Timothy Shaler Williams

The earlier career of Timothy Shaler Williams indicated one of the paths through which the American professional man may get at least a foot-hold on politics. Williams was Albany correspondent for the old Commercial Advertiser, in days when that newspaper was published, edited and provided with news by a group of youngsters most of whom, like Williams, were hardly in their thirties. At the State House the young correspondent attracted by his suavity, tactfulness and energy the attention of Governor David B. Hill, who promptly made Williams his private secretary. Intimate service under Hill was not perhaps the surest road to high statesmanship, but it certainly was a school for practical politics and, when Hill was succeeded at Albany by Governor Roswell P. Flower, the new executive found Williams too useful a lieutenant to make a change. When Flower’s own term at Albany expired, he placed the executive secretary on the official staff of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit.

Williams was thus deflected from the political field in which preferment might conceivably have been before him. But he had learned at Albany to meet on even terms men of divergent opinions and not to be turned from his own purpose even by their powerful political or financial backing. The lesson served him well in the troublous experiences which lay before the transit system, of which he became the president nearly twenty years ago.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook