Never Say Die

On a winter night in Chicago, twelve years ago, the charred and battered body of Oilman Paul Ryan was pulled from the wreckage of an airliner. His skull and pelvis were fractured, his legs were shredded, the muscles of his eyes and ears were torn. His left hand was nearly ripped off, and his bladder was ruptured. Even when he surprised the doctors by living on and finally walking again, insurance companies listed him as 100% disabled.

In Manhattan last week, the 100% disability proved that he is still a good risk. Paul Ryan, 52, was ready to build the longest (1,605 miles) and costliest (more than $140 million) pipeline in the U.S. It will be the only pipeline carrying refined petroleum products (gasoline, kerosene, heating oil, etc.) all the way from Texas Gulf refineries to the vast markets on the East Coast (see map). The Government considered the project so urgent to defense that it granted Ryan and his U.S. Pipe Line Co. a fast tax write-off on 25% of the construction cost, and gave him priorities for 211,000 tons of steel--equal to 16 hours output by the entire U.S. steel industry.

The project was so attractive that two of the largest U.S. investment bankers, Manhattan's Dillon, Read & Co. and Glore, Forgan, have agreed to help raise 70% of the cost from big insurance lenders, the rest in equity capital. Ryan, who is planning to deliver gasoline from Beaumont to Newark for a cost of 29-c- per barrel v. an average of 38-c- by tanker, expects no trouble in lining up customers from the 50-odd U.S. oil companies with refineries in the Beaumont-Shreveport, La. area.

Crutches & Canes. Battered Paul Ryan, who is still so pain-ridden that he can sleep for only an hour at a time and can hobble only short distances on a cane, was already a success at 40, when he was disabled in the Chicago crash. Pennsylvania-born, he had worked as a roustabout in Oklahoma oilfields, earned an engineering degree at M.I.T., became a sales engineer for Shell, rose to president of Cleveland's National Refining Co. After the accident, Ryan sold out of the company, lived on courage and painkillers as he struggled to walk again.

By 1943, he was able to get about on crutches, and took a wartime desk job in Washington, where he helped map postwar plans for the Petroleum Industry War Council. When the Government-built Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines were declared surplus property at war's end, Ryan formed U.S. Pipe Line to bid on them. He lost out to a higher bid from Texas Eastern Transmission, which now uses them for natural gas. But Ryan was convinced that there was still a big need for a transcontinental line, and decided to build his own.

Over the Hurdles. To help design the line, he got the world's pipeline king, 68-year-old Burt Hull, who built both the Inches and Trans-Arabian's 1,068-mile desert pipeline, "Tapline" (TIME, Nov. 20, 1950). He brought in as president of U.S. Pipe Line Jersey Standard's ex-vice president Robert Haslam. Months were spent in drawing the complex plans, months more in getting O.K.s from Justice, the National Production Authority, Petroleum Administration for Defense and all the Government bureaus involved. With that approval last week, durable Paul Ryan has hurdled all the barriers; barring a hitch in the financing, he expects to have the first pipe in the ground by January.

Ryan's new pipeline will be the same in diameter as the Big Inch (24 in.), but because of improved construction techniques, will be able to pump 600,000 gallons of oil products a day, twice as much as the Big Inch ever pumped in crude oil. An offshoot will help power the AEC's new plant, now abuilding at Paducah, Ky. When it is pumping at 100% capacity, Ryan's line will be able to supply a big share of the petroleum needs of the Midwest and Northeast.

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