet over the water, and I thought we were going to end up ditching, but [it’s] one of theHistory things you didn’t want to do. Everybody had been told about that: don’t get involved with landing close to shore. So we were going out to sea as best we could. At the same time, jettisoning fuel and throwing stuff overboard. We got down to fifty feet andOral we finally began to climb a little bit back up. The maximum setting on thoseMinnesota's engines was fifty-seven inches of mercury, 2800 RPM [revolutions per minute], and only for five minutes. I had that engine up to about eighty-five inches of mercury for about twenty minutes. MinnesotaIt was a Pratt and Whitney engine. The Pratt and Whitney engine is a very, very good engine.

JF: It got a workout. Where were you flying back to at that time?

NL: Well, we were trying to get back to Okinawa. We were based at Okinawa on a ship. Every morning, noon, and night, those Japanese Zeros would come down, kamikazes. We had another incident one day. We were going up north on what you called the outside, toward the Kurile Islands. The inside was closer to China and the Japan Sea. All of a 41 sudden, our radar guy says, “Oh, we got a target. It looks like a bunch of ships.” Well, about two minutes later, he said, “No, it’s not ships. It’s got to be airplanes.” We had a scope, and I could see what was happening. Then the question was, “Are we going to open fire on them?” I said, “No, the first thing we’ve got to do is get information back to the fleet,” and we did. While that was going on, we went right through the middle of those guys. They were at almost the same altitude as we were. They just spread out. I don’t know why one of them didn’t think about diving on us. [Chuckles] But they didn’t. They never got even close to their target. The Navy got their fighters up and launched. They shot the Japanese planes down. It wouldn’t have done much good for us to shoot one or two of them down, because they would definitely have come after us.

JF: How many crewmen did you fly with on those planes?

NL: Well, we had normally eight enlisted men and three pilots. In the Navy,II a pilot is qualified as a bombardier. He’s also qualified as a navigator and as a pilot. Versus in the Air Force, you’ve got three people qualified for those different things. We were pretty good at navigating. I didn’t do the navigation per se. GenerationI did at times. I took most of the star sites and sun sites. You had an instrument that you could take thePart readings with.

JF: In the midst of these really long flights you’re talking about, eleven,Society twelve hours sometimes, did the three of you change off at all so that one person wasn’t having to do everything all the time?

NL: Most of the time what happened,Greatest you hadProject: the two co-pilots, and one of them would be the navigator for that trip, and then he’d be a copilot for the next trip, and they’d switched. The two co-pilots would switch. A senior pilot always was up in the cockpit watching things and taking turns. There were times when you’d say, “Well, you take over for an hour or so.” Yes. We also had food on theHistorical plane, and we had a couple of guys who were pretty good at cooking. The Navy would put on a supply of food available for us, a lot of times chicken and otherHistory varieties, and you’d have to cook it.

JF: Because you were up so long. Oral NL: Yes.Minnesota's I had a great crew. The plane captain I had in the beginning . . . When we were on a couple of flights, several things happened that were little things that shouldn’t happen. Sometimes, littleMinnesota things are evidence that maybe some big thing can happen. One of those deals involved the cowling, which is fastened with Dzus fasteners. You twist them in and they’ve got a spring-loaded device in them. Well, he didn’t do that, so we lost cowling, and that’s not a good thing. We had another time where we had an oil leak on the engine, and we had to turn back. Obviously, the oil leak must have been there before, so I told the skipper I didn’t want that guy as the plane captain anymore. He argued with me, because he knew the guy from another squadron. I said, “Well, if you feel that way about him, maybe you should have him.” He didn’t like that. Anyway, we changed and the second guy in my crew was really a great guy. We also had a first class 42 guy in charge of ordnance, a wonderful guy. We had two radio guys that were topnotch, radio and looking at all the stuff that was electrical. We had three turrets. You could mount guns on three other places, so between manning the engineering panel, the three guns, and then the two side guns and the side gun up forward, the whole crew was pretty well occupied.

The Japs got in a running fight with one of our PBMs for probably . . . it seemed like an eternity, but I guess maybe only about fifteen-twenty minutes. There were six of them and the one PBM, and the PBM shot down two of them and badly damaged another one. Finally, there were two left, and they just broke off and left them. But the plane was so full of holes and the gas fumes so bad that they decided the plane could blow up any minute, so they decided to land in the open ocean. We sent out planes from our squadron. We had a procedure for searching. We didn’t find them that day, but the second morning, we found them and picked them up. Our planes, on several occasions, didII land and pick up people.

Another time I was up . . . I had set up the schedule theGeneration day before and assigned ourselves to the outside line going up towards the Kuriles. We ended up beingPart a communication station for our fleet. So we relayed a lot of messages by radio. That’s when they sank that biggest Japanese battleship. Society

JF: The Yamato?

NL: Yes. They also damaged a severalGreatest cruisers.Project: The Navy torpedo planes came in and just raised hob with them. That was really the last big engagement between the two fleets, but primarily by air, not ship-to-ship. One of our guys, the other guy that was flying what we called partners, flew on the inside and he got over there where a couple of those torpedo planes had been shot down, and he landedHistorical and picked up three people and got away with it. [Chuckles] History JF: That must be a tricky maneuver to get down and pick them up.

NL: Yes, on the openOral sea you’re bouncing up and down. There were shots around him, but theyMinnesota's didn’t hit him and he got off with it.

JF: Incredible. So you Minnesotawere in service when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima?

NL: Yes, but I was sent back to the States to get another . . . a squadron of my own. On these fitness reports they send out, they show what your qualifications are and it showed on mine, “Ready to command,” which meant that you’d get either a squadron of your own or you were going to be the next senior officer. I got back to Corpus Christi, and here was my former executive officer there in charge of training for Pacific Ocean areas. So about the first or second day, when I’m in one of the classes they had where they’re briefing on all the new changes going on, I got a note to report to him right away. I got up 43 and left. He said, “I want you to audit the training here to see what we’re doing.” I said, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. If I’ve got to go back out, I’d just as soon go back.” “No,” he said, “you’re assigned to that. You can’t change your mind.” I said, “Well, I guess, okay.” So I did that for about probably a month. Then the war ended.

So the next thing I knew, I was told, “You’re going to be interviewing all these people who apply for regular Naval service, and you can pick two people to be with you. You’ll be interviewing these people and you’ll get data ahead of time about them, telling you brief facts on each one. The big thing is to question them and see what you think of them.” So I picked my two co-pilots. I knew them the best and had a lot of confidence in them. We’d run through about two to three of these guys in an hour. Before we began each day we would review these personnel data reports. We had some preliminary questions that they suggested we use and then we came up with some of our own. II We agreed that if these guys were in view of each one of us, “Up.” If we had three “ups,” that was it. We’d say, “Up.” If we got three “downs,” obviously, it goes the other way. If we got two “downs,” it went the other way. So we wentGeneration through, I would say, in the course of an eight-hour day, probably about twenty of them, dependingPart on how they were scheduled. We did that for about three weeks. The opportunity to be released from active duty arose. The navy began accepting requests for release from activeSociety duty. Almost all of my service, with the exception of the time here in Minneapolis and at New Orleans, was sea duty. So I was probably in the first thirty or forty people to apply for and to be granted termination. So I did that. GreatestProject: JF: And at that time, you were discharged from Corpus Christi?

NL: Yes, we were at Corpus Christi. Historical JF: Then you came home? History NL: Yes.

JF: Where was homeOral at that time? You went back to Dilworth? Minnesota's NL: No, when I was out in the Pacific, Helen went to be with her sister who lived just outside of Madison at Stoughton,Minnesota Wisconsin. That’s where our son was born. Then she came up north in about May of 1945, so she was in Jamestown then. I got released at Corpus Christi to have leave. That was in June, and I came home. Then we went back to Corpus Christi to do these other things until I got released. So she was down in Corpus when we were released.

JF: So you came back up together, and where did you go?

44 NL: We went back to Fargo, and we got an apartment in Moorhead. I was going to go into business with my brother. He already had a store. The idea was that we were going to start a second store in merchandizing . . .

JF: What was your brother’s name?

NL: Arnold. He had dry goods, et cetera. We were going to buy a building which his father-in-law owned, and we found out what he wanted; he wanted $100,000. My brother thought that’s way out of line for that building. So we decided to wait. In the meantime, I returned to my job again with the railroad. One of the guys came to me and said, “We need you to run for the chairman of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.” I said, “I don’t want that kind of job.” “We’ve decided you should be it.” I said, “I really don’t want it.” He said, “If we do all the campaigning that is necessary, would you refuse to do it?” I said, “Well, no, I guess I wouldn’t refuse.” He did the campaigning,II and it ended up that I was elected. So I did that for about eight months.

JF: Was that a full time job? Generation Part NL: No. Anytime something happens when a union person feels he’s been unjustly dealt with, you’re involved. I did that. That gave me a lot of exposure to theSociety officers at Fargo, including Doug Thompson, whose dad had been superintendent of the dining car department for the Northern Pacific. He was kind of a rough guy. He never took a cigarette out of his mouth to take the ashes off; he’d just, “Poof,” blow them off like that. GreatestProject: One day I was in there with a case where the guy obviously . . . was disciplined for ten days and there was no reason for doing that, I didn’t think. Mr. Thompson got full of steam about it. All of a sudden, he got up and he was jumping up and down. He went over to pick up a chair, and I thought he was goingHistorical to throw the chair at me, so I got up and went over by the door and I opened the door, just in case. He was still ranting and raving, and I said, “Mr. Thompson,History isn’t that a terrible way for a superintendent to act?” He stopped. He looked at me and said, “Come on back in and sit down.” So I went back in and sat down and he sat down. He says, “Okay, I’ll pay that claim.” I thanked him and left. Oral Minnesota's Then, about ten days later, he called me up and said, “I want to see you. Come on up.” So I went up there. I didn’tMinnesota know what he was goi ng to be talking about, so I brought some of those files in. He said, “What did you bring those for?” I said, “I didn’t know what you wanted to see me for.” “Well, it’s not that. You’re going to go to Duluth.” I said, “What am I going to do there?” He told me. I said, “I want to talk to my wife.” “You don’t have to talk to her.” I said, “Well, I don’t want to go anyplace unless I talk to my wife.” He said, “You don’t have to talk to her! I’m going to call up the general manager and tell him that you’re coming down to see him and that you’ve decided to go.” “No,” I said. But then he made an appointment, so I went down to St. Paul and I saw the general manager and the superintendent from up at Duluth. After meeting them there was a brief 45 discussion about where I could report to Duluth. I was told what the salary was and that my pay would begin the next day. Since there was a weekend coming up, I was to report there on Monday.

