BOUNCED INTO WEALTH

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 248, 16 October 1920, Page 17

BOUNCED INTO WEALTH

RUBBER MILLIONAIRES OF AKRON. A COMIC OPERA TOWN. • Akron, Ohm. which t.h P present cen?n? r-how- to have grown 201 per cent, in tPi: yeare, i> one of the funniest town- in tiio country, simply because there aro probably more nc .v millionaires tliorc. for the >izo of the place, than one would find in almost any other ci , . \- you rnipht mentipn. Things happen ;n Akron that would not happen a.nyw'here outside of a comic opera, moving picture or a honk nf old-fashioned fairy tales. The town is built on rubber, and about every other man you meet there has bounced into sudden wealth. Men who worked for 10 a day just a. few years ajro are rrow residing in palatial homes costing niOTe than a king's ransom—more than rhr ransom of a. whole squad of modernte priced king;. THE CiOLDEX FLOOD. To get an idea of the. money that keeps pouring into Akron, tear in mind that there, are now more than 7.000,000 autoraobriis in ii*o. that something like "fl per cent, of the tyres are made in Akron, that each car will wear out. on tlie average, one -et of tyree a season at an average co>t of, say, from £5 to t'7 a lyre—a total of neaTly £140,000.000 (i year received in Akron for renewals alone! And then there are all the tyres for the new automobiles. A iarge per cent, of the money paid for these tyres is profit. Xow, naturally a lot of this money must be spent, and an obvious way to spend it is for housing the people who have it. Many of these lAkron homes approximate the size and spaciousness of Machinery Hall at one of the big expositions. They are larger, perhaps, than is absolutely necessaryE -for an averageeized American family. But supposing you had £6,000,000 or £8,000.008 and one of your fellow townsmen put up a dwelling place that was the talk of the town while you were living in a nice iittle place that attracted no particular attention at all! Wouldn't you be tempted to spend at least one of your millions for housing yourself in such a way that you could look your neighbours in the eye and keep yonr seM-respect? LIKE A TUDOR PALACE. One Akron residence, modelled after a Tudor palace, is more than 400 feet long, and if you were told how much it coet you would not believe it. The owner of the palace hired an expensive architect by the year, and told him to go to England and for the first few months or a year do nothing but gather ideas. With an unlimited expense account the architect browsed about famous old English estates, taking note of what he saw. In a number of instances he made plaster of pari3 casts of mouldings. He' even bought tons of seasoned timber from , old easbles and such places. There was a certain kind of narrow, odd-sized briok that it was desired to use in the construction of the house, to carrespond with the brick in a certain old English palace. The brick in this palace 'had little dents all over the eurface, as if made by-fingermarks in the days when Tjricks were moulded by hand. Brick of the same size without these fingermarks, or whatever they wea-e, would look too modern. So when the bricks were manufactured on a special order at an Akron plant, the house builder employed 'boys at good wages to make little dents in the bricks with their fingers before tihe clay was baked. This process of borrowing designs and ■ia.teria-1 from England recaJls, by the way, the case of General Palmer, who built the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Hβ built a big house at Colorado Springs and wanted it to havo a red tile roof. Moreover, he desired that the tile should be of a certain kind and eucti as he had seen on roofs in England. But he found that such tile was no longer being made. So he went to England, bought himself an old castle, i«emoved the tile roof, and had the tile chipped in creates to Colorado Springs. A LAKE O"NT A HULL. An Akron man built hie home on top of a hill. It had long been his ambition to have a lake in his front yard, and he spoke of this detail to his landscape architect. He said he wanted not only a take, 'but a brook, and the water was to come trickling through the brook over some moes-covered 'logs into the lake. The landscape designer called the man's attention to a few of the difficulties in the way. "In the first place," lie said, "your grounds are on top of a hill, and ths hill ie mostly sand. There is no source for a brook, and even if them wata, the ■water would run out of you. , lake as fast as it ran in." Tve thought of all that," admitted the multi-millionaire, "but I intend to have my brook and lake just the same. I'll seal the bottom of the lake with concrete over a wire mesh, and drill i dozen or co artesian wells, if necessary, to providn water for the brook. Then well go out into the woods and transplant a young forest, including a thousand or so of moss-covered logs, AH ■well require then will be a power plant to pump water from the artesian wells 1 and everything will be complete." ) My recollection is that he did ifr, too! 1 TRANSPLANTED A FOREST. \ Another well-to-do Akronite picked as '• a site for his new house a hilltop W-biul' 1 commanded a fine view, but which lacked ( trees. So he transplanted an tyitire l woods. Even yet the layout did not suit 1 him. What he" wanted was a birch woods s in the distance. So he went, to Xew ( Hampshire, bought a nice little birch 1 woods and brought it to Akron on a i couple of freight train?. Then he took ] another trip, to Virginia, where he dug 1 up a train load of mountain laurel. ( \n Akron tanker had some rubber ' stock a few years ago which he regarded as -practically worthless. In fact, it was 1 worse than worthless, for the reason j that he was afraid that it miafht be assessed. He offered to sell it for 10 cents on the dollar; then 10 cents a < share and finally to give it away. He 1 K-ould even have paid a bonus to any- < bndv who would have taken the stock i off "his hand.. About that time the > automobile came into its own and the tyre industry began to boom. flio stock < doubled and quadrupled, and then did it 1 all over again. To-day that stock which the banker tried to give away is worth about £2,400,000.-F. C. KeL.y in the 1 •Yew York Tribune."