Coal, Cars & Love

Chrysler's announcement last week that its auto sales are running 48.2% ahead of last year pleased nobody so much as a Pittsburgh coal executive, George Hutchinson Love, 62. Coal and cars may be far apart, but Love's aptly named Consolidation Coal Co. is now Chrysler's largest shareholder with a 7.3% interest that Love is steadily increasing. Since 1961, Consol has pumped $45 million into Chrysler from profits piled up in 20 years of profitable Love management; the value of this investment has jumped to $86 million. Love himself has become chairman of both Consol and Chrysler, the only U.S. businessman to chair two major companies in widely separated fields.

An Eyebrow for a Toupee. A strapping man (6 ft. 2 in., 190 Ibs.) who is called "Cupey" by some friends because of his bald head and cherubic face, George Love never set out to be coalman or auto magnate. After Princeton and Harvard Business School, he became a bond salesman in Chicago and St. Louis, but left to run three family coal mines outside Pittsburgh. He did well enough to be offered a Consol job by George Humphrey, who was then heading Consol for its principal shareholder (now 21%), M. A. Hanna Co. Love succeeded Humphrey as president, in 1945 forged together the best of Consol and the best of Pittsburgh Coal (a Mellon interest)--two companies that between them had lost $100 million in 15 years. Breaking into the black, he cut off unproductive mines, found new coal customers among steel mills and utilities to replace fading markets among dieselized railroads and oil-burning homeowners, and automated until the most efficient Consol mines now produce 70 tons per miner per day using $100,000 continuous mining machines.

Inevitably, Love crossed shovels with brawny opponents. When he stood up for the whole coal industry against John L. Lewis' demands for a three-day work week in 1950, Lewis in his fury borrowed from Shakespeare to dismiss Love as "a liar by the clock." Love good-naturedly responded by asking Lewis for one of his eyebrows to use as a toupee. Eventually Lewis backed down, and today the two old antagonists are friends. Hanging from the wall of Love's Pittsburgh office is an unlikely trinity of photographs: George Humphrey, U.S. Steel's late Ben Fairless and John L. Says Love: "I like to say that I made an enlightened labor leader out of John. And he likes to say that he made a man out of me."

Flute & Toy Soldiers. Next, Love battled the railroads, whose rates on coal had risen so high that coal cost 8-c- a ton more to haul than to mine. Consol built a 108-mile pipeline across Ohio to a Cleveland electric plant, shipped a slurry of coal and water at $1 a ton less than railroad rates. The Eastern railroads got the hint, and last March dropped their coal rates by one-third (TIME, April 12).

Love's current target is to increase Chrysler's 13.6% share of the U.S. auto market. He gives a free hand on day-to-day operational matters to Chrysler President Lynn Townsend, who was hand-picked by Love, but visits Detroit regularly to chart policy. In a converted World War II B23 bomber that Consol owns, Love spans the country four days each week in search of new markets and ideas for Chrysler or coal. Between times, he relaxes at one of four homes spread from Pittsburgh to Grand Bahama, tootles on his silver flute ("My wife says I play it when she wants to get rid of the guests") and toys with his collection of 400 little lead soldiers, mostly from the Napoleonic era.

Love likes to josh that he does not know how wide a mine opening should be or where the spark plugs go (though he really does). "I'm just a policy and investment man who knows how to delegate authority," he says, but he is something more--a relaxed businessman who knows a lot about details but never forgets to look at the horizon.

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