Zippy’s Bopo

His granddaughter Zippy called him "Bopo".

His son-in-law, the most famous literary editor who ever lived, called him Mr. Saunders. All the civilian engineers who served the war effort during WW I called him their boss, and every employee and director at Ingersoll Rand, the world’s largest compressor builder, must have called him Sir, if it’s possible to say that to your friend.

William Lawrence Saunders wasn’t just a somebody, he was a Somebody’s Somebody. You had your Paul Warburgs making federal banking policy, you had your Edisons in the lab ambitiously overseeing the creation of new technology. You had your Woodrow Wilsons running a world war out of the White House, you had your Herbert Hoovers trying to feed the world with mining profits, you had your Max Perkinses helping untamed geniuses like F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway into a condition that would build publishing empires. Later there was Arthur D Whiteside, running Dun & Bradstreet with one hand and trying to rebuild the economy of Europe with the other, based on the early influence of his mentor, W L Saunders. Looking each of these world makers right in the eye, working literally side by side with them, never quavering in his certainty, and seldom wrong about anything, you had your one-and-only William Lawrence Saunders, the king of compressed air, one of the most productive and influential of the 20th century industrial giants.

Now Zippy’s Bopo is nearly forgotten. Why?

In 1930 he was visiting the west coast, staying at the Biltmore in Los Angeles, when the census taker dropped by. Asked what his occupation was, he could have provided any number of impressive credentials, not the least of which would have been his status as founding president and still chairman of Ingersoll-Rand Company, Inc. I don’t dare suggest that he was travelling incognito, or that he needed to. Is it possible that this mover and shaker among industrial giants was not interested in building a monument to himself? He told the census taker that he was an employer, the manager of a glove factory. That’s possible; he could manage a dozen projects with one finger. Why even speculate?

One of William Lawrence Saunder’s younger brothers set a high standard when he sold his used bookstore and opened a small, finicky publishing house in Philadelphia. The goal at Walter Burns Saunders Publishing Company was to produce medical texts written only by current top experts in their fields, to manufacture the books using the best materials and workmanship, and to get the information to its intended audience quickly while it was still current. The company he started is still in existence, because of something that doesn’t run in every family: competence.

William L Saunders couldn’t have achieved one percent of what he did if he was the sort of person who would let himself be eaten alive by any one project, mired in the details. He was the opposite of a specialist; he was interested in everything. During World War One while he was running the Naval Consultants Board, he put up a $50,000 reward for anyone, doctor or layman, who could invent a significant and universally applicable cure for cancer, and he offered the same reward for a way to prevent the same disease. When women fought for the vote in North Plainfield, New Jersey where he served twice as mayor, he was on the front line with them. When Arthur D Whiteside, the chief of Dun & Bradstreet, was younger, he and his family went on a cruise with W L Saunders to the Bahamas. The two men shared the philosophy that financial monopolies were counter-productive. They believed that what was good for the world was good for America. That sort of goodnik thinking couldn’t get them a job as an assistant manager at Burger King in today’s shark-eat-shark, “conscience is stupid” business environment.

But getting back to that brother of his, the well-known and highly reputable technical book publisher. This is back when $5 was a high price for a textbook. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and assert that W L Saunders had connections in the world of technical book publishing. I’ve been asserting it for years, and now I have evidence. But from all indications, few of his descendants know anything about him.

Several or maybe all of Saunders’ siblings were well-off, and he seems to have been particularly close to his youngest sibling, his only sister Jennie Morton Saunders of Philadelphia. As a little girl, Jennie had no mother to take care of her and only a busy Episcopal minister for a father, as well as her mother’s unmarried sister who lived with the family and later with Jennie and her partner in Philadelphia. Jennie was the first of the family to move from Florida to Philadelphia. She was born in Marietta, Georgia during the Civil War, and never got to know her mother. At the age of six she was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia, and the rest of the family soon followed her up north. Jennie lived her whole adult life in Philadelphia, always had money because of her brothers, and she never married because her life partner was named Stella M Pinckney and why would two women want to get married? In his will, W L left them the property he owned in Philly, the two of them. On the 1920 census Jennie listed Stella as her Partner. Not business partner; they reported as their occupations, “None.”

Here is what I’m getting at. The Reverend Doctor William Trebell Saunders, who had an honorary degree from William and Mary College in Virginia, raised his children to be liberal free thinkers. This was a century ago; don’t jump to conclusions about what a “liberal” was back then. This is not in reference to the so-called kneejerk liberal of today, the sloppy-thinking happy-happy joy-joy New Ager with a big black SUV and a guilty conscience and a stock portfolio. Or else dred locks, a customized VW bus, and Mommy’s credit card in back pocket. Other than having ten fingers and ten toes, the liberal of 1876 and the liberal of 2011 bear little resemblance to each other. Back then being a free thinker could make you rich, because the world was wide open. New and exciting world-changing inventions like W L Saunders’ underwater rock-drilling rig created new millionaires regularly.

What was W L thinking, as a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a cub reporter with a technical degree, when he climbed into a hot air balloon, ascended to three-and-a-half miles above the face of the earth, and spent the night there? Did he have any idea what he was going to do with his life? Maybe or maybe not, but the adventure of that night was a symbol for all that would follow.

In 1930, the world’s largest publisher of engineering books came out with the fifth edition of mining engineer Robert Peele’s Compressed Air Plant. This book made it perfectly clear to anyone who cared to read it that the compressed air locomotives then proliferating in coal mines all over the world could cut their fuel costs a lot, by absorbing free ambient heat from their surroundings. This was no big surprise; the technology was already over twenty years old. But this particular textbook marked the end of an era. Something about textbooks which were written to be read, understood, and used--no longer needed or welcome. By 1945 it was a new world order, when it came to the dissemination of information.

The next year, W L Saunders, chairman of the board at the largest compressor company in the world, set out on a leisurely trip around the world. In March of 1931, his two married daughters met him somewhere near the coast of Morocco or Spain, and then headed back to New York. Three weeks later, Saunders died suddenly and the cause of his death was not mentioned anywhere in print.

The instructions for how to design compressed air engines that could purposely use ambient heat to expand their fuel supply were never again included in any engineering textbook. With Bopo gone, the world was finally free to go to hell in a handbasket.