The Shipbuilder’s Debt of Honor
A Seattle industrialist pays back a fifty-cent loan given to him by a stranger when he was a penniless runaway.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
William Moran, of the Moran Bros. shipbuilding company in Seattle, was married yesterday in Kansas City to Miss Grace Williamson. The marriage is the outgrowth of a romance started years ago when 'Billy' Moran was herding cattle on the plains of Kansas. Moran’s life has been a strange one. As a lad of 14, he ran away from his Virginia home to find his brother in the West. While traveling, he once stopped in Pendleton, Indiana, hungry and penniless. He asked a woman, Mrs. Kerwood, for help. She gave him 50 cents. He wrote down her address and six months later sent the money back. Years later, after Moran had become a major shipbuilder in Seattle, the Kerwoods visited the city. Moran did not let the grass grow under his feet. He took them on a tour and paid their hotel bill, settling the interest on the 50-cent investment made by Mrs. Kerwood years before.
“William Moran had paid the interest on the 50-cent investment made by Mrs. Kerwood years and years before.”
In an era of rapid industrialization and anonymous corporate growth, this story of a billionaire shipbuilder maintaining a personal moral code from his days as a wandering waif resonates as a 'good person' narrative that contrasts sharply with the cutthroat image of the Gilded Age.
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