JF: What was your position when you went to Duluth?

NL: Assistant train master.

JF: What did your wife think about moving to Duluth?

NL: I went home and told her about it, and she said, “Do you want to go?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Well, let’s go.” I figured she would, but I thought I wouldn’t do something that she wouldn’t want. Mr. Corser was the superintendent, a very nice fellow, a wonderful guy to work with. He told me, “Theoretically, you’re an assistant train masterII and we have a train master and you should report to the train master. But I want you to be in touch with me.” Generation Then in the early 1949 the tunnel in the Rocky Mountains west Partof Helena caved in. They tried to get a number of other guys out there. It caved in on March 10, I think. Finally, Mr. Corser called me up one day and he said, “They want you to goSociety to Butte.” I said, “Oh, when?” He said, “You should have been there yesterday.” It was like three in the afternoon. I said, “I’ve better go home and pack and get my grip on the train in the evening.” “Oh,” he said, “you can go home and then leave on the train in the morning.” That’s what happened. I went to Butte,Greatest and I wasProject: there for what was supposed to be two weeks. I ended up being there until December.

JF: In the meantime, your wife and family were in Duluth? Historical NL: Yes, but in early June, they said, “If your wife would want to come out here, you can have her come out.” She wasHistory wanting to do that. I said, “What do I do about the place we’re renting in Duluth?” “You can figure out what it costs per day, and you put that on your expense account.” I didn’t have anything in writing about that, but I put down, I think it was, seventy-fiveOral cents a day every day for a meal. Minnesota's We found a place in Butte to sublet from a Jewish rabbi. He was going to be gone three months. Seventy-five dollarsMinnesota a month. The company paid that. We got a lot of telephone calls at that place. I remember one lady in particular who was asking about where there were kosher meat markets. I had heard where there were kosher meat markets and so I suggested one. She said that wasn’t one that was close to her. “Any others, she asked?” I said, “No, I don’t really know of any more.” She said, “You’re not a very good rabbi.” [Laughter] I didn’t tell her I wasn’t a rabbi. We were there for three months, so then we got a duplex. The people who were there were Italians, Trasolini, and they made tamales commercially. Trasolini’s tamales. They were the nicest people and they just thought we loved tamales and Helen didn’t like tamales. [Laughter] 46 People had a bad idea about Butte. Going out there, several guys said, “Where you going?” I said, “To Butte.” “Oh, I feel sorry for you.” But those people in Butte out there were just very nice. They were just wonderful people, couldn’t be nicer. One day, our little son took off and Helen couldn’t find him. She was out looking for him, and Mr. Trasolini came out and asked what was going on. She told him. “Oh!” he said, “My goodness. Why didn’t you call me?” So right away he took out to help her and then, finally, he got a hold of Helen and he said, “I’ll bet I know where he’s at. There’s a band playing.” So they went up there and there was Tom with his nose against the fence.

Butte High [School] had a very good band. You went to the football games not to see the football game; you went there because of the halftime performance by the band. I think Bernie Bierman was, at one time, the football coach of the high school in Butte. The year we were there, they had a special train out of Butte to go to the Rose Festival in Portland [Oregon] with the band. The bandmaster had a system of signals. He’d holdII his nose or his ear or whatever, and that would signal a different song. He had, like, several dozen different signals. The band played at the legislature in Helena thirty minutes without the director ever telling the kids what music they would playGeneration except these little signals. Part JF: How long were you in Butte then? Society NL: Until December 1.

JF: Then you went back to Duluth? GreatestProject: NL: Went back to Duluth. I’d been a trainmaster in Butte, and I was a trainmaster coming back. One of the things at Butte that happened was when Mr. [Charles] Denney was the president. I was alone when I first started. He came by one day and said, “How many hours do you work per day?” I did not tell himHistorical the whole truth. He never said anything more to me, but the next day, the superintendent called me up and said, “We’re going to put a person on at night, and Historyevery other week, there will be a different guy.” He said, “They’re working for you.” These guys had been working for a long time before I was.

Another time, Mr. OralDenney was on the passenger train coming west and they had a mess of trainsMinnesota's in Butte. Butte was not equipped to handle freight trains, and here were these freight trains coming in with up to a hundred cars, and the longest track in the yard was about forty-seven cars.Minnesota He was coming westbound on Train #3. I came down fairly early, around six that morning, and I saw we had a problem. The only way to get rid of the problem and not delay the train with Denney’s business car was on was to have the passenger train take the siding. I told the dispatcher to do that, and he said, “Can’t do that.” I said, “Well, you’re going to do it this morning.” “No,” he said, “I can’t. I’ve got instructions.” I said, “From who?” He said, “The superintendent.” I said, “Call him up and tell him we’re going to have to put him in the siding.” They did put him in the siding. That train was delayed a little bit more than I expected, so I thought, “I’ll probably get fired for this.” [Chuckles] Mr. Denney came down, and I apologized for having to put 47 him on the siding. He said, “Young man, you know this is a freight railroad. You did exactly right.” I said, “Thank you.”

The next thing was Mr. Burgess, who was the assistant general manager out at Seattle, and he came over to Butte a lot and got to know me. Then he became general manager in St. Paul. When I went back to Duluth, they wanted a terminal trainmaster at Duluth, and I was put on that job. One day in August, 1953, early August, they told me, “Mr. Burgess wants to talk to you.” So I called him and he said, “I want you to come in here and be my assistant as of September 1.” So I did. I hadn’t been there more than two weeks and Mr. William Judson, who was the operating vice-president, had a heart attack. Then Mr. MacFarlane, the president, decided that Mr. Burgess would handle both jobs. Burgess asked me to come down on a Saturday and a Sunday. He told me what had happened. He gave me guidelines for what I could do. He also indicated the need to discuss certain issues. On Saturdays, he normally would be in the office. So that was helpful.II On a very few occasions he might be out of the office for as much as a week and up to ten days. I would usually sign all his letters that went out with his name. Generation JF: That meant moving though. You had to move from Duluth?Part

NL: Yes, down to St. Paul. Mr. Judson decided to retire and Mr. BurgessSociety got his job. Three times I was going to go in on a job and work for Mr. Judson as assistant to the vice-president, and I never got there. Then Mr. Burgess said, “Come April 1, you’re going to go someplace. I don’t know where yet.” [Chuckles] I went to be superintendent in Missoula. We were there threeGreatest years, and thProject:en I went to Spokane as superintendent and was there for seven years. When Mr. Burgess retired in March of 1964, Mr. Steinbright, (General Manager lines west), became vice-president operations in St. Paul. The position of general manager (Seattle) was not filled until March 5, when I was assigned to that position. Several rumors about the delay in fillingHistorical the position in Seattle existed. One was that Mr. Steinbright recommended a person other than the one Mr. Burgess recommended. History

JF: And you were based in Seattle, at that point? Oral NL: Yes,Minnesota's and I was there until January 1, 1968. I came back to St. Paul as vice president operations. Minnesota JF: In St. Paul?

NL: Yes.

JF: Talk a little, if you would, about the railroad business at this time, about NP as a company and what it’s major businesses were at that time, who its competitors were, how things were going during this long period that you worked for them.

48 NL: Well, the Northern Pacific was really a conglomerate. Most people didn’t realize that. They had timber, they had oil. They had the Resource Company. We had a lumber mill. We had pipelines, interest in pipelines, so a whole mix of different things and all the land development operations were part of the corporation.

JF: Because the railroad owned millions of acres of land.

NL: Yes. Well, at one time, the land grant to the NP was roughly forty-seven million acres. You know, for years, having that land was supposed to be a great thing and the only way it was ever worthwhile was to get people out there to buy it. That’s what those land commissioners that they had selling this product over in Europe were doing. “Come on over and we can do this and that.” Plus, settling on the land, you know, and getting a quarter of land, was very important to what happened. But you couldn’t sell the land for fifty cents an acre or twenty-five cents an acre without people. Eventually,II it turned out that they did not keep the mineral rights on most of the land they sold, only on something like six-plus million acres. There was a guy in the land department who wanted to do that way back when, and they never did it. They just let theGeneration mineral rights go with the land as it sold. Part

JF: But they still did have a lot of coal and oil and things on the landSociety that was left, I suppose?

NL: Yes. They owned Mount Saint Helens. GreatestProject: JF: Oh, really?

NL: They tried to get rid of it. Supposedly, you were supposed to be able to exchange with the Federal Land people, but they never did.Historical After it blew up [May 18, 1980], the Federal people were ready to make an exchange. There was a man by the name of Harry Truman. He leased the place,History and he had a bunch of cabins, and had a small resort including a lake. I talked to Harry two weeks to the day before it blew up. He was here in St. Paul. It’s not hard to remember his name when it was Harry Truman. He had a sister, too. I said to him, “AreOral you going to stay there?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “You know, when Minnesota'sit blows, it won’t be possible . . .” He said, “Oh, I’ll jump in the lake.” I said, “But, Harry, the lake won’t be there.” He said, “Well, then I’m going to jump in the cave.” I said, “The cave is goingMinnesota to go, too.” He said, “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s going to be. I’m not going to leave.” So he’s up there someplace.

JF: So he stayed despite—?

NL: He stayed there.

JF: So NP was in fact a conglomerate with major timber interests?

49 NL: Timber was a big thing. The lumber mill. They bought a lumber mill in Montana in about, oh, maybe 1964 or 1965, and paid $6 million for it. Lumber prices had been very low and the man who owned it was getting very disgusted with it. Anyway, the next year, the company netted more than $6 million. The market turned around completely and Plum Creek today is listed on the stock market.

JF: So this became Plum Creek Lumber?

NL: Yes. And we also had an interest in El Paso. We had the mineral rights to gas and oil also an interest in pipelines. We had a refinery at one time. And of course the timber operation itself was very substantial. The company had a very, very forward-looking program with respect to timber preservation, and replenishing tree growth.

One of the interesting things they did was one that caused some trouble, whichII is kind of ridiculous. They planted millions of trees every year, and one of the things they did was for families. If you wanted to go up there . . . They didn’t tell the families, “You can’t use your children six years old or eight years old or ten yearsGeneration old.” But, “You go up there and you have a picnic and plant some of these trees and we’ll pay youPart so much for them.” It was a very simple operation. And a lot of families went up there with two kids or ten kids, and they could plant a bunch of trees in a day. All you do is youSociety get the seedling and they had kind of shovel thing with a handle like a shovel to prod into the ground, and of course it’s moist. They had a pattern to follow putting these seedlings into the ground. They’d have their picnics and enjoyed the outdoors. Then the Company was told that it was child labor. GreatestProject:

[Laughter]

JF: What was the railroad’s overall profitabilityHistorical through these times?

