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Illinois Central Railroad - Wikipedia

The Illinois Central was chartered by the Illinois General Assembly on February 10, 1851.[6] Senator Stephen A. Douglas and later President Abraham Lincoln were both Illinois Central men who lobbied for it. Douglas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_…

owned land near the terminal in Chicago. Lincoln was a lawyer for the railroad. Upon its completion in 1856, the IC was the longest railroad in the world. Its main line went from Cairo, Illinois, at the southern tip of the state, to Galena, in the northwest corner. A branch line

went from Centralia (named for the railroad), to the rapidly growing city of Chicago. The Illinois Central, and the other "Harriman lines" owned by E.H. Harriman by the 20th century, became the target of the Illinois Central shopmen's strike of 1911.

Illinois Central was the major carrier of passengers on its Chicago-to-New Orleans mainline and between Chicago and St. Louis. IC also ran passengers on its Chicago-to-Omaha line, though it was never among the top performers on this route. Illinois Central's largest passenger

terminal, Central Station, stood at 12th Street east of Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Due to the railroad's north-south route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, Illinois Central passenger trains were one means of transport during the African American Great Migration of the

1920s

Roger Lewis (January 11, 1912 – November 12, 1987) was an American business executive. He was the CEO of General Dynamics from 1962 to 1970 and was the first CEO of Amtrak from 1971 to 1975. From 1953 to 1955, he was the Assistant United States Secretary of the Air Force.

In 1962, Henry Crown, the majority shareholder of General Dynamics recruited Lewis to take over as the president of the company, which had experienced sharp losses in 1960 and 1961 after the company wrote off development costs in its jet program

Henry Crown (June 13, 1896 –

August 14, 1990) was an American industrialist and philanthropist. Among other things, he founded the Material Service Corporation, which merged with General Dynamics in 1959. At the time of his death, he was a billionaire. Henry Crown and Company, of which he is the namesake,

is an investment firm that owns or has interests in a variety of business assets.[1] From 1951 to 1961, he was the owner of the Empire State Building.[Formed in 1954 with the merger of submarine manufacturer Electric Boat and aircraft manufacturer Canadair,[6] it evolved through

multiple mergers and divestitures and changed markedly in the post–Cold War era of defense consolidation. General Dynamics' former Fort Worth Division, which manufactured the F-16 Fighting Falcon, was sold to the Lockheed Corporation in 1993, but GD re-entered the airframe

business in 1999 with its purchase of business jet manufacturer Gulfstream Aerospace.[7]
10% of General Dynamic stock is owned by the Crown family, which includes Nancy Carrington Crown and Steven Crown. This is the family's largest single asset.

Hale was married to the former Virginia Kingsbery, and the couple had at least three sons (twins Robert Allen Hale and William Hale, and Timothy Hale).[2] Hale became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in Fort Worth, Texas and was a close associate of J. Edgar Hoover.

[3] Later he became chief of security for the Convair aircraft factory[4] and General Dynamics, and was a chairman of ASIS International. "Citing unreleased FBI documents, Hersh writes that Bobby joined his twin brother, Billy, in breaking into the Los Angeles apartment of

Judith Exner, a woman who later acknowledged having an affair with Kennedy. An FBI agent observed the break-in on Aug. 7, 1962, but made no attempt to arrest the Hale boys, according to Hersh.
In the book, Hersh speculates that the break-in was part of a successful attempt by

the Hales' father, I.B., then chief of security at General Dynamics, to blackmail Kennedy into giving the company a major defense contract."