ctrabs74 wrote:
(a) What was the Bill Stead affair and (b) what happend to this Gould guy?
Anyone else may jump in to correct me if I'm wrong about certain things: I admit it's possible as it was a long time ago.
Bill Stead was hired to fill the vacant SEPTA GM position in September 1987. He came from San Francisco MUNI after a nation-wide search. While at MUNI, he was GM, and he was used to (presumably) a much more coherent organization.
As Matt Mitchell said, when Stead arrived, he almost immediately began making changes. This resulted in emnity from within SEPTA in the upper and mid-level manager ranks, especially since he was an outsider. Allegedly, they took every opportunity to stab him in the back.
Shortly after he arrived, an incident occured one day just prior to the PM rush hour. A stray dog was sighted on the MFSE tracks somewhere near the I-95 tunnel portal. MFSE service was halted to look for (and remove) the dog.
Bill Stead wanted service to resume. He began issuing orders that mid-level management could not follow (making PA announcements on the MFSE - there was no PA system in 1987) or would not follow (for fear of reprecussions from PETA or it's predecessor - he wanted to run over the dog if it was found to be in the way). There was speculation at the time that mid-level management already knew he was on his way out.
The resulting rush hour was a fiasco. When service was restored they didn't even platoon the trains. People waited forever to get onboard at stations like 13th Street and 15th Street, because the trains were already loaded with people from further upstream.
Lew Gould, the current SEPTA Board Chairman at the time, publicly criticized Bill Stead over this incident.
Shortly thereafter, Bill Stead resigned and returned to San Francisco, claiming that he had been the recipient of "threatening phone calls" telling him that it would be in his best interest to leave Philadelphia and SEPTA. His entire tenure was less than two month (maybe 5 weeks?).
The media blamed Lew Gould for mis-handling the entire affair, and also implying that he had somehow been connected with the threatening phone calls to Stead. Public pressure for Gould's ouster grew and he was finally forced to resign (early the next year, I believe).
Keep in mind that SEPTA was in crisis (sound familiar ?) at the time, and Bill Stead was portrayed as the savior of the system. That he turned out not to be (and given the way that he left) meant somebody had to be (and, realistically, should have been) held accountable.
One other note: I specifically remember after the fact a news article, perhaps by the Philadelphia Daily News, in which a reporter sought comment from the other GM candidates not selected. The response from one was to burst out laughing in the reporter's ear upon hearing the news, and then to hang up the phone without further comment.