NL: Not adequate. At the timeHistory we merged [with the Great Northern], the NP Resources was contributing a substantial amount, including Plum Creek Lumber and the oil, pipelines, et cetera. The Great Northern had better income, but their income was declining, as was theOral Northern Pacific Railroad business declining, but then the so-called non-transportationMinnesota's income picked up the gap. You know, the coal that was on the NP land had limited value. Anyway, they finally came to a deal where they would issue preferred stock to the GreatMinnesota Northern stockholders, which was to compensate them for perceived better earning power. The Great Northern had a better line, in some respects, than the NP, because the NP, built ten years earlier, had more grades and more curves and greater mileage from St. Paul to Seattle. In some ways it had been constructed less efficiently than the GN. Mr. Denney had corrected a lot of that when he was president, but there still was a lot left to do.

JF: Who was in control of the Northern Pacific before the merger? Were there controlling stockholders in the NP at that time? 50 NL: Over the years the Hill interests diminished. At one time, George Slade (son-in-law of Jim Hill) was vice-president operations on the NP. But after World War I and on, the two roads were very competitive with each other. Some of that competition was evidenced in the passenger operation after World War II. Both roads established faster train schedules, new streamlined equipment including vista Dome cars. Both railroads had very high on time performance records on their passenger service.

JF: What percentage in those years, the 1950s and 1960s, was passenger service on the NP as opposed to freight, would you say?

NL: From the standpoint of contribution, not very significant. There were times when they did, but there were times when they didn’t. People who rode the NP were very, very happy with what they saw and what they did. I think the NP probably had the more scenic route. In fact, I’ve said many times that from Missoula to Sand Point, Idaho,II there is no area anywhere that is as beautiful as when you’re running along the Clark Fork River, and all the time you’re looking at these snowcapped mountains. Generation I just reread [Eugene V.] Smalley’s History of the NP [RailroadPart] and I also just read that book about Washington and the Revolution [George Washington’s War: Saga of the American Revolution by Robert Leckie]. I come away with a coupleSociety of words: patience, persistence, and dedication. The Josiah Perham who got [President Abraham] Lincoln to sign the charter for the NP on April 2, 1864, spent a lifetime getting a charter for the railroad. He died before it was ever started. He died a pauper. He spent all of his money. Then some of the others that cameGreatest along in theProject: initial stages didn’ t fare well, but those who came along, like Ben Cheney and George Cass and [Frederick] Billings, and they bought land out there and started the “Bonanza Farms.” They ended up making money. Cheney, for example . . . there’s a Cheney Foundation out in Tacoma. He was interested in education. He gave $10,000 to the city of whatHistorical is now Cheney, Washington, to start a school; that’s now Eastern Washington State University. But he also started this foundation at Tacoma, whichHistory is the Ben Cheney Foundation. And George Cass, too, was like that. Billings gave a library to the city of Billings. Then Charles Wright founded the Annie Wright School, a private school in Tacoma, one of the premier private schools in the country that is Oralstill running. Minnesota's JF: And all coming from the railroad. Minnesota NL: All coming from the railroad. On the other side there was the Central Pacific. Stanford [University], Leland Stanford was involved in starting the Central Pacific. The NP also had a guy by the name of Henry Villard. He was a German boy. He was president at the time the NP was completed in 1883. He’s the one who created the Blind Pool. He talked to all these German people and European people to give him money on a blind pool, $15 million. He was able to buy NP stock, I think, at a very low cost per share. He built a massive home right in downtown New York City, a massive thing. Somehow or another, the Swedish church got it, the LCA [Lutheran Church in America]. 51 I was in it two or three times. At that time, they said it was worth—this is back in the early 1970s—$7 million or $8 million dollars.

JF: I’m sure. The real estate alone probably was.

NL: It was sold eventually.

JF: Did the GN carry more passengers than the NP when they were competing with each other or not at that time?

NL: The Northern Pacific, I don’t know the actual passenger count. I think it’s probably a standoff. The North Coast Limited used to be pretty full. In fact, you had to have reservations all the time. But traffic dropped off in the winter season except for the holiday season. The GN got one of the mail trains, which was a big factor.II After the mail business went, the passenger trains were, without question, run at a loss. The government decided to go to air service for mail, and there were years when I know a lot of Missoula [mail] it went on the North Coast Limited, because theGeneration air service wasn’t that dependable. From Missoula to Spokane was just like overnight, not even overnight.Part You’d get on at Missoula about 6 pm and you were in Spokane at 10:30 pm at night. Society JF: As you went into the 1950s and 1960s, what were the competitive forces that the railroads, which hadn’t merged yet, were facing in terms of freight?

NL: The interstate highways had,Greatest no question,Project: a big impact. The fact that truckers, you know, had the free roadway and the railroads had to maintain their tracks. For a long time, the railroads took the position that we didn’t want to get Federal help involved because of what they do when they get there. That attitude has changed somewhat now. And fortunately, the attitude of the Federal GovernmentHistorical is, in some cases, recognizing that there’s a two-way street. There are some projects now that are being done where Federal money is being providedHistory and, at the same time, the railroads are also putting money in.

For instance, just comingOral out of the West coast /Seattle Portland area and crossing the CascadeMinnesota's Range, there is a lot of traffic and the highway system is congested. If they’re going to increase the highway capacity, they’re talking about billions of dollars. The other side of that is theMinnesota railroad needs to do something about the grade. Lower the grade with a new tunnel, and come through the mountains with the grade a maximum of about one percent, and provide increased capacity. I don’t know what’s going to happen on that, but that thing is being looked at as to what should be done.

JF: To alleviate the congestion?

52 NL: Yes. Freight traffic today is very heavy. For example, when I was at Spokane, if we had twenty-two freight trains a day, that was a big day. They’re running fifty-plus trains now, and they’ve had sixty freight trains in a twenty-four hour period.

JF: Wow.

NL: It’s just very, very substantial. Out of California, on the Santa Fe portion, this is the time of the year when all the things come in from China and the Pacific region for Christmas. A couple years ago—I don’t know what it is today—there were some days when they were running four eastbound container trains every hour, like in a twenty-four hour period, up to sixty trains. It’s probably not that heavy now, because the trains are a little longer.

JF: In fact, I remember, wasn’t it just a year or two ago, when there was aII problem with the Union Pacific [UP] having all sorts of trouble moving some of their portion of this freight, and there were people who were stocking up for Christmas that were worried about it, because the UP was having one of its many problems?Generation Part NL: Yes. The UP has not been able to overcome the congestion. They still have some problems. In connection with the coal, they were competing with theSociety Burlington Northern. [Chuckles] Rates were very competitive. Just not too long ago, the BN picked up one of the utilities in Georgia, which required fifty-one locomotives to handle just that one plant. The BN spent considerable money developing the capacity to serve the Powder River basin coal. We also had to Greatestconvince theProject: utility companies that our company could move the large volumes of coal needed.

JF: What year was this? Was this in the 1970s or 1980s? Historical NL: It was in the mid-1970s there were several coal slurry pipelines proposed. Our company looked at the possibiliHistoryty of operating a slurry pipeline. We made a decision, after researching such a proposal, not to do so. For a period of three to four years there were many seminars conducted by different companies to bring to utilities and coal producers informationOral about costs, capabilities of rail vs. slurry. We participated in these seminarsMinnesota's presenting our plans to meet the needs of these utilities. Its now nearly twenty years later and none of the proposed slurry pipelines have been built. One of the key items was the water needsMinnesota of the slurry system . Part of our strategy was that issue. We used a quote: “Water is the life blood of these states.” It was very effective.

JF: And, now, it’s worse than ever.

NL: Yes.

JF: When did you join the TCF [Twin City Federal Savings and Loan] Board?

53 NL: It was after I retired, maybe in 1981, 1982. Should I talk about that now?

JF: Yes, why don’t we do that now.

NL: Part of the business of being in St. Paul is getting involved with community activities. I was involved with the Metropolitan Church Council and then the St. Paul Foundation and the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. I guess I spent something like nineteen years with the YMCA. I was the fellow who signed the lease for the Y in the Sky, and the finance chairman was Gordon Mosentine, the two of us. We had, at the time, maybe less than a thousand members—the Y today is just a fantastic organization, I don’t know the exact membership, but it’s up in the several thousands. They have Ys in the suburbs, including New Richmond, Wisconsin, Apple Valley and Eagan [Minnesota]. They’re looking at doing some work with rebuilding the Y in the central part of St. Paul. And of course they’ve had the Y camps up north andII the St. Croix Y. They have just grown while doing a tremendously good job.

Another involvement was as a Director of TCF, a federalGeneration savings loan bank. They were a major bank in the St. Paul and Minneapolis areas only. Three membersPart of the board began discussing their concerns about the quality of loans being made. In several cases, management recommended approval of loans that failed to meet theSociety established guidelines. The result of our concerns was that we felt it necessary to talk to other directors to determine if they had similar concerns. In doing so, we found that we (the three of us) were not alone. Two other directors shared our concerns. A third director was concerned, but felt we should waitGreatest until anotheProject:r board meeting before taking action. In the interim, management came with another questionable loan, and this resulted in the third director deciding to join the group. This then gave us six directors (the board had ten members). We had a special board meeting, (without the CEO being present) at which time the decision to terminate the CEO was taken.Historical

Two of us were delegated to Historytell the CEO about the termination being effective at once. He was instructed to gather his personal items and to leave the building. The board also elected me as interim chairman. In addition, we selected a search committee (five members) with GeorgeOral Fox as a Chairman of the committee, to engage a search firm to assist Minnesota'sus in finding us a new CEO. You may recall that in the mid-eighties several Savings and Loan Banks were in financial troubles. It was commonly known as the “Savings and Loan Scandal.”Minnesota One of the most prominent of this group was Lincoln Federal Savings and Loan from Phoenix, Arizona. TCF was moving towards a similar fate. The concerns of the Directors about the direction TCF was moving were well founded.

The Search Firm moved forward with their assignment promptly. The Search Committee was kept informed reporting to the Board on a regular basis. When a good number of candidates were available, interviews with the candidates were begun by the Search Committee (and other board members if they wished). The result was the selection of Mr. 54 William Cooper, president of a bank in Florida, as the best of the group. We reached agreement with him on his salary and other issues, and a starting date. Mr. Cooper ultimately brought with him some of the officers he had worked with at prior institutions. He also terminated some of the people directly involved with moving TCF into troubled loans. As time moved forward and TCF began making progress financially, additional Executive staff was developed using local talent. Eventually, TCF went public with a stock offering. TCF today is a very strong, well-managed financial institution, serving Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin and now Arizona. Mr. Cooper retired recently. The current President and CEO is one of the Minnesota people brought into TCF after Mr. Cooper came.

