Tag: Dollar Steamship Lines

Lawrence Howard Good (“Howard”) was born in 1910 in St. Helena, California. He was the son of Stanley Wells Good and Cornelia Wheeler Good, known to their grandchildren as “Tapah” and “Namah”. Stanley spent his career in trans-Pacific shipping when ships, along with railroads, were the primary mode of long-distance transportation. While general manager of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in San Francisco, Stanley made voyages to Hawaii, then a territory of the US. He established a worthy reputation in the Islands and the Far East, and when the Dollar Steamship Company expanded its Pacific trade, Stanley was hired to lead the Honolulu office in that effort. He and his family moved to Honolulu in 1920. Howard, his older sister, Harriette and older brother, Stanley Jr. (”Stan”) were early students at Punahou School, and Howard graduated in 1928.

These were glory years to grow up in Hawaii. Howard, Stan, and their friends were surfers, enjoying the beach at Waikiki with the likes of Duke and Louis Kahanamoku. Duke became known as the father of Hawaii surfing; a monument in his memory can be found at the Diamond Head end of Waikiki Beach. Howard’s surfboard, the “Shark”, made from the wood of a koa tree, was about 16 feet long and weighed over 100 pounds. The board was without a skeg, which had yet to be invented.

Howard became an accomplished swimmer, winning the state backstroke championship in his junior and senior years at Punahou. He graduated in 1928 and spent the summer with his brother Stan on a Dollar steamer to the Orient as cabin boys. They stayed at the now famous Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong for its grand opening that year.

Howard attended the University of Hawaii from late 1928 through 1931, majoring in civil engineering. These were the early days of the Great Depression when the national unemployment rate was approaching 20%. Engineering jobs were non-existent in Hawaii, so Howard returned to Dollar Steamship for the next four years.

In 1935, he took an engineering position with the American Bridge Company, which was constructing the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Across the Bay at the same time, the John A. Roebling’s Sons Company was building the Golden Gate Bridge and Howard soon joined the engineering team there. He worked on the main cable before the roadway was built, sometimes working over 700 feet above the water. The bridge would become the longest suspension bridge in the world. The Bay Bridge was completed in late 1936 and the Golden Gate in mid-1937.With the bridges completed, he joined Hawaiian Pineapple Company in San Francisco, furthering his export and import expertise. With the annexation of Hawaii to the United States in 1903, selling agricultural products to the mainland became much more profitable because – those products were notsubject to import tariffs. Howard helped build Hawaiian Pine’s sales to the Orient.

All the while, Howard’s grandfather, John Hoffman Wheeler, maintained Wheeler Farms in St. Helena as the family gathering place. While visiting one weekend in 1936, Howard met Jane Lines, who was a friend of his cousin, Patsy, at Mills College. They would be married in the fall of 1938.

During World War II, Howard worked at the naval shipyard in Sausalito. Before the war’s end, Howard and Jane had three children-Valerie, Tony, and David. Son Stuart was born in 1951. After the war, he met Walter Boysen, who was expanding his paint company in Emeryville. Walter envisioned exporting paint and other building supplies to the war-torn areas of the Pacific- primarily Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippine Islands. With his knowledge of the South Pacific and exporting, Howard was a natural and joined Boysen in 1946, where he remained as Export Manager until his retirement in 1970.

In 1953, the Goods purchased a lakeside property in Homewood, 6 miles south of Tahoe City. The property was known as “Snug Harbor” and over the ensuing years, Howard remodeled the main house, built a separate garage complex complete with a dormitory and workshop, installed a paddle tennis court and constructed a pier and boathouse. Howard acquired a 51’ Chris Craft yacht from his brother in the mid 60’s, the HMS Pinafore, which the family enjoyed for years. Valerie, Tony, David, and Stuart spent many idyllic summers at Tahoe. Valerie and David were also fortunate to attend many events at the 1960 Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, including the ice hockey gold medal game won by the first USA “Miracle Team”, led by Harvard’s Cleary brothers.

Sadly, son Stuart contracted a form of lymph cancer in the summer of 1969 and passed in January 1970, a day before his 19th birthday. During Stuart’s decline, Howard and Jane visited Tahoe less and less. Coupled with their children having jobs and families of their own, The Goods sold their Tahoe estate in 1971.

At the same time, Howard and Jane began spending time in Sonoma, often staying with Gary and Leilani Burris Welch, who was Jane’s ‘little sister” at Mills College. The Welch home at 29 East MacArthur Street had been in Anna’s family since David Burris settled in Sonoma in 1851. Gary and Anna had no children to inherit the estate, so when they decided to sell it, Howard and Jane bought it in 1972. Although different than Tahoe, the estate became a haven for family holidays and weekends. Three generations have many memories of visits there for the next 25 years. Howard had a passion for
cars which he stored in the old barn. His favorite was a 1974 Jensen Healey.

After Howard passed in 1991 and Jane in 1995, “Sunnyside Farm”, as it was known in the family, was sold to Suzanne Brangham. She soon converted it into a country inn, today known as MacArthur Place.

