Talk:Greyhound Lines/Archives/2018

Precision, accuracy, and careful attention to details

Especially if y'all are serious about achieving GA status for this article, you would do well to pay more attention – careful attention – to details, precision, and accuracy.
That includes a need to analyze facts and the implications of them.
Today I've noticed several errors in the text, along with edits, summaries attached to them, and comments contained in the summaries.
Even the opening paragraph consists of a muddled, careless, and slapdash presentation in both grammar and the facts.
Here are a few specifics:

The GLI, the subject of the article, does not operate "across" either Canada or Mexico; there's a separate Greyhound corporate entity running in Canada.

Greyhound has lots of corporate entities so it gets fuzzy on the edges, but the says of itself Founded in 1914, Greyhound Lines, Inc. is the largest provider of intercity bus transportation, serving more than 3,800 destinations across North America" which I judge is true enough to be used without quibble (we'll quibble anyway ;-)KevinCuddeback (talk) 06:43, 1 July 2015 (UTC).

"Greyhound" was not founded (in the imprecise passive voice) in Hibbing, Minnesota, and "Greyhound" did not begin in 1914.

Carl Eric Wickman and others started operating in Hibbing in 1914, first with a partnership, later (in 1915) with a corporation (the Mesaba Transportation Company).

Yes, the history of the Greyhound story starts in Hibbing in 1914, but neither "Greyhound" nor "GLI" began either in Hibbing or in 1914.

I've tried to address this, but the convention generally is that companies can claim to be founded whenever their earliest predecessor started (e.g. United Airlines claiming to be founded in 1926, which is when Varney made the first flight).KevinCuddeback (talk) 06:43, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

In 1924, after several changes in the corporate names and structures, Wickman's growing firm, then based in Duluth, became known as the Northland Transportation Company.

About the same time Wickman and others organized also a separate company, the Automotive Investments, Inc., likewise based in Duluth, to make Northland's acquisitions.

The next year, 1925, Northland acquired both the Superior White Bus Company (of Superior, Wisconsin) and Orville Caesar, its previous owner, who remained with Wickman and eventually served as the Chairman of the Board of The Greyhound Corporation.

Later that same year, 1925, the Great Northern Railway, under Ralph Budd as its president, bought a majority ownership (90%) in Northland and hired Wickman to manage his bus firm.

Both Wickman and Caesar moved to Minneapolis, where they continued to expand Northland, using railroad money; Wickman served as the strategist, and Caesar served as the tactician.

In 1926 Wickman and several investors formed the Motor Transit Corporation (MTC) as a holding company to own controlling interests in operating carriers.

The first purchase of the MTC was the Safety Motor Coach Lines (based in Muskegon, Michigan), which, under Edwin Eckstrom, one of Wickman's investors, had begun to use the Greyhound name and the image of a greyhound dog.

Thus the MTC acquired the lawful right to use both the name and the dog.

The Obit says "the company" was organized in 1928.KevinCuddeback (talk) 06:43, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

In August 1929 the Great Northern Railway sold its interest in Northland to the MTC, which formed the Northland Greyhound Lines, which in turn took over the Northland Transportation Company.

Later that same year, 1929, the Motor Transit Corporation became renamed as The Greyhound Corporation (with an uppercase T because the word the was an integral part of the official name).

Sometime early in the 1960s – I've forgotten exactly which year – during the explosive growth and diversification of The Greyhound Corporation, the parent umbrella firm, those in charge established a separate subsidiary, wholly owned, called the Greyhound Lines, Inc., the GLI, to take over Greyhound's core motor-coach business and to insulate it from its other activities.

That company, GLI, is the one which The Greyhound Corporation sold in 1987 to the GLI Holding Company (that is, to Fred Currey and his cronies in Dallas); that's how and why the headquarters of the GLI moved from Phoenix to Dallas.

Nobody "recruited" Currey; quite to the contrary, Currey and his investors bought the GLI.

Further, Currey had not worked for any Trailways entity since 1979, when the Holiday Inns of America finally managed to unload Trailways, Inc., to Henry Lea Hillman Sr., said to be the richest man in Pittsburgh, and the Continental Trailways had not existed since 1977 or -78, when the Holiday Inns renamed the Continental Trailways as the Trailways, Inc.

After the sale of the GLI, The Greyhound Corporation, the original parent Greyhound firm, changed its name to the Greyhound-Dial Corporation, then the Dial Corporation, then parts of Dial became known as the Viad Corporation.  [The contrived name Viad appears to be a curious respelling of the former name Dial – if one scrambles the letters D, I, and A, then turns the V upside down and regards it as the Greek letter lambda – Λ – that is, the Greek equivalent of the Roman or Latin letter L.]

The website of the Viad Corporation makes no mention of its corporate history or its past relationship to Greyhound – that is, its origin as The Greyhound Corporation – as though to ignore or dismiss Greyhound or to escape from it. [The GES Exposition Services, Inc., a subsidiary of the Viad Corporation, began in the 1960s as the Greyhound Exposition Services (GES).]

Neither the GLI nor The Greyhound Corporation "established" the Premier Cruise Line; The Greyhound Corporation bought it in 1984 (and sold it about 1998).  [Thanks, Kevin, for correcting that.]

Kevin, in an edit summary, expressed uncertainty about who owned the cruise firm – Greyhound, Dial, or Viad.

The GLI never owned Premier, but The Greyhound Corporation bought Premier in 1984, then the name of the parent company became changed to Greyhound-Dial, then Dial.  [Apparently Dial sold Premier to a third party without Premier's first going to Viad.]

Much of this appears in the various articles at my website, entitled Bluehounds and Redhounds.
Three particular articles – on the Central Greyhound Lines, the Great Lakes Greyhound Lines, and the New England Greyhound Lines – contain much of the early history of The Greyhound Corporation.
If anyone wishes to use any of this material, please feel free to do so.
As always, best wishes to all,
Doc – DocRushing (talk) 05:03, 1 July 2015 (UTC).

I would invite DocRushing (talk) to make any remaining changes directly. Seems better to be bold and change them as they are spotted KevinCuddeback (talk) 21:51, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Another inaccuracy (and a big one) is the "Ameripass" paragraph. Since I visited Key West just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis on a "$99 for 99 days" ticket book, 1972 would seem to be way off on dating. I also went to upstate New York in 1966 on a similar ticket book. Maybe it was the Doc Brown Greyhound ? :)

Also, the entire section about the end of the real Greyhound - when they basically left the bus business and "diversified" into all kinds of money-losing ventures, is quite wrong-headed. There was a good published, researched bound-paper history of Greyhound that went into this in detail, but I read it a good thirty years ago so the name and author escapes me. But the events behind Greyhound's demise are quite different than what is presented here. 116.231.75.71 (talk) 13:43, 25 January 2018 (UTC)