JF: When did you retire from the TCF Board?

NL: I was on it for ten years. 1986, I think. No, it was longer than 1986. ItII must have been 1988. I was there about four years after Cooper came.

JF: Since you retired, have you kept in touch with theGeneration company? Part NL: Well, they used to invite former board members, on occasion, to come to their annual meeting, which, of course, you could go to as a stockholder. SocietyThen, on other occasions, they would have sort of a get-together. Most of those directors are gone now. There are only two left now.

JF: Just going back, if we could forGreatest a second,Project: to the YMCA. You were talking about you and a number of your colleagues being instrumental in going to Y in the Sky. Did you also bring in new management and people who did more marketing so that people would know about it and join it? Historical NL: The downtown YMCA facility was an old obsolete building, part of which was not useable due to deficiencies whichHistory were not in compliance with the Cities building code. The board had long realized that change was necessary; a new building or finding another new, modern building with the ability to meet the Y’s needs. With the community support, a capital fundOral drive was undertaken. Mr. Hall, John Traver’s predecessor, was a very fineMinnesota's leader. Mr. Traver did an excellent job in planning for the change. We were able to get the space and the type of facility needed on Fourth Street. Our fund drive brought in funds so weMinnesota could get a $2 million CD with a very high interest rate for a two- year period. The sale of the old facility (primarily the land) produced some additional funding. Mr. Traver, board members, and some volunteers were involved in raising funds.

Once the new facility was available, the YMCA membership (downtown) took a very positive turn for new members. The YMCA staff under Mr. Traver did a very fine job. The Board at that time consisted of a number of prominent St. Paul businessmen and they were very helpful. 55 JF: As you were pointing [out] earlier, too, that they then began to move out where people were moving, into the suburbs, so that they could be relevant.

NL: Yes. They have a Y in Apple Valley, and they have a Y at a couple other places south of here. They’ve gotten great help from the local communities for funding, just amazing. They have the Y at New Richmond. Now they’re starting another Y north of St. Paul at Lino Lakes. They go out and they get the community involved and start planning with them, and pretty soon, the community is picking up the ball with guidance from this Y. So the St. Paul Metro Y is a big affair now. Plus, they have the camps up north, which are very dynamic and just a wonderful thing. They have their annual meeting tonight and will be celebrating 150 years of service for the greater St. Paul YMCA.

JF: Oh, really? Are you still involved? II NL: I started something when I was there. They used to forget former directors. I said, “Why do we do that?” I thought it was about time we changed that. They said, “Let’s send the minutes of the board meetings to these formerGeneration directors to keep their interest.” And they still do that, and I’ve been off now for it must be closePart to fifteen years. So I get those minutes. If you have an interest, it’s worthwhile getting them. Society JF: And it keeps you in touch.

NL: Right. You get to see the inside of the Y. Confidential information is not included in there, but if you want to, you canGreatest call them upProject: and say, “I’d like to know what you did,” and they don’t hesitate to tell . . .

JF: Let me ask you, too, Mr. Lorentzsen . . . Here you are at this time, you’re taking leadership in the Y, you’re on the board at TCF,Historical which is a big bank in the Twin Cities. BN at that time is still a very big company, a very big presence in Minnesota—BN and 3M were two of the biggest companiesHistory in St . Paul. There’s always been talk about how cohesive the Twin Cities business community really was, whether there were Minneapolis companies and St. Paul companies that never really got together because they were so muchOral a part of their own community that they never really participated on a city-wide,Minnesota's a metropolitan-wide, basis. Did you see much of that or not?

NL: Well, in one way, Minnesotayes. I’m from St. Paul, so probably my views there might be tailored. [Chuckles] We tried to get together with the Y over there and, to a certain extent, there was some cooperation, but it was never dynamic.

JF: On an even wider business basis, what was your relationship as the CEO of Burlington Northern with companies like General Mills and others that happened to be based in Minneapolis?

56 NL: We always had a board member from General Mills. Charles Bell was on our board. And we had a fellow after him. I think we had pretty good relations with those companies overall.

When you mention companies here in St. Paul, Lew [Lewis Lehr, chairman of 3M] and I were very close. We did a lot of things together for the common interest of St. Paul. Unfortunately, [Governor Rudy] Perpich never heard us. The reason that 3M is in Austin, Texas, is, in part, Perpich. A typical example was the state’s personal income tax. At BN we brought a fellow in from Seattle and gave him a very substantial raise, what would be a substantial raise then, not so much now, but I think something like $10,000 or $12,000 a year. The first check he got here in Minnesota was less money than he had out there. That hurts. We started to make a study on whether BN should stay in St. Paul. When you put all the economics together, the answer was, “No.” I met with Perpich three times, and the last time was a breakfast with just the two of us at the Governor’s mansion.II If he heard, I don’t think he understood. I believe Lew Lehr had met with him, too, about their deal, and they finally made a decision to go to Austin. The plant at Austin is almost as big as what they have here. Yet they had all the property Generationand everything they needed to stay here. Part

Here’s another example about our relations with Perpich. There usedSociety to be the annual Governor’s Prayer Breakfast. They always invited the governor to come and the mayor. Bob Haugen was the chairman one year, and they invited Perpich to come. He was on the program to make some comments. He didn’t show up. So Bob came to the next meeting of the committee and said, “We needGreatest to changeProject: the name. It’s going to be the Minnesota Prayer Breakfast. No more the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast.” That’s how that came about.

The same thing with the Chamber of Commerce.Historical We always invited him to come to the Chamber. One night, he was supposed to be the principal speaker, and he didn’t show up. We always had George LatimerHistory (Mayor of St. Paul] there, and always invited him to just get up and say a few comments, but we always told him, “George, just two minutes. No more than that.” [Laughter] This night, he got up and he said, “Well, I’ve been to these things X number ofOral years, and always I’ve been told, ‘Two minutes.’ All of a sudden tonight,Minnesota's they come and tell me that I can talk for fifteen minutes.” He said, “Do you know why? Because that ‘Turkey’ didn’t show up.” [Laughter] But he gave an off-the-cuff speech that was very good.Minnesota I did like Latimer . He’s a very interesting guy, different. I remember when he was running for mayor against George Vavoulis. They were having a joint appearance before a group of people out on the east side of town. The guy who was supposed to go from the Chamber to listen to them couldn’t go, so I got a call about five o'clock saying, “You’ve got to go to that thing tonight,” so I went out there. All the time, up to that time, we’d been talking about Vavoulis in the Chamber as the one we were supporting for mayor. I went out there and I came back and they said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think we’re on the wrong candidate.” The Chamber had to kind of moderate what they were advocating. Then, of course, Latimer won. 57 JF: Talk a little bit, if you would, Mr. Lorentzsen, too, about the business climate in St. Paul, because St. Paul was always kind of . . . oh, I don’t want to say the poor sister, but that’s the way it got looked at. There weren’t as many companies as in Minneapolis. It was more dependent on BN, 3M, and West Publishing. There wasn’t the great number of corporate headquarters. How did you look at that as one of the business leaders based in St. Paul?

NL: One of the things we did in the Chamber was “Project Responsibility.” It was funded primarily by 3M. Why did we do that? Well, the overall attitude of the people in St. Paul was the big companies are just . . . they’re not honest. They’re dishonest. They cheat whenever they can, et cetera, et cetera. So we decided to do something about that. We started this Project Responsibility and we had five different committees. We went out and conducted sessions in the schools where teachers could get credit for the Continuing Education Program. We invited students from schools to come to our companies.II We would often have six to ten students at a time. A lot of them were saying, “I want to get in the accounting department and find out how they mess up with the books.” [Chuckles] We said, “You pick where you want to go. We don’t Generationhave anything to hide.” We had boys do that and girls do that. Then some of them wanted to goPart out and see how an engine worked, and we did that. Every company did something like that. I think we had five to six in our company all the time for a couple of years. HornerSociety Waldorf did the same thing. 3M did. We monitored what was happening, and the impact of that perception of business began to change.

The business community in St. PaulGreatest was veryProject: involved in the United Appeal, et cetera, and there was a lot of support. I don’t know how it would measure up against what Minneapolis did, but it was a considerable amount. The banks were very responsive and all the major companies. We had a lot of good people, business people, here. I don’t think any one of them conducted their business in anyHistorical way except ethical, as far as I know. Certainly 3M was a leader in that area. But also smaller companies were. History JF: Let’s discuss the evolution at Burlington Northern itself. The merger of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific happens in 1970. Talk a little bit—as you began to earlier—about consolidatingOral those two companies, if we can step back just a little bit. You’reMinnesota's talking about two companies that were associated, but they were different. They occupied the same building, but they didn’t . . . at least the rumor always was that there wasn’t a lot of communicationMinnesota with each other. And here you were among the people trying to meld together and make economic sense out of the merger of two big railroads. What was that like? Were there two different corporate cultures to put together?

NL: Well, not really. There were some people who had . . . I guess if you look back at the time Jim Hill got involved, he literally controlled the Northern Pacific. That was in the early 1900s. He had some of his family involved. George Slade was a vice president. He was married to one of Hill’s daughters. Slade had a son by the name of Norman, who was

58 a division superintendent working for the NP. There were other people under those same circumstances.

The question is: how can two companies, who are so competitive with each other, agree to merge? MacFarlane was the one who proposed the merger. A lot of the NP people felt that they should have had more value for the coal deposits or the oil and all that. But the trouble is the coal was just like the land grant; nobody was buying coal. So coal, what was it worth? Practically zilch. The fact that the NP got oil, found oil out in North Dakota, was helpful. But still, the basic business was the railroad itself, two railroads. The Northern Pacific had the longer route, the more arduous one. A lot of people said that the Great Northern chief engineer did a much more masterful job. He came along ten years later. It’s pretty easy going from the Chinese people handling shovels with a team of horses to some kind of machine to do the work. So yes, they had a better line to speak of, and not so long. Our company went south down to Pasco [Washington].II The Great Northern took a more direct line from Montana and West, saving a considerable mileage.