Tags 1960 Winter Olympics, Building the Golden Gate Bridge, Dollar Steamship Lines, Family Fleet, Halekulani Hotel on Waikiki, Honolulu in the 1920s, Kona Village Resort, Lake Tahoe in the 1960s, Lawrence Howard Good, Punahou School, San Rafael Military Academy, Squaw Valley, St. John’s Episcopal Church Ross, Sunnyside Farm

Dollar Steamship Lines

Post author By Admin
Post date March 18, 2023

At its height in the 1920s, the Dollar Steamship Company was the largest and most successful United States shipping firm, and its signature white dollar sign mounted on red-banded stacks was known around the world.

Robert Dollar (1844-1932) was the quintessential rags-to-riches millionaire – a poor immigrant who would one day dine with presidents and generals, and died one of the world’s wealthiest men. Born at Falkirk, Scotland to poverty, he immigrated to Canada in 1857. In Canada he took a job as a “chore boy” for a cook in a lumber camp. In his self-published memoirs Dollar writes of his formative years that “I always have a very kindly feeling for the place where I started work, even though it was under very adverse and the most difficult conditions, and with hardships under working conditions that are unknown to the working men of today; but I look back at those times with the feeling that it was those conditions that developed the man in me that perhaps never would have shown up if I had not been brought up in that hard school of practical experience.”
While working at the camp he began teaching himself mathematics in order to understand accounts, and French in order to understand his co-workers. At the age of 21, as Dollar recounts, he was working “as a common hand at the munificent salary of $16.00 a month” when the management of Hamilton Brothers having noted his ambition placed him in charge of affairs at a new timber operation. Now making $26.00 a month, he saved his money and began to make payments on a farm. In 1872 he started his own lumber camp, a business which soon failed leaving him with debts that he spent the next three years paying down. “I had good luck—I failed when I was young,” he told Time Magazine for a 1928 cover story commemorating his 85th birthday.

Dusting himself off from the setback, Dollar continued to pursue the lumber business and began to find success. He established operations first in Canada, then in Michigan, and finally in northern California where he settled in 1888 at San Rafael and began buying timberland and lumber camps. Dollar was now a timber magnate with one of the largest operations in the Pacific West. His move into shipping was apparently born more of frustration than ambition. The shipping services he was using to transport his lumber up and down the Pacific coast were notoriously unreliable and he was unable to make deliveries on time. In 1885 Dollar bought his first steamship to move his own lumber, a 120-foot, 300-ton steam schooner called the Newsboy. Finding success in moving his own freight, he continued to buy ships and soon had a small fleet.

In 1901, Dollar now well into his fifties incorporated the Dollar Steamship Company formally entering the steamship business. More importantly, it is at this time that he began to pursue with passion opening up trade with China. In 1902 he took the first of what would be more than 30 transpacific voyages to explore the possibility of trade. Over the next few decades he would make extensive investments in real estate in China setting up operations in such exotic locales as Shanghai, Hankow, Tientsin, and Canton. Dollar had great success with his China operations and won the respect of the business and political leaders there, his associations including presidents Li Yuen Hing and Chiang Kai-shek. It was widely known that his word alone was enough to close a multi-million dollar deal in China.

In the 1920s Dollar Line began providing scheduled round-the-world service for both passengers and freight. This letter posted in 1933 on Dollar’s signature letterhead was posted from Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) aboard the SS President Adams.

In the early 1920s, Dollar began a successful strategy of buying shares in his competitors in order to achieve controlling interests. His influence and accomplishments continued to grow. In 1920 he established a round-the-world cargo service, and in 1924 he established the first round-the-world passenger service to publish scheduled departure and arrival times. In 1925 the Dollar Steamship Company took over its chief competitor, Pacific Mail, which gave it a near-monopolistic share of U.S. Pacific coast shipping.
The late 1920s would turn out to be the peak of Dollar’s shipping fortunes. The Merchant Marine Act of 1928 established generous subsidies for carrying mail. The Act, however, had strict performance requirements and Dollar would need new ships. The company began an ambitious plan of building six luxurious ocean liners. Before the first ships rolled off the line, the onset of the Great Depression sent the global economy into chaos. Only two of the ships would be completed, the President Hoover and the President Coolidge, which famously set out on their respective maiden voyages at less than half capacity.

When Robert Dollar died in 1932 at the age of 88 he had amassed a fortune of $40,000,000, the moniker Grand Old Man of the Pacific, and a reputation for both business acumen and philanthropy. By the late 1930s the troubles that had begun in 1929 would finally bring down his empire. As Time Magazine reported in 1938, the great shipping company saddled with debt was “signed away by its crew of heirs, assignees and moneylenders” to be taken over by the U. S. Maritime Commission. The company would soon be reincarnated as American President Lines, a firm which plies the seas to this day, but nonetheless a colorful chapter in United States Maritime History was drawing to a close.