Untold Story of the Survival of the Penn Central by Donald Prell - HTML preview

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To Washington D.C.

 

Business travel was a frequent occurrence, to which my  family was well accustomed. In those days, to fly First Class  from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. on PanAm, was to  know a degree of pleasure in air travel. How to justify my  absence from the family at Christmas-time would not be a  pleasant prospect; so for the moment I merely hinted at the  possibility to my wife, then packed a bag and took off the  next morning.

 

  Cutler and Pickering was - and still is - a very prestigious  law firm in the District of Columbia. Lloyd N. Cutler, Yale  Law School, 1939, Editor of his law Journal, was already a  prominent figure on the Washington scene. He wasted no  time in filing me in on the details of the proposed venture,  and emphasized the extremely sensitive nature of the  assignment. He revealed that some members of the Penn  Central's board had put funds into an account in a Bank in  Zurich and signing authority for these would be mine to do  with as I saw fit.

 

Mentally I rolled this nugget of fiscal largesse around in  my mind as he went on:

 

“The primary holdout is a Doctor Lauder. He bought the  notes and now feels he was cheated by the company. The  other holdout is a Herr Schneider, who says he will do  whatever Lauder does. Schroders Bank have asked Lauder if  he would meet with you on December 27th. He has agreed,  but is telling them it will do no good, as he has made up his  mind not to sign.”

 

“Do realize, if any of the other note-holders were to  discover that Lauder was being paid, it would no doubt  produce chaos as they would all want to be paid. We dare  not even let Schroders know what is being done. In fact,  when you leave my office, I don’t want to know what you  plan to do.”

 

Plan, I didn’t have a plan, not yet anyway. However the  tantalizing prospect of convincing a singularly reluctant  note-holder to put pen-to-paper was as intriguing a  challenge as I’d yet encountered. Only after I had taken the  measure of this Dr. Lauder would I be able to create some  sort of inducement. Perhaps.

 

Lloyd Cutler stood up. “Here are the papers for Lauder  and Schneider to sign. After they have been executed,  deliver them to Schroders and let me know it has been  accomplished. Believe me, everyone appreciates your  accepting this assignment. Good luck, and please give my  thanks to Harry Volk.”