I heard all kinds of stories that the NP was looking atGeneration locating a shorter line from Spokane to Seattle. From Spokane, instead of going down southPart to Pasco, they’d go up to Cheney, Washington and then build a line straight west. One of the engineers who was on that project told me that he was told to stop. He said, “Why?” “Well,Society because there’s a Hill problem.” “A hill problem? Where are the hills?” [Laughter] Jim Hill, it was, had his finger in the thing. I don’t know that that would have been good or bad, but it indicates that there was some influence at that time. GreatestProject: George Slade, Jim Hill’s son-in-law, was vice president of operations for several years. As he left and then other people came along, I think there got to be less and less of that relationship there and we became more competitive. When we merged, I would say, Bob Downing couldn’t have been better. He was a GreatHistorical Northern person. Most of the top people were excellent. There was a small number that thought they were working for a better railroad, so to speak, butHistory they were not the people that set the policies.

JF: How do you think the rank and file felt, at that time? Did you end up dealing with job duplication like someOral companies do when they merge? Minnesota's NL: Yes we had a lot of that. The merger was made possible by guaranteeing no employee would be putMinnesota to a disadvantage and wouldn’t be put out of work and he wouldn’t have his pay decreased. So whatever they were earning, it was guaranteed. We had a lot of what you call excess employees, but attrition gradually reduced that number. Generally, engineers and conductors were among the employee group that had wages approaching $45,000 or over per year. But wage increases and normal retirements began to minimize these instances.

When they named officers, I would say that it was done reasonably well and in a fair manner. I was the surviving person as vice president of operations and the Great 59 Northern’s top lawyer was the survivor there, but not for long. He eventually retired. There was Louis Menk and we had Bill Quinn, too, at that time. So we had Menk, John Budd, and Bill Quinn, a lot of top people. Quinn went back to the Milwaukee, and John Budd retired, and Menk became the CEO and Bob Downing was the second man behind him. Then, by that time, I was president of the Transportation Division. When Bob retired, I became president of the company. With a merger as large as BN’s, even when much effort was made to be fair, there are some disappointments.

The rank and file were pretty well even up. There were a couple of deals where we had a misfit on certain jobs. Menk used to always tell me, “What are you doing about that?” I said, “Well, the guy reports to you. What are you doing about it?” Eventually, we were able to work that out. I think on the whole it worked fairly well.

I came back to St. Paul on January 1, 1968. The first thing that happened IIto me is I went to Harvard University for three months. In the interim, there was an opportunity to review initial plans for operations on Day 1. They were going to start all these trains scheduled on day one (Monday) at one time. I was mindful of theGeneration Penn Central problems and the results encountered. The human mind can only absorb a certainPart amount of change, and to give them all these new schedules and tell them, “This is what we’re going to do.” We decided we’ll start one set of trains from each of these major terminals,Society going like from Seattle to Chicago and Seattle to St. Paul. Not that we didn’t have problems, but we had a minimum of problems compared to what the Penn Central had. That worked out fairly well, I think, over all. GreatestProject: JF: Talk about the development, if you would, of how you looked at the development of other businesses within BN. You’ve got the basic transportation business, which you’re keeping healthy, but you’re also the owner of a big store of natural resources that are just sitting there waiting to be developed. You’ve gotHistorical timber. You’ve got coal. You’ve got oil. You’ve got natural gas. Talk about how, at your level, way up in the company, you began to look at the development ofHistory those parts of the company, as well.

NL: Prior to 1973, the Resource business was headed by a vice-president. On July 1, 1973, a decision wasOral made to establish two “divisions” in the company. All of the so- calledMinnesota's “outside” activities (lumber, minerals, oil and gas, et cetera) became part of the Resource Division with Robert Binger as President of that Division. In like manner, all of the rail operations, trucking,Minnesota airfreight, became part of the Transportation Division with myself as President. Well, our outside [non-railroad] income was, I would say, very, very good. It was not a substantial portion, but it was a very significant portion, and that came from lumber, from oil, from the pipeline we had. The Great Northern had a pipeline, too. NP had a portion of the Butte pipeline. Then the oil out in North Dakota was very positive. They also had other resources, the timber. When they bought Plum Creek, there were some concerns about Plum Creek getting timber at cut rates, that did not happen. We bought Plum Creek for $6 million. That was in 1965, and the first year we had it, the first full year we had it, we netted over $6 million. On the New York Stock Exchange 60 today, there are really five companies that trace back to the Northern Pacific: Burlington Resources; El Paso—we didn’t own all of El Paso, but we had an interest in it; Plum Creek Lumber is a totally independent operation and a very good one; Burlington Northern itself; and then Burlington Air Freight, a subsidiary of Brinks, Inc. We were competing with Federal Express and, in fact, in some areas, ahead of them. It was a very successful operation.

[Richard] Bressler, my successor, was an oilman. There was some concern among the directors about the airfreight business. We were using regular carriers to handle our airfreight business. We didn’t own planes, but we chartered some 747s several times, like from Japan to Seattle and so on. Bressler was an energy man and he put Bnafi up for sale. “If you’re in the business and you’re making money, buy your own airplanes or you can lease them or whatever.” I think not keeping the company was a mistake. If you look at Federal Express today, it is a mammoth operation. II

JF: So that was when the decision was made to get out of the airfreight business? Generation NL: Yes. Part

JF: How was that done? Society

NL: It was sold to Brinks. Brinks bought it and they paid cash for it. Interest rates were at the peak, and they borrowed that money. You know, a couple hundred million dollars and paying eighteen percent was a toughGreatest deal. TheProject: company is still there with them. They kept on using the name. We called them BNAFI, Burlington Northern Air Freight, Inc. They are now called BAX. They still use the green colors. You’ll see their trucks every once in a while. When they got them, they wanted to move the headquarters for the chairman, Larry Rodberg, from Los Angeles toHistorical New York. He didn’t want to do that. I was not involved with any of the dialogue that went on, but eventually Rodberg left them. There was another person thatHistory we had hired, George Ryan, and he stayed with them for a while, but then he eventually left them, too. So they lost their two top people. I think they struggled when that happened. Rodberg was a tremendous person on marketing and operations, Ryan wasOral tremendous on rates; just a wonderful team of people. Minnesota's The longest phone conversation I’ve ever had in my life was with Rodberg. I was in Pittsburgh one night andMinnesota he was in California. We looked at a lot of people who were in the airfreight business, and somehow or another, Rodberg’s name came up as one with top potential. I was in Pittsburgh for a Traffic Department meeting. I called him and we talked, I think, for three hours. I asked him all about his philosophies and his interests, as well as experience. He was the vice-president for Airborne at that time. After that conversation, I agreed to arrange several additional meetings with him.

Finally, Rodberg came back and we met over in Minneapolis. That led to the decision to make an offer to him. In the meantime, Ryan was in Seattle working for Airborne. I had 61 one of the former Great Northern officers meet with him to see what kind of a guy he was and whether or not to go any further. I asked Rodberg what he thought about him, and he was impressed with him. We agreed on compensation, and other personal items.

JF: So you attribute, in part, a good selection of people to the rapid growth of BN Air Freight?

NL: Initially, with a surplus of many railroad officers, it was thought we might use them. But after further thought, our conclusion was to hire Rodberg and Ryan. I didn’t want to be a part of an outfit that failed. Both Menk and Downing agreed with our plans. There’s no question that it was right thing to do.

JF: It was a little remarkable, at the time, that BN Air Freight became so successful, because a number of other similar companies had tried this ploy and failed.II

NL: They were struggling. Generation JF: Yes, they were struggling. Part

NL: After we first started, we were in the red for five quarters, but fromSociety then on our growth was very positive. One instance that became most helpful was a meeting with the traffic manager at Ford Motor. So I called him one day and I said, “I wonder if we could come down and see you?” And I brought Rodberg with me. Ford had just entered into a new deal on handling repair parts.Greatest Well, they Project:used to have a parts depots in different locations throughout the country. They came up with the concept using airfreight and the sole source will be Detroit. So that was a massive change. Ford gave us a piece of the business out west, but just a piece, and to see how we would do. We did that and did very well with it. Later on we were given additionalHistorical areas to serve, becoming their prime carrier. We continued expanding including overseas, Europe and Pacific countries. History JF: Talk a little, if you would, too, about the development of the trucking company, Burlington Northern Trucking [BNT], which came along. Oral NL: TheMinnesota's trucking company is a different story. The NP had one and the Great Northern had one, and the Great Northern was a little different setup than the NP. That led to a big problem on the part of Minnesotathe Great Northern em ployees at the time of the merger. They took the case to court saying that they didn’t get the right treatment, so there was a lawsuit involved. There were too many restrictions, far too many restrictions, to permit a trucking operation that could be successful. But the rules were not equitable. On the long distance, you had to stop at certain key points. There were restrictions that were very damaging, so it was very difficult to run a competitive truck operation. At that time, the Interstate Commerce Commission seemed to be more of a hindrance than they were a help. The trucking company never really was a very good operation, and finally we got rid of it.

62 JF: Did you sell it to another trucking company?

NL: We merged first. We merged the Great Northern portion into the BNT, as we called it. Then it was, ultimately, disposed of. It was primarily set up for local freight deliveries and not long distance movements.

JF: So it wasn’t long-haul trucking?

NL: No, you had too many of those restrictions to make it successful. It never worked out very well.

JF: So those are two businesses that you developed. How did BN handle the development of its coal and oil resources? II NL: That was the Resource Department. During steam engine operation, NP had a coal mine in Montana. We also owned some in other areas with coal. In the states, we got every other section for twenty miles on either side of Generationthe centerline of the main line with the land grant. In the territory, it was for forty miles. And in somePart cases, if there was some reason we couldn’t get those, we were permitted to take alternate sections someplace else, like Mount Saint Helens. After it blew up, we were Societyable to get sections some other place.

The coal resources are substantial. The majority of them, though, are low grade, like lignite. Probably the highest BTUGreatest [British ThermalProject: Unit] on some of that is around 7,500 to 9,000. The coal that’s being mined down in Wyoming probably runs in the area of 12,000 to 13,000 BTUs. It is cleaner burning than some of the eastern coal. It has less soda ash, et cetera, and has less of the contaminants that raise problems with grass and vegetable growth and that kind of thing. Historical

We did a couple of major thingsHistory to deal with the coal transportation. One of them was the business with the slurry pipeline and how they were going to operate it. Number two was when we went and talked to the utility companies, as I mentioned earlier. They used to question our abilityOral to handle the large volumes of coal they anticipated. The company developedMinnesota's plans for increasing the capacity to move coal overall, I think, and the records shows this has been done fairly well. Last year they handled something over 250 million tons. There is about 900Minnesota trains, empty or loaded, going someplace every day handling coal. There’s one mine that can load up to 40 trains in 24 hours.

JF: Is this the Powder River Basin?

