Suspicion, alarm, even rage. But not blasé detachment. I glanced at the old man at the next table. He hadn’t given any indication he knew we were there. But he was a fixture. He belonged. Not like me, an outsider who seemed to be discovering what everyone already knew and didn’t much care about.
***
That night I went online and Googled the name “Sutton.” After wading through pages of websites about the London borough, hotel chains, and even a publishing company, I clicked onto a website that traced the history of trains.
In the early days, rail cars were equipped with a metal bar and ring on each end called a “link and pin.” The cars were manually attached by workers who braced themselves between the cars and dropped a metal pin into place at the exact moment the holes in the bars lined up. This was a delicate and dangerous operation. The slightest mistake in timing meant a man could be crushed, and it wasn’t uncommon to see railroad workers missing a finger, an arm, or even a leg.
The first patent for an automatic coupler was granted in 1873 to a store clerk in Atlanta. An improvement to the device was patented twenty-four years later by Andrew Beard, a former Alabama slave, who himself had lost a leg in a coupling accident. By the turn of the century, the government mandated the addition of automatic couplers to every rail car in the country.
Enter Luke Sutton’s great-grandfather, Charles. A farmer from the same part of Alabama as Beard, Sutton claimed to have purchased the rights to the coupler from Beard. He started Sutton Rail Services, which, over the next fifty years, grew into a huge concern. By the 1930s, the company was manufacturing over half of all the automatic couplers in the world; in fact, it narrowly escaped antitrust action under FDR. When Sutton died right after World War Two, his son, Charles Junior, took over.
Curiously, no one knows what happened to Andrew Beard, the slave who sold his invention to the Suttons. There is no record of his life—or death. But ten years later when Charles II died unexpectedly in an automobile accident, his son Charles III took the reins of the company. He had been only twenty-two at the time and was still running the company today. His son Chip, Charles IV, was executive vice-president.
Was “Chip” a nickname for Luke? Maybe his full name was Charles Luke Sutton. Or was Chip the other Sutton brother? If I could find an organization chart, I could answer that question. Except that a privately held company isn’t subject to the same disclosure requirements as a publicly owned one, and there’s no obligation to list the company officers. I went back to Google and entered the name Charles Sutton. Happily, I ran across an article from
Forbes
profiling Sutton Services.
Charles Ashcroft Sutton III was the CEO. His son, Charles Ashcroft Sutton IV, executive vice-president. Ashcroft was his grandfather’s middle name, his great-grandfather’s, too. The CFO was Henry Banker; Jeffrey Hopkins, first vice-president. The article went on to name several other officers, none of whom were female, and none of whom I recognized. The name Luke Sutton was nowhere in the article.
I typed in “Chip Sutton.” A few sites popped up. From one of them, I learned that he was married to Jennifer Brinks from Detroit, an heiress in her own right. They lived in Winnetka, the next village over from me. She sat on the board of several North Shore charities. Then I entered the name Luke Sutton. I got nothing.
I twirled a strand of hair around my finger. The Sutton family was fabulously wealthy, rich enough for their sons to have planes for toys. But only “Chip” followed his father into the family business. Why didn’t Luke? What did he do for a living—if he, in fact, did anything besides meet Daria Flynn for drinks at the Lodge?
And what about Jimmy Saclarides, Lake Geneva’s chief of police? If he and Luke Sutton were best friends, I could understand the guy
***
That night I went online and Googled the name “Sutton.” After wading through pages of websites about the London borough, hotel chains, and even a publishing company, I clicked onto a website that traced the history of trains.
In the early days, rail cars were equipped with a metal bar and ring on each end called a “link and pin.” The cars were manually attached by workers who braced themselves between the cars and dropped a metal pin into place at the exact moment the holes in the bars lined up. This was a delicate and dangerous operation. The slightest mistake in timing meant a man could be crushed, and it wasn’t uncommon to see railroad workers missing a finger, an arm, or even a leg.
The first patent for an automatic coupler was granted in 1873 to a store clerk in Atlanta. An improvement to the device was patented twenty-four years later by Andrew Beard, a former Alabama slave, who himself had lost a leg in a coupling accident. By the turn of the century, the government mandated the addition of automatic couplers to every rail car in the country.
Enter Luke Sutton’s great-grandfather, Charles. A farmer from the same part of Alabama as Beard, Sutton claimed to have purchased the rights to the coupler from Beard. He started Sutton Rail Services, which, over the next fifty years, grew into a huge concern. By the 1930s, the company was manufacturing over half of all the automatic couplers in the world; in fact, it narrowly escaped antitrust action under FDR. When Sutton died right after World War Two, his son, Charles Junior, took over.
Curiously, no one knows what happened to Andrew Beard, the slave who sold his invention to the Suttons. There is no record of his life—or death. But ten years later when Charles II died unexpectedly in an automobile accident, his son Charles III took the reins of the company. He had been only twenty-two at the time and was still running the company today. His son Chip, Charles IV, was executive vice-president.
Was “Chip” a nickname for Luke? Maybe his full name was Charles Luke Sutton. Or was Chip the other Sutton brother? If I could find an organization chart, I could answer that question. Except that a privately held company isn’t subject to the same disclosure requirements as a publicly owned one, and there’s no obligation to list the company officers. I went back to Google and entered the name Charles Sutton. Happily, I ran across an article from
Forbes
profiling Sutton Services.
Charles Ashcroft Sutton III was the CEO. His son, Charles Ashcroft Sutton IV, executive vice-president. Ashcroft was his grandfather’s middle name, his great-grandfather’s, too. The CFO was Henry Banker; Jeffrey Hopkins, first vice-president. The article went on to name several other officers, none of whom were female, and none of whom I recognized. The name Luke Sutton was nowhere in the article.
I typed in “Chip Sutton.” A few sites popped up. From one of them, I learned that he was married to Jennifer Brinks from Detroit, an heiress in her own right. They lived in Winnetka, the next village over from me. She sat on the board of several North Shore charities. Then I entered the name Luke Sutton. I got nothing.
I twirled a strand of hair around my finger. The Sutton family was fabulously wealthy, rich enough for their sons to have planes for toys. But only “Chip” followed his father into the family business. Why didn’t Luke? What did he do for a living—if he, in fact, did anything besides meet Daria Flynn for drinks at the Lodge?
And what about Jimmy Saclarides, Lake Geneva’s chief of police? If he and Luke Sutton were best friends, I could understand the guy
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