The first thing the 18-year-old Swedish immigrant did, upon his 1905 arrival on Minnesota's Iron Range, was change his name. Martis Jerk became Carl Eric Wickman. It would prove to be one of several smart decisions for the innovative Swede, who had a knack for wisely remaking things. Wickman worked as a driller in Hibbing's iron ore mines until he was laid off in 1914. He decided to move from his mine to an automobile showroom. A couple of brothers in Grand Rapids, Mich., Robert and Louis Hupp, were early rivals of Ford and Chevrolet. Wickman landed a Hupmobile dealership in Hibbing.
One problem: He failed to sell his first Hupmobile, a seven-seater. Underpaid miners could ill afford a new car. So in 1914, Wickman and his partner, Andy Anderson, got behind the wheel of that large car and began shuttling miners a couple of miles between Hibbing and Alice — a mining community later gobbled up by Hibbing.
Wickman charged 15 cents a ride. A century and several mergers and expansions later, Greyhound is North America's largest bus company with nearly 1,300 buses, 4,000 destinations and 5.5 billion ride miles a year.
It's easy to deride Greyhound and, what the Washington Post recently called "its long-standing image as the chariot of absolute last resort." The late singer Harry Chapin, in a song titled "Greyhound," sings in the chorus: "Take the Greyhound, it's a dog of a way to get around. Take the Greyhound, it's a dog gone easy way to get you down."
When I was 17, I used my summer wages earned cleaning up poop at a dog kennel to buy a month pass on Greyhound. Old journals are littered with memories of crying infants, gospel music playing on transistor radios, reeking fellow passengers and midnight rest stops in North Platte, Neb., on my way to Seattle. Years later, everyone on a ride from Maryland to Virginia was busy watching movies on their phones — ear buds in; talking out.
But how did this grass-roots bus operation that started shuttling miners in Hibbing survive for 100 years when other early transportation start-ups from California to Georgia to Maine all fizzled?
English historian Margaret Walsh, in a 1985 article in Minnesota History magazine, attributes some of the longevity to a rare sense of cooperation between the fledgling bus company and the powerful Great Northern Railroad in the 1920s.
As some railroads slashed prices in hopes of rubbing out bus competition, Great Northern President Ralph Budd scuttled plans to start his own bus company and used his vast railroad capital to go into business with Wickman in 1925. Their $2.5 million merger of eight independent lines left Great Northern with an 80 percent stake and Wickman's Northland Transportation Co. with $240,000 of rail dough to finance 150 buses dominating the region.