NL: Yes. We’ve had to build a new line to serve that area, about one hundred twenty- some miles of track. I’d say it was the largest rail construction project since way back in the early 1900s. Coal movements vary in length, most being destined for easterly or southerly destinations. One recent year BNSF bought three hundred locomotives and 63 leased . . . six hundred new locomotives in one year. We bought five hundred locomotives from GE [General Electric] over a period of several years when I was there, and GE thought that was a big event.

JF: It’s interesting to hear you say that, because I think when most people find out that General Electric makes locomotives, they’re stunned, because they never think of it. It’s not a high profile business for them, and yet, here is this huge industrial business.

NL: General Motors was, for many years, the major builder of diesel locomotives, but GE is the one that now builds a very good locomotive and is very successful at it.

JF: With regard to the coal land and things like that, you must have been helped by . . . As I recall—you can tell me if I’m right—particularly in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, there was a huge resurgence, probably because of environmental laws,II of interest in low sulphur coal. And nobody wanted the West Virginia product anymore, and everybody wanted the western coal. So that must have been a huge event for the railroad, both in terms of the fact that you owned so much of itGeneration and that you hauled so much of it. Part NL: Well, that’s right. I spoke a little earlier to the question that the utilities and the coal companies had about whether or not you could handle all that traffic.Society That’s why we called on utilities and coal producers to tell them about our plans to meet their needs. We were going someplace sometimes two and three different outfits in a week. We met with firms such as Peter Kiewit Sons, they’re one of the very positive outfits that started there. Also Peabody and all major coal Greatestcompanies. ForProject: a long time there was a proposed slurry coal line which claimed they could move coal better and at a lower rate than we could. At BN we had to come up with a lot of ideas to counter that. One of them is that, “Water is the lifeblood of the West.” That was very effective. Historical JF: And it was true! History [Laughter]

NL: That worked veryOral effectively. The other thing was the pipeline companies sought to cross underMinnesota's our tracks with their slurry lines and that ended up in a lawsuit. After I retired, there was a settlement made. At the time when I was there, our attorneys took the position that they don’tMinnesota have a case, and that may be true, but it’s like every lawsuit you get into . . . and I think they made the wise decision to settle it without getting into extended litigation.

JF: Slurry never really went much of anywhere, did it, I mean in the long run?

NL: No, not really. But to get the slurry, it means you pulverize the coal, and then you use water. They used to contend that they would take that slurry water and then pump it back again, which involved a second pipeline. Well, that’s a wonderful idea, but you 64 know, the problem in doing that is massive. The other thing was, “Oh, you could use the water for irrigation.” Well, to get the filtration system to work would be just prohibitive in cost. Those are some of the reasons we gave up the idea of us having a slurry pipeline.

JF: Looking over BN’s history, it appears that somewhere along the line there the decision was made that there’d be greater value for shareholders and others, maybe even to the company, if the natural resource businesses were split off, spun off as separate corporations, rather than continuing as part of the parent company.

NL: Norton Simon was one of our directors for the NP for over twenty years. That was one of the things he was going after all the time. I’m not sure he was right. At that stage of the game . . . There’s always a factor about timing. You know, it’s like, what’s the housing market going to be? Or what’s the coal market going to be? Different prices. If everybody could have foreseen what’s happened to houses the last coupleII years, they would never have sold their house two years ago. It’s like the early days when the NP received the land grant. They couldn’t sell the land. It wasn’t worth anything. Tentatively worth a lot of money, but not then. That was true withGeneration the coal, too. So that is always a question of timing. I’ve often pondered whether it was right to handlePart it the way they did.

There was another factor involved in that the bondholders had whatSociety they called Gold Bonds. That required that the company couldn’t do anything for the railroad without getting authority to spend money for improvements. Everything had to go through the bondholder authorities. Well, Bressler came along with the idea that we could change that. We’d been doing that for 100Greatest years. TheProject: agreement said, “It’s forever.” Really, who could imagine that it should be there forever? So they went into court, ultimately, and got a deal where the company could redeem those bonds at a premium that was satisfactory to the investors, and they did that. That freed the company from those restrictions, which was a good thing. Historical

The other side of that is PlumHistory Creek was a very viable outfit and making good money. Do you want to let it go? Maybe. The timberland is very viable. Do you want to let that go? Again, I think the answer is, “Maybe.” But all of that produced a substantial income. When the railroad Oralwas the way it was in those days, there was some question the NP shouldMinnesota's take what it could get and run and get that cash. “What’s going to happen next?” I think the Santa Fe still keeps a lot of the assets they had. They could have done that at the NP once they got rid ofMinnesota the bondholders’ objec tions. Maybe that would have been a better decision. You’d split the thing into two different parts. A lot of people would argue, “Well, you’ve got to concentrate on one or the other.” Maybe. But look at General Electric. If you’re thinking about investing in a mutual fund, General Electric is it. Or look at Berkshire Hathaway, which is another diversified company. You can argue that General Electric doesn’t have all of the things that a mutual fund has, but in fact, you’d have to go a long way to prove that. General Electric is about as massive a corporation as you can imagine. Berkshire Hathaway, of course, owns many different entities, too. Their mix is unbelievable. 65 JF: The dynamics of running a corporate board must be fascinating. Tell me what it was like for you as a CEO. When you talk about someone like Norton Simon, who’s on your board, who clearly has his own agenda. It seems to me that it would be like having Carl Icahn on your board, somebody who is surely dedicated to the good of the company and interested in serving on the board, but who’s also, perhaps, coming at it from a very different point of view than the people who actually run the company on a day-to-day basis.

NL: There were several people who had different ideas. For example, one thing was the air freight company and the fact that one director kept saying, “Oh, you’re going to have to buy airplanes someday.” That sets a tone with the other directors. There’s a mix of people and a mix of views, and that’s a wonderful thing.

I would say one of the fellows that I had a lot of respect for was Mr. PhilipII Nason. He was chair of our finance committee. He never saw anything with a prejudice. He would talk it out. If there was some project coming up that involved a lot of money, he wanted to know what the answers were. If somebody would comeGeneration in with some comment that might indicate either a great exuberance for doing it or vice versParta, he would always ferret out what really were the basics for doing it. There were others like Bill Lang. Anything that had to do with the railroad, he loved. He loved nothing more thanSociety getting on a train. He’d go out in a business car and ride over the railroad and spend days out there. You know, that’s fine in one way, but if you’re going to have to send somebody with him every time, you’re wondering about the resources that takes. He did a lot of that. GreatestProject: Norton Simon had his own agenda. He was an interesting guy. He and I got along great. You know, he has his own art museum out in California. He built a moat around it so that you couldn’t come in at night and rob it. [Laughter] They pull up the bridge when they close the doors. As much as he used to hassle withHistorical MacFarlane about policies and so on, he hired MacFarlane’s son, who was a Presbyterian minister, to be the executive of the museum. Sort of an interestingHistory thing. Norton married Jennifer Jones in the middle of the English Channel at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. She insisted when they got ashore they go to some church and get married again. She wasn’t sure that being married in the middle of the Channel wouldOral do it. He had a son, and the son, when he was about maybe sixteen or seventeen,Minnesota's had so much money that they had an investment manager for him. The boy eventually took his life. Every year at Christmas time, Norton Simon would give you a bunch of pictures of theMinnesota paintings that were in the museum. Beautiful. It wasn’t just one. He’d have a book made, a big book, full of pictures. He could also be very contentious. His last board meeting he did not attend, but he sent his personal representative and he objected to everything we were doing. [Chuckles]

JF: This was the last board meeting before he left the board, do you mean?

NL: He was still on the board, but he didn’t attend. He sent a representative to speak for him. 66 JF: Did he then become the leading champion of breaking off these other companies and selling them off separately?

NL: Yes, he was, but it never happened while he was there. The business of the bondholders hadn’t been settled yet. I look back on that and I think I should have gone after that, too, because we couldn’t do anything without getting their authority. If we wanted to build a new terminal someplace, we had to get authority from the bondholders to do that. The expenditure had to be something that improved the property, you know, a logical idea back in the days when the bonds were issued. But to go out and buy something that didn’t improve the property, you probably would have had a lot of problems with them.

JF: And they would have had difficulty, you’re saying, with selling off railroad resources like that? II

NL: That’s right. Generation JF: When was the decision reached or how did the discussions Partgo that led up to actually doing that? Society NL: That was after Bressler came. There’d been lots of discussion before, and Bressler got the bondholders’ situation changed. Then, one by one, they let Plum Creek go, and they let Burlington Northern Air Freight go, and then they let the Resources go. Just one by one. He did a couple of things.Greatest He saddledProject: the Transportation Company with a big debt that they had to pay off. The guy who is now chairman [Gerald “Jerry” Grinstein] of Delta was the president at the time. I had a good relationship with him. They paid off like $500 million a year for a several years. That was a lot of money then. That really impeded what they could invest in the railroad.Historical

JF: What were they spendingHistory money on? In other words, here they are selling off these companies, and presumably taking in a lot of money, and yet he’s still also taking on debt at the same time. Oral NL: Well,Minnesota's the Transportation Company ultimately paid off the debt. They had established a formula on how you do that, and, of course, that’s subject to a lot of debate. I forget what the total amount ofMinnesota debt was; it was very substantial. The railroad was a good cash generator.

JF: I’m trying to balance in my mind what the discussions must have been in your board, because I would think that, admittedly, there are fashions that come and go. You know, sometimes the idea is that you should be diversified, and at other times that you should be focused. You’ve been through so many of those fashions, where the pendulum swings back and forth. But, the board as a whole eventually came to the view that spinning off,

67 selling off the resource companies was good business, even though their income and resources were no longer available to the railroad to use.

NL: But the other thing is I was not involved with that at that time. I can say I know that there were among some of the board members with strong feelings about what was being done. You have to recognize that it’s difficult for a board member to decide, “I’m going to stand up and be against something.” I know when we did what we did at TCF, you’re taking on a lot of risk. [Chuckles] So is there a point of compensation for that risk? Maybe not. If it’s not successful, you’ve got lots of problems. On the other side of that, if you didn’t take that risk, there’s a lot of problems. It’s often hard for a board member to decide. You look at what’s happened with some of the big companies now, like Citicorp and a number of others where there’s a big internal struggle. This morning, three more directors resigned from J. P. Morgan. II John Mack came in. One of the directors who resigned was one of those who said (he was chair of the committee looking for a replacement), “We will never consider Mack.” And of course Mack got the job, and now he thinks he’s goingGeneration to resign. Part JF: It’s probably not a bad idea. Society NL: Yes. We had a lot of good directors. Donald Dayton was a wonderful guy and very concerned about doing what’s right. And Phil Nason and we had some New York bankers, a fellow from Bethlehem Steel, just a lot of good people. I’m not saying that Norton wasn’t a good person. I thinkGreatest he was, Project:but he had a definite agenda, which he was never able to accomplish during the time he was there. It happened afterwards.

