Garrett Ross: If you've heard of Greyhound Bus, just know it started 6 miles from my house.
.
Greyhound exists because a Swedish immig
If you've heard of Greyhound Bus, just know it started 6 miles from my house.
.
Greyhound exists because a Swedish immigrant couldn't sell a car. In 1914, Carl Wickman, a 27 year old who'd been laid off from his job as a drill operator at a mine in Alice, Minnesota, took a job selling Hupmobiles in Hibbing. When he couldn't unload his very first seven passenger demo model, he decided to put it to work instead, using it alongside fellow Swedish immigrants Andy "Bus Andy" Anderson and C. Arvid Heed to drive iron ore miners the two miles between Hibbing and Alice for fifteen cents a ride. Wickman made 2.25 dollars on that first run, and the company Americans now know as Greyhound was effectively born.
Wickman almost walked away after a single brutal Minnesota winter nearly broke him, but he stuck with it, cutting back his own driving duties rather than quitting outright. In 1915 he added a route to Nashwauk and merged his operation with that of 19 year old Ralph Bogan, a motorcycle racer who'd been running a competing service from Hibbing to Duluth, forming the Mesaba Transportation Company. By 1918, what had started as one unsellable car had grown into 18 vehicles pulling in 40,000 dollars a year.
The company kept growing the same way it started, buying out competitors rather than just outcompeting them. Wickman and his partners picked up Orville Caesar's Superior-White Bus Lines in Duluth in 1922, and by 1925 had spent 2.5 million dollars acquiring eight separate independent bus lines across Minnesota. The company moved from Duluth to Chicago in 1930 and formally took the Greyhound name in 1929, a brand that would eventually grow into the largest bus company in the world.
Carl Wickman retired as president in 1946 and returned to Sweden, where King Gustav V knighted him specifically for serving the unserved, a nod to the rural, overlooked routes his original Minnesota bus service had been built around in the first place. He died in 1954, but the company he started hauling Iron Range miners around for pocket change eventually grew into a nationwide transportation network built on the exact same idea, getting people somewhere the railroads and highways of the time weren't quite reaching yet. Hibbing never let go of that history either, and the town's own Greyhound Bus Museum still tells the story of how America's biggest bus company traces every mile of its network back to one unsold car and a fifteen cent ride on the Mesaba Iron Range.
Garrett Ross: If you've heard of Greyhound Bus, just know it started 6 miles from my house. . Greyhound exists because a Swedish immig
If you've heard of Greyhound Bus, just know it started 6 miles from my house. . Greyhound exists because a Swedish immigrant couldn't sell a car. In 1914, Carl Wickman, a 27 year old who'd been laid off from his job as a drill operator at a mine in Alice, Minnesota, took a job selling Hupmobiles in Hibbing. When he couldn't unload his very first seven passenger demo model, he decided to put it to work instead, using it alongside fellow Swedish immigrants Andy "Bus Andy" Anderson and C. Arvid Heed to drive iron ore miners the two miles between Hibbing and Alice for fifteen cents a ride. Wickman made 2.25 dollars on that first run, and the company Americans now know as Greyhound was effectively born. Wickman almost walked away after a single brutal Minnesota winter nearly broke him, but he stuck with it, cutting back his own driving duties rather than quitting outright. In 1915 he added a route to Nashwauk and merged his operation with that of 19 year old Ralph Bogan, a motorcycle racer who'd been running a competing service from Hibbing to Duluth, forming the Mesaba Transportation Company. By 1918, what had started as one unsellable car had grown into 18 vehicles pulling in 40,000 dollars a year. The company kept growing the same way it started, buying out competitors rather than just outcompeting them. Wickman and his partners picked up Orville Caesar's Superior-White Bus Lines in Duluth in 1922, and by 1925 had spent 2.5 million dollars acquiring eight separate independent bus lines across Minnesota. The company moved from Duluth to Chicago in 1930 and formally took the Greyhound name in 1929, a brand that would eventually grow into the largest bus company in the world. Carl Wickman retired as president in 1946 and returned to Sweden, where King Gustav V knighted him specifically for serving the unserved, a nod to the rural, overlooked routes his original Minnesota bus service had been built around in the first place. He died in 1954, but the company he started hauling Iron Range miners around for pocket change eventually grew into a nationwide transportation network built on the exact same idea, getting people somewhere the railroads and highways of the time weren't quite reaching yet. Hibbing never let go of that history either, and the town's own Greyhound Bus Museum still tells the story of how America's biggest bus company traces every mile of its network back to one unsold car and a fifteen cent ride on the Mesaba Iron Range.
If you've heard of Greyhound Bus, just know it started 6 miles from my house. . Greyhound exists because a Swedish immigrant couldn't sell a car. In 1914, Carl Wickman, a 27 year old who'd been laid off from his job as a drill operator at a mine in Alice, Minnesota, took a job selling Hupmobiles in Hibbing. When he couldn't unload his very first seven passenger demo model, he decided to put it to work instead, using it alongside fellow Swedish immigrants Andy "Bus Andy" Anderson and C. Arvid Heed to drive iron ore miners the two miles between Hibbing and Alice for fifteen cents a ride. Wickman made 2.25 dollars on that first run, and the company Americans now know as Greyhound was effectively born. Wickman almost walked away after a single brutal Minnesota winter nearly broke him, but he stuck with it, cutting back his own driving duties rather than quitting outright. In 1915 he added a route to Nashwauk and merged his operation with that of 19 year old Ralph Bogan, a motorcycle racer who'd been running a competing service from Hibbing to Duluth, forming the Mesaba Transportation Company. By 1918, what had started as one unsellable car had grown into 18 vehicles pulling in 40,000 dollars a year. The company kept growing the same way it started, buying out competitors rather than just outcompeting them. Wickman and his partners picked up Orville Caesar's Superior-White Bus Lines in Duluth in 1922, and by 1925 had spent 2.5 million dollars acquiring eight separate independent bus lines across Minnesota. The company moved from Duluth to Chicago in 1930 and formally took the Greyhound name in 1929, a brand that would eventually grow into the largest bus company in the world. Carl Wickman retired as president in 1946 and returned to Sweden, where King Gustav V knighted him specifically for serving the unserved, a nod to the rural, overlooked routes his original Minnesota bus service had been built around in the first place. He died in 1954, but the company he started hauling Iron Range miners around for pocket change eventually grew into a nationwide transportation network built on the exact same idea, getting people somewhere the railroads and highways of the time weren't quite reaching yet. Hibbing never let go of that history either, and the town's own Greyhound Bus Museum still tells the story of how America's biggest bus company traces every mile of its network back to one unsold car and a fifteen cent ride on the Mesaba Iron Range.
