New Man, Old Name

California's American-Hawaiian Steamship Co. (the "AH Line") had a new president last week. But the name was old and familiar. Lewis A. Lapham, 38, is the lean, twinkling son of San Francisco's tubby, twinkling Mayor Roger Lapham (TIME, July 15) and grandson and great-nephew of Lewis H. Lapham and George S. Dearborn. Starting with a fleet of windjammers, his grandfather and Dearborn had built A-H into the biggest U.S. intercoastal steamship line. New President Lapham knew that his job was no sinecure: "I'm being thrown off the dock to see if I can swim." West Coast shipping men were betting that he could.

When Lewis Lapham came home to San Francisco after Hotchkiss and Yale ("I'm one of those mass-produced guys"), he wasn't interested in working for his father, then A-H's president. Instead, he wrote a shipping column for Hearst's Examiner, learned about the waterfront and gained a reputation for brains and high spirits. After six years of this, he went to work for A-H and was lent to the Waterfront Employers Association. Shippers think that he had a lot to do with improving labor relations. During the war, when ulcers kept him out of uniform, he ranged the Pacific, unscrambling shipping problems. When A-H's President John E. Gushing decided to move over to the Matson Navigation Co. a month ago, Lapham was the logical choice to replace him.

The line is long on cash (over $19 million liquid assets) and prestige, short on ships, and uncertain about the future. Before the war it confined itself to the coastal trade (the Hawaiian run was abandoned in 1917). But the war set it to operating War Shipping Administration ships all over the world. Now, with operating costs up 100%, A-H does not see how it can go back to coastal runs at present ICC-fixed rates. It is operating twelve vessels for the Maritime Commission. But this service may stop next July.

The six ships A-H now owns and 33 Commission ships it has chartered are currently sailing with no set routes to ports in Europe, Africa and Asia. Lewis Lapham would like to get the line back to operating its own ships on regular schedules. But he plans to wait until the pattern of postwar trade is clear and the U.S. Government decides about subsidies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.