JF: Did he retain his stock, even though he didn’t get what he wanted? Historical NL: I don’t know about that. I think probably he did for a while. I think Norton was a pretty smart investor. He got Historyinvolved in stock with Diamond Match. That was the beginning of how he got into NP. Eventually he had a fairly significant amount of stock in Northern Pacific. You know, Henry Villard got into the NP by raising $20 million dollars in a Blind PoolOral from people over in Germany and Europe. Then he got himself electedMinnesota's president. He was there for about three years. After the big celebration in September of 1883 (completion of the NP)—probably the biggest celebration ever held in St. Paul, with the greatestMinnesota number of senators and top officials, including ex-presidents ever to be in St. Paul—he got out to Seattle and the boys in New York told him to come back, and he was out.

JF: How long after you retired did the company then move out of St. Paul?

NL: We made the studies about staying in St. Paul or relocating to some other city. I was involved in making the studies. We got the statistics and they indicated that there was a substantial savings in going to Seattle. So that was in the mill, but we had not set a date. 68 When Bressler came, that was one of the first things he followed up on, and they went out to Seattle. We had a board meeting in Seattle just after he came here, while I was still working. Actually, I think he had taken the job about a week before that. We had it out at Seattle and, of course, we had directors from out there. Wilson was with Weyerhaeuser, and we had a couple others out there who were very favorable to coming out west. It meant, though, if you were a board director in New York or anyplace east, a lot of traveling. You know, it was a daylong affair in those days. We had company planes, but the planes weren’t big enough to go and pick up half a dozen people and then get them out to Seattle. That was a problem with moving out there, but nobody questioned moving out there at the time, and the savings were enough to make it worthwhile.

And of course the next step was when they went down to Fort Worth. One of our subsidiaries, the Fort Worth & Denver, had headquarters in Fort Worth, so it was not uncommon for us to be down there. We were as much at home in Fort WorthII as we were anywhere else.

JF: So what was the difference between Seattle and FortGeneration Worth? Part NL: They merged with the Frisco [St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company]. That was done while I was still here. They were sort of down south, not in theSociety far south, but in that area. In the meantime, too, the company set up certain operations facilities in Kansas and they were there for a while. Then, eventually, the Executive Department moved from Seattle to Fort Worth. There was kind of a two-step deal involved with that move GreatestProject: JF: And then moved to Fort Worth?

NL: Yes. Historical JF: What were some of the, I don’t know, emotional or other feelings about leaving St. Paul? This has been the historicHistory headquarters of both the Hill railroads, and you had a lot of employees here. You were a huge corporate presence in downtown St. Paul. You must have undergone some lobbying from local officials who really didn’t want to see a corporate headquartersOral go. Minnesota's NL: You know, when we merged, there was a lot of work done on the part of the Chamber of CommerceMinnesota in both Chicago and St. Paul. There were a lot of top people from companies here that talked to a lot of our people. Of course, we had a good base of directors here, and they were supportive for staying. We had a couple of directors from Chicago at the time, but the majority were either West Coast or St. Paul. There was one from down in Nebraska, but the flavor was Minnesota. That changed after Bill Lang retired. Donald Dayton was still on the board. A couple of the other fellows that were on here were retired. Phil Nason left the board not too long after I retired. So that made a difference. There’s no question that directors, I don’t care who they are, like to spend half the day or a whole day flying. If you have a meeting and you can’t get out of there by 69 early afternoon, going back to New York or wherever, it gets to be a very long day. Most of the time, they have to come up the night before, so every meeting is about a two-day deal. I think that’s a factor. When you look at corporate boards today, I don’t want to say that they gather them from a cluster, but there’s quite a bit of that.

JF: Did you face any intense lobbying from the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce and others when the actual time to move to Seattle came along?

NL: I think that that there was some. I think the most prolific lobbying came from people involved in the Chamber. I think that when the company finally left it was seen as sort of inevitable. You’re competing with bigger cities and other factors like income taxes, the whole business. It becomes easier to make a decision than to defend it.

JF: But it must have been a big blow for the St. Paul Chamber and all theII people with whom you were involved when, in fact, BN pulled up stakes and left for Seattle.

NL: No question. You know, income taxes for the stateGeneration itself is a substantial piece of money. Part

JF: Yes. Society

NL They talk about that with these sports teams. I don’t know how many of those fellows are actual residents of Minnesota, but, you know, if they are, the salaries they’re getting, it’s a substantial item. We’ll probablyGreatest find outProject: now with Ziggy’s [Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings] deal. He wants $250 million from the county and $250 million from the state to build a new stadium.

JF: We’re going to find out, aren’t we, though?Historical

Let’s talk a little bit . . . You Historymentioned, when you were talking earlier, about traveling around to utility companies and other things, and that brought to my mind that you were famous both before you became the CEO and afterwards for traveling, for feeling that you needed to be out,Oral meeting people, seeing people. You obviously did not believe in stayingMinnesota's in the corporate headqua rters and not being seen very much. You seemed to feel that being out there and being seen and being in touch was tremendously important. Is that right, or am I misreadingMinnesota that?

NL: No, I think that’s right, particularly with business people. When you make changes you have to realize that sometimes your customers may feel as though, well, you know, “I’m not important, my business isn’t important to them.” It helps to know those people. I think that same thing applies to employees. I’d go out there. For example, if we had some project going, I’d go out and I’d maybe shake hands with a dozen guys. I don’t know that they ever knew who I was, other than Norman Lorentzsen. I felt at home doing that. I had a lot of contacts with business people. I think that if they feel comfortable with you, and 70 they’ve got a problem, they’ll call you up and talk about it. I think the personal contact with the people you serve is very important.

Having said that, I have to recognize that some of the corporations are getting so big that it becomes very difficult to have that personal contact. But you can do something about that in the way of letters you publish, employee letters, letters to businesses. I think that Matthew Rose, who is currently the chairman and CEO [of Burling Northern Santa Fe] does a tremendous job in expressing the company’s agenda. He’s been very good in talking about the business and how it should respond to people. He lays out a wonderful dialogue that opens up the ideas to the employees. It’s very difficult now for him to go out with almost 30,000 miles of railroad and 40,000 employees. His contacts have got to be very, very limited, but you can use these other means in a lot of ways. There are a lot of ways to do it. II When I went to Missoula in 1954, no division on the west end had ever won a division safety award. Everybody felt, “Well, they’re working in mountain areas; it’s more difficult, stressful,” and all that. Mr. Burgess, who wasGeneration vice president, said to me one day, “You know, it’s very difficult to get out there and do that,” andPart I said, “I don’t agree with that. I think you can do that.” He said, “Do you think so?” I said, “Yes.” We started a little thing; it was a very simple thing. I had a fellow, who was in ourSociety office at Missoula, and he was pretty clever on making up little sayings, and we’d post them every Friday with the injury ratio. We’d post them on the roundhouses and the shops, every place. It was just a little piece of paper, most of the time with pencil. You know, that began to take effect. I would hear from a foremanGreatest someplace.Project: They’d say, “Yes, everybody is going and looking and seeing what they’re posting today.” It was about twelve noon they did that.

We didn’t win an award that first year, but we Historicalwon it the second year, and we won it again the next year. So that was the first time they ever won that thing. Costs money? Peanuts. But it brought something,History a human factor, into these places. I know that the doctor in the hospital in Missoula—we had our own hospitals then—called me up one day and he said, “I had this fellow, he dropped something on his foot. He came over here and I told him he probablyOral should stay off his foot for three days.” Well, that makes it a reportableMinnesota's injury. The fellow said, “I’m not going to do that. I can work.” The doctor said, “What are you doing to these guys?” I said, “I don’t know anything about this guy.” I didn’t do anything withMinnesota him, but I found out from the foreman that the program had really changed attitudes. People could keep track of what’s going on with that little piece of paper.

JF: They begin to have a sort of esprit de corps.

NL: Yes, it did. Like I say, communication is a great thing. It can be very damaging or it can be very effective. It’s a matter of how you do it and timing, all of that.

71 JF: That gives some insight into something else that I’d like to ask you to talk about. Here you are, somebody who, literally, rose through the ranks. You knew virtually every level at some point, as you ascended through the Northern Pacific and, eventually, through Burlington Northern. Talk a little, if you would . . . If you had to define your philosophy of management, the elements that you feel are important that made you a good manager, that you feel are important to managing a large company, what would those be?

NL: Well, I go back to number one: you have to have integrity. You can’t tell something to one group of people and tell something else to somebody else. Secondly, when you deal with somebody, deal with him as a human being, fair and without prejudice. One of the things you would get to do on the job that I had was, when from time to time people do things they shouldn’t do and they get into some kind of accident. I held a lot of investigations. It’s kind of like you’re the judge and the jury and everything.II You conduct the investigation, but conducting it fairly and not trying embarrass anyone. If, in fact, they’ve done wrong, then having them get to the point they recognize it. I don’t want to say I was an expert at it, but I was pretty good at holdingGeneration investigations. Part I recall a couple of times when a fellow did something wrong, and we held an investigation. One engineer had an accident down in Pullman, Washington.Society He ran into another train and that’s automatic discharge. While I was holding this investigation, it got to be where, forget about anybody else, and it was just he and I. He said that, yes, he did wrong. So he was discharged. But I went to my boss and told him I wanted to reinstate him after about three weeks. Well,Greatest then it wentProject: to Mr. Burgess, and Mr. Burgess thought I was being way too lenient for what he had done. I persisted and, finally, Mr. Burgess said, “Well, if you feel so strongly about that, I guess we ought to do it.” And we did. That sort of thing gets a positive reaction. Yes, you did something wrong, but we’re not going to hold it against you forever. Historical

We had a guy who had visionHistory in one eye, and they wouldn’t let him work on passenger trains. I talked to the doctor about that and he said, “Well, you know, he’s perfectly all right. There’s no reason he can’t.” I got that done. Then I got involved with a local chairman who representedOral the engineers at Pasco. When I got there, he was very obnoxious.Minnesota's There were a couple things he got involved with. He got involved and he did something wrong and we had to discipline him, and then I met with him afterwards. He turned around completely.Minnesota Instead of being an ti-, he was very supportive. I think that whole thing says that if somebody did something wrong, don’t hit them over the head twice. If you’re fair, the word spreads.

