| Notes |
- Investor's Reader, Page 7
Management - Connecticut Yankee
Bill Bassett of the New Haven RR
(Picture included)
Men like him helped build America
Up in suburban Cos Cob, Connecticut, William Bassett, the genial, 63-year-old station master of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, last week was busy with the 101 odd jobs which have been his career for 40 years. His office is an old-fashioned brown & tan passenger and freight station with a pot-bellied stove camped in the middle of the floor. His job is to sell tickets, handle freight and Railway Express shipments, see to minute details like firing the stove in winter and taking care of the bundles of newspapers which are thrown off the early morning locals. He has two helpers (one is Bill Bassett, Jr.).
To most people, Bill Bassett's job probably seems unimportant, without excitement and glamour. Yet it is an integral part of the railroad set-up. And by cheerfully doing his job decade after decade, Bill Bassett has not only become a popular and respected citizen but also has gained far more satisfaction and worldly goods than anyone would expect.
Bill Bassett came to the U.S. in 1905 as a young lad of 23, fresh from the green valleys & hills of Belfast, Ireland. Because he had been ticket clerk and telegrapher for the Belfast & County Down Railroad, he got a job as freight clerk at Bridgewater, Massachusetts for the New Haven. Two years later he was transferred to Cob Cob. He worked with Irish vigor and the firm conviction that American and opportunity were synonymous.
He became station master in 1911 and felt secure and prosperous enough to marry a young girl from nearbly Riverside. Ten years later, his wife died and left him with four youngsters to raise alone.
Wholly and resolutely determined that his children would have the best he could give them, Bill Bassett worked still harder so he could treat them to New York junkets, with dinner at the Commodore and a Gilbert & Sullivan opera afterward. When his two youngest daughters graduated from business college in 1939, Bill Bassett finally did what he had dreamed of for years - he took them on a European tour.
But the European war broke out just as they reached Le Havre and the Bassett family was shipped across the Channel to Britain. In London, Bill Bassett and his excited daughters were issued gas masks, watched while buildings were sandbagged and women and children evacuated to the country. After a nostalgic stop-over at Belfast, the family returned to the U.S. on a 5,000-ton freighter.
Safely Home. Back in good old Connecticut, Bassett's daughters first took stenographic jobs, left them to join the WAVES in 1942. And after his brief but tumultous trip abroad, Bill Bassett settled down to his old life as station master and general philosopher of Cos Cob. On the side he dabbles in politics, collects postage stamps and first editions, gives safety lessons to the school children and takes them on one-day trips to New York.
Meantime, his town has grown from a little Connecticut village into a fashionable Manhattan suburb. Today Bill Bassett gives a cheery "hello" to 200-odd commuters every morning - some of them great and near-great. And all of them like to sit around in the little freight office and talk to the stocky, smiling station master with the Irish brogue. Mildly tickled by this, and proud too, Bill Bassett likes to philosophize: "It's funny how the most famous people can be the humblest. Whey, they sit around and talk for hours as if they really were learing something from you; all the time you know you're just common folks who ought to be learning from them."
But sincere, hard-working, resourceful Bill Bassett helped build America.
1920 Federal Census of Cos Cob, Greenwich Township, Fairfield County, Connecticut (6 Jan 1920)
William Bassett - 36 - M - IR-IR-IR - Head - Agent Railway
Margaret - 35 - F - IR-IR-IR - Wife
Mona - 7 - F - CT-IR-IR - Daughter
William - 3 - M - CT-IR-IR - Son
Jen - 10/12 - F - CT-IR-IR - Daughter
(Living on Mead Avenue)
1930 Federal Census of Cos Cob, Fairfield County, Connecticut (15 Apr 1930)
William Bassett - 46 - M - IR-IR-IR - Head - Station Master Railway
Mona - 17 - F - CT-IR-IR - Daughter
William Jr. - 13 - M - CT-IR-IR - Son
(Living at 226 School Street)
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Bassett Family Association Database
1882 - 1969 (86 years)