Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408150063
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Dunlap committed suicide, according to railroad sources.
Dunlap, 72, worked his way up from his days as a brush-clearing axman to become president of NW on June 1, 1982, the day it and the old Southern Railway became the Norfolk Southern Corp.
When he retired in 1986, railroad analysts were saying that he was the last in a line of Roanoke rail chiefs. Roanoke no longer would be the primary power base of the new rail giant. When Dunlap stepped down, so did his job and title.
Dunlap, only child of an NW assistant freight manager, grew up in Old Southwest Roanoke and was a distant relative of the Confederate biographer Douglas Southall Freeman.
He used to ride a Pullman car to New York with his dad. He got to know the railroad by tagging along on business trips around the country.
Dunlap went to Hampden-Sydney College a couple of years. He joined the Army after his sophomore year.
He had been a clerk in the coal traffic department before World War II, but office work didn't appeal to him after he became a Pacific combat hero.
Fifty years ago, as a first lieutenant in the 31st ``Dixie'' Division, he and a sergeant killed about 75 Japanese soldiers attacking their company in New Guinea. Dunlap won a Silver Star for that. He was decorated, too, for bravery in the Philippines and on other Pacific islands and was made a captain.
Back in Roanoke, he became a clerk again but decided he needed to be outdoors. He pulled 22 jobs in many a railroad town: chainman, rodman, inspector, assistant yardmaster, trainmaster, superintendent, and on up the ladder.
After 20 years of service, he was a vice president for operations, then senior vice president and, finally, president of the whole system.
``He was tough, a tough railroad man,'' said John Fishwick Jr., former NW chairman. ``I don't mean he was unfair or anything like that, but we had a strike back in '78 and we ran the railroad with 3,000 people.''
Most were supervisors marshalled by Dunlap to keep a railroad going that normally was staffed by 30,000 workers. His foes this time were vandals and boxcar looters.
A 1986 newspaper profile said that Dunlap, with a .38 Special strapped to his hip, waded into picketing strikers and commanded railroad police equipped with flak jackets, helmets and riot guns. When there was violence in an Ohio town, Dunlap switched schedules so trains could race through without stopping.
Another railroad friend remembered how Dunlap once tore off his shirt and dived into murky river water to set a cable around a locomotive that had derailed.
Dunlap was said to be a tough boss, calling staff meetings at 5 a.m. and posting ``no loitering'' signs at vending machines. But he also was remembered as a boss who was there if a worker was killed or injured in an accident.
David Goode, NS chairman, president and chief executive officer, on Saturday said of Dunlap: ``Dick Dunlap was a great operating man and he had a great deal to do with the success of the Norfolk and Western. All of his friends at the railroad are greatly saddened by his passing.''
He is survived by his wife, Marie Fallwell Dunlap; a son and daughter-in-law, Richard F. Dunlap Jr. and Katherine Gardner Dunlap of Charlotte, N.C.; a daughter and son-in-law, Anne D. Stephenson and Alan E. Stephenson of Roanoke; and four grandchildren, Richard F. Koehler and Elizabeth Anne Kanady of Roanoke and Martha Fallwell Dunlap and Katherine Cary Dunlap of Charlotte.
Graveside services will be private.
by CNB