A while ago I was up at a meeting of the to the Northern Pacific Historical Association. Not a lot of the employees are members of that thing. The interesting thing was there were maybe about twenty of the former employees there, and they just feel very comfortable coming up and talking to me and visiting. The other thing is if you don’t

72 know something, don’t try to bluff yourself into saying something you shouldn’t. If you don’t know something, you better say, “I don’t know.” I think that’s important.

I haven’t talked about that, but one of the studies we made was about dieselization and electrification. I haven’t talked about that yet?

JF: No.

NL: It was about in the late 1970s, and we had a consulting outfit—supposedly the best known in the world—that we engaged. Three of the people were MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] grads, and we hired them to determine what was going to happen to the price of fuel. They came back after about a year-long study, and they had charts with future projections. They concluded that diesel fuel was going to, within about two years, go up in the range approaching three dollars a gallon and that itII would continue escalating, they thought, to four dollars. Between three and a half and four dollars at that time, it was a break whether we stay with diesel or go to electric. So we got the study, and I had a group in the company that was Generationworking with them. Part When they got that report, they were of the view that maybe we ought to start the preliminary steps to electrification. I said, “I don’t think we want to Societystart yet. It’s not right. Let’s wait a bit.” So we waited about a year and a half. Then we had the same consulting group update that study to see where were they at. Then they predicted that the price of diesel fuel was going to go into the four and half to five dollar range, and, in fact, it was even more serious than it wasGreatest before. Obviously,Project: with that prediction, we should electrify. Well, our group in the company thought we ought to go to the board and get authority for that, and I thought, “Let’s hold off.” We’re talking about building power plants, cable system, et cetera, that you have to have for electrification. I waited nine or ten months. We’re talking about, by that time, Historicalan investment of a couple billion dollars with all that was involved. The subject of what we should do was never out of my thoughts. One morning I wokeHistory up and there was just no question, we’re not going to do it. I came down and got our group together and told them I decided not to do it. But here we are today and we’re not at four dollars per gallon yet! All I can think about now, looking back, is that if we hadOral gone to electrification it would be called “Norm’s folly.” [Chuckles]Minnesota's I know the consultants thought the decision was wrong, our own vice president who was in charge of that study thought the decision was wrong. Minnesota JF: And yet, you had a sort of seventh sense, if you could call it that.

NL: Yes. That was not infrequent for that to happen. There may be a point in time when electrification is called for, but it hasn’t happen yet.

JF: No, it hasn’t.

73 NL: Maybe sometime. I used to talk a lot to our people about doing things and I always appreciated their input. We probably used to have too many meetings, hashing over things. Sometimes you come up with what you’re going to do, and sometimes you don’t. There are other CEOs that don’t want to get that involved.

We had a process for budgeting for the Northern Pacific, which maybe in a different form continued to carry over in the Burlington Northern. It was something different than what the Great Northern did or the Burlington. Their decisions were practically all made at headquarters. On the other hand, what we did was to get these people in and sit down, and they’d hassle and argue for different projects that they thought were important, and that gives you a very good feel for what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. Not everybody got what they wanted, but I think they all saw that the other project over there was a lot more important, much more valuable. II JF: They came to understand the reasoning behind it?

NL: Yes, and they heard it. You know, they heard it fromGeneration somebody else, and they realized that the logical decision is to do whatever we would endPart up with. I know there are other companies who say, “You prepare a budget and send it in, and we’ll decide what we’re going to do with it.” In one sense, we had only so much Societymoney that was available, and we’d try and aim for a target that was within the bounds. It was not something that was decided solely at headquarters. Ultimately, yes, but there was a lot of input to it. GreatestProject: JF: Talk a little, if you would, about . . . One of the great debates always in American business history is the relationship, the changing relationship, between business and government. You referred to it a little bit when you referred to the ICC and when you referred to other regulatory agencies. How did Historicalyou see, over the period of time you were involved, the relationship between business and government play out? Did government become bigger and more intrusive?History Did it become smaller and less intrusive? How did it play out in your mind?

NL: The railroads Oralprimarily were under the Interstate Commerce Commission; they were the regulatoryMinnesota's body. They were years behind in their thinking, philosophies, and so on, and terrifically damaging to the railroad industry. They had those restrictions, and you couldn’t do this and youMinnesota couldn’t do that. They were not flexible. They didn’t change with the times. Finally, they got some changes made down there, and, gradually, things began to improve. You know, the fact that the National Transportation Agency was that meant that all of the state agencies had an anti-railroad viewpoint. North Dakota, for example, had a Full Crew Bill which was, to me—and I came out of that service—it was sort of a joke. If you had forty-one cars, you had to have a full train crew, which was four people. If you had thirty-nine, you only needed three. Well, the question was, “Did you really need three in the first place?” With some local trains where you did a lot of switching and that kind of thing, it was different. It’s a matter of how much do you want 74 to keep somebody under your thumb? For how long? I think, over all, the government had a very negative attitude about making progress. It certainly had a big impact on what happened to the transportation business over all. Today it’s a much better era than it was. You don’t have all that business of an agency trying to impose things that are too restrictive and unnecessary.

JF: When did you see the change come?

NL: Well, when they got rid of the Interstate Commerce Commission. That was really a big change. It brought in different people. The people in the ICC days were not helpful. They had people out in the field and it looked like their incentive was, particularly as the trucking business became more aggressive, not to help the railroads, but more or less to hinder them. There are people who would argue against that, but I wouldn’t accept that. The whole set up on the tax situation, et cetera, with railroads versus trucksII has never been on any equitable basis. Now, trucking people would argue against that, naturally.

I go back to North Dakota; there they had a state commissionGeneration and, you know, you couldn’t eliminate a railroad agency in a town until you got theirPart approval. Sometimes, there was no work. [Chuckles] In the case of the state of Washington, they had a passenger train that ran from Spokane to Lewiston, Idaho, every day,Society back and forth, almost empty. We went to the commission about, I don’t know, two or three times. They’d bring people in when you had these hearings, which you had to do, to tell the commission how important the train was. I remember down at Moscow, Idaho, our attorney asking this person who wasGreatest testifying,Project: “When did you last ride this train?” The answer was, “Oh, I ride it quite frequently.” “But when was the last time you rode it?” Finally it came out, “About four years ago.” That’s the kind of thing that you were dealing with. They finally got the train eliminated. That kind of an environment was prevalent. Historical

JF: But that changed over time?History

NL: Yes. Of course, when they got to computers and all of that, you can do so many things, the way youOral handle billing and cars and that. You don't need a station agent in every Minnesota'splace. You have a phone into a central system, and they probably put out the bills of lading and everything for a whole train in a matter of minutes versus somebody sitting in a little station. It gotMinnesota down to where if the town still had a post office and a railroad station, you should not make a change. It got to be that those were the last two things that kept the town alive: a post office and a railroad station. You had railroad stations about every fifteen miles, and in some cases, every ten miles. They’ve got all this gear now that makes it unnecessary to have a person go out and check what the cars are on a freight train. They go by a gadget that takes the numbers down and prints out a report.

JF: Scans it, sort of.

75 NL: Yes.

JF: Much more efficient.

NL: The next issue is going to be to run the trains without an engineer—with nobody. Or with only one person. That’s a big issue right now. When we put the yard in at Pasco—it was 1955—it was set up to operate the engines without anybody in the engine. Under the rules, you couldn’t do that. But then, finally, the rules changed, so the option was available to engineers, “If you want to continue to be the engineer on this thing, okay, but you’re going to also have to be a switchman.” Well, the engineers said, “No, no. We won’t get out of the cab.” Today a switchman does it with a little push button gadget. There’s nobody in the engine.

JF: Times change whether they like them or not. II

NL: Yes. Generation JF: Talk a little, if you would, keying off on some of the thingsPart we’ve been discussing, about your own philosophy of management. There’s a great deal of discussion in the last ten years, more than that, I suppose, about the concept of business ethics.Society This has become a big issue. Business schools now teach courses in ethics. As somebody who has headed one of the nation’s biggest companies, tell me how you view that field and its emergence over the last twenty years as a corporate CEO. GreatestProject: NL: First of all, I can’t imagine any CEO doing what some of those people have done.

JF: You’re thinking of Enron, for instance? Historical NL: Yes. It’s beyond my concept that they would do that. My concern was always about whether what we were doingHistory was right. Is there anything wrong with it? Are we shading any figures or anything like that? Are we changing things to change the figures?

One thing that happenedOral at TCF after I got off the board, TCF gave $100,000 to ConcordiaMinnesota's [College] to sponsor seminars in ethics and integrity. The first person they had on the job didn’t do so much, but now they have someone on there who has done a fantastic job. I sent himMinnesota the name of a lady from Arizona State University, and she has been up there a couple of times. They have these seminars and bring in people and talk about issues. I think that, considering the area and considering the people they have, they’ve done a great job in calling attention to the fact that ethics is something you don’t throw out the door. I have made the statement many times that auditors or auditing companies tell the truth, but they don’t always tell the whole truth. Why? Because there’s something that they see that should raise a question, and they say, “Well, I guess I won’t do anything about that.” So they make an audit and say that a company is in whatever condition it is, that there’s no deficiencies and so on without disclosing that there is a 76 weakness. I think that’s a very, very critical thing. How people can do what they have done in some of these companies is just unbelievable. I think they ought to get the most severe punishment that they can possibly give them.

JF: Do you see that there has been a growing acceptance of ethics, however it’s interpreted, as being compatible with good business, within the business world itself? I know that one of the issues that’s been raised often is that it’s difficult, sometimes, to get some business people to come and listen about ethics because they don’t see how it relates to making a profit on the bottom line. How would you argue that the two are, in fact, connected, that to be ethical is not inimical to making a profit?

NL: It’s absolutely essential. If you’re not ethical—the question comes up, to what degree?—the question is, how long can you go before somebody finds out? The question is, what are the auditors doing? The next question is, what about the auditII committee? Are they just listening to the auditors tell them a story or are they getting into the nuts and bolts of what is going on? Generation I was chair of an auditing committee in a couple of different instances.Part I always used to ask the question, “Is there anything, anything, that you found in this audit that you have not disclosed that is of significance? Or if it’s not of significance, isSociety it something that should be of concern?” You know, if they answer that question, it’s tough not to come up and say, “Well, I didn’t do this and I didn’t do that.” You see a lot of auditing companies now say, “The information we have in this audit is based on what was told to us by the officers of the company.” Then, ofGreatest course, theyProject: have that statement now, which is required in the annual reports and signed, so a CEO really has got to know and the audit committee has to know what went on, not just accepting a report saying that everything is fine. I think that is an important step forward. You have to be able to do business with integrity. Historical

JF: Thank you very much, Mr.History Lorentzsen.

Minnesota'sOral Minnesota

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