George D. Pratt

George Dupont Pratt was as active in the interests of the Century as he was in railroading, in big game hunting, in amateur photography, in the conducting of Pratt Institute. He served loyally on the Club’s admissions committee, on its board of management and on its committee to nominate officers; in each of these responsibilities his judgment was valuable. Pratt was a member of that interesting family whose father, having accumulated his own fortune in the Standard Oil, notified his sons that he would give them a college education but that, after graduation, they must get down to hard work and learn what they were fit for. George thought of railroading; his father started him (not without the son’s acquiescence) as worker in the Long Island Railway car-shops. Although his father’s financial influence might have made him at once a dignified officer of the company, he actually ran a locomotive for a time and officiated as Superintendent of Ferries.

Eventually, Pratt worked his way up to the high position on the railway in which, as with the Oliver Optic boy railroaders of whom we used to read when considerably younger, his father might have installed him at the start. That George Pratt should subsequently have branched out on his own account into state conservation, protection against forest fires, collection of Indian relics or oriental textiles, active participation in the city’s artistic betterment as member of the Municipal Art Commission, and ardent promotion of the Boy Scout movement, merely showed how far the personal qualities of the man superseded his inherited fortune.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1936 Century Association Yearbook