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History
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Greyhound Lines page on 25 October 2017, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Greyhound Lines, Inc., usually shortened to Greyhound, is an intercity bus common carrier serving over 3,800 destinations across North America. The company's first route began in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1914, and the company adopted the name The Greyhound Corporation in 1929. Since October 2007, Greyhound has been a subsidiary of British transportation company FirstGroup, but continues to be based in Dallas, Texas, where it has been headquartered since 1987. Greyhound and sister companies in FirstGroup America are the largest motorcoach operators in the United States and Canada.
Carl Eric Wickman was born in Sweden in 1887. In 1905 he moved to the United States where he was working in a mine as a drill operator in Alice, Minnesota, until he was laid off in 1914. In the same year, he became a Hupmobile salesman in Hibbing, Minnesota. He proved unable to sell the car. In 1914, using his remaining vehicle, a 7-passenger car, he began a bus service with Andy (Bus Andy) Anderson and C.A.A. (Arvid) Heed, by transporting iron ore miners from Hibbing to Alice (known for its saloons) at 15 cents a ride.
In 1915 Wickman joined forces with Ralph Bogan, who was running a similar service from Hibbing to Duluth, Minnesota. The name of the new organization was the Mesaba Transportation Company, and it made $8,000 in profit in its first year.
By the end of World War I in 1918, Wickman owned 18 buses and was making an annual profit of $40,000. In 1922, Wickman joined forces with Orville Caesar, the owner of the Superior White Bus Lines. Four years later, Wickman purchased two West Coast operations, the Pioneer Yelloway System (the operator of the nation's first transcontinental bus) and the Pickwick Lines, creating a national intercity bus company.
The Greyhound name had its origins in the inaugural run of a route from Superior, Wisconsin to Wausau, Wisconsin. While passing through a small town, Ed Stone, the route's operator, saw the reflection of his 1920s era bus in a store window. The reflection reminded him of a greyhound dog, and he adopted that name for that segment of the Blue Goose Lines. The Greyhound name became popular and later applied to the entire bus network. Stone later became General Sales Manager of Yellow Truck and Coach, a division of General Motors (GM), which built Greyhound buses. Wickman, as the president of the company, continued to expand it so that by 1927, his buses were making transcontinental trips from California to New York. In 1928, Greyhound had a gross annual income of $6 million.
In 1929, Greyhound acquired additional interests in Southland Transportation Company, the Gray Line, and part of the Colonial Motor Coach Company to form Eastern Greyhound Lines. Greyhound also acquired an interest in Northland Transportation Company, and renamed it Northland Greyhound Lines.
By 1930 more than 100 bus lines had been consolidated into what was called the "Motor Transit Company". Recognizing that the company needed a more memorable name, the partners of the Motor Transit Company decided to rename it after the "Greyhound" marketing phrase used by earlier bus lines.
Wickman's business suffered during the Great Depression, and by 1931 was over $1 million in debt.
As the 1930s progressed and the economy improved, the Greyhound Corporation began to prosper again. In 1934, intercity bus lines (of which Greyhound was the largest) carried approximately 400,000,000 passengers—nearly as many passengers as the Class I railroads. The film It Happened One Night (1934) centered on an heiress (Claudette Colbert) traveling by Greyhound bus with a reporter (Clark Gable). The movie is credited by the company for spurring bus travel nationwide. In 1935, national intercity bus ridership climbed 50% to 651,999,000 passengers, surpassing the volume of passengers carried by the Class I railroads for the first time. In 1935 Wickman was able to announce record profits of $8 million. In 1936, already the largest bus carrier in the United States, Greyhound began taking delivery of 306 new buses.
To accommodate the rapid growth in bus travel, Greyhound also built many new stations in the period between 1937 and 1945, most of them in a late Art Deco style known as Streamline Moderne. In 1937, Greyhound embarked on a program of unifying its brand identity by acquiring both buses and terminals in the Streamline style. By the outbreak of World War II, the company had 4,750 stations and nearly 10,000 employees.
| 3 October 2017 16-55585 Carla Mejia v. Greyhound Lines, Inc. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Children of decedent Nora Martinez appeal the district court's summary judgment in favor of Greyhound Bus Lines, Inc. in a diversity action, alleging Greyhound was negligent for failing to warn Nora of risk of developing deep-vein thrombosis. Download 16-55585 Carla Mejia v. Greyhound Lines, Inc. - 109MB - 28:22 |
| Date | Media or Collection Name & Details | Files |
|---|---|---|
| ~1950's | America for Me Jerry Fairbanks Productions for Greyhound |  Topic Page - 30:56 |
| Date | Document Name & Details | Documents |
|---|---|---|
| 15 May 1950 | Capitol Greyhound Lines v. Brice Supreme Court of the United States Decision | Text |