The Newtown bee., 1908-07-10
WILLIAM J. ROGERS.

WILLIAM J. ROGERS.
 Charles Elley Hall in The Chicasoan
 The patriotic American, who at the same time appreciates the ethnologi- cal process of formation through which his country has been passing for more than a century need not see any req son to deprecate, or to apologize for the undeniable fact that a large number of those who have built up our i'm mense industries have been foreign born citizens. And yet the native American. particularly the native New Yorker, may fairly indulge in little sentimental qualification when he con templates the case of a New Yorker by birth, by early education and by business training, who has taken up one American industry in its day of small things and by dint of his own special abilities and his own moral strength and integrity pushed it into it's actual position of primary importance. Such case is that of William J. Rogers, president of the Borden's Condensed Milk Company, born in May, 1S43, in a house which then occupied the south east corner of Greenwich and Frank lin streets, Manhattan, within one block of the present headquarters of the business over which he now pre- sides. N
 MT Rogers had the initial advantage of being, in the best sense, "a son of somebody" His father, Thomas Rog- CTS, sturdy product of County Car low, Ireland. came to New York early in the nineteenth century, embarked in the grocery and provision business, and on June Il, 1886, married Miss Eliza Smith in St Luke's Episcopal church, the same church where thirty years later (April 26, 1S66) William J. Rogers was married to Mary J. Jeff fers. The progeny of this union were brought up in all the salutary strict ness of discipline that might have been expected, and in these later days Will liam J. Rogers is one of those staunch Episcopalians who can look back with satisfaction upon an old-fashioned childhood, when his parents, them selves attending two church services every Sunday, made him attend two sessions of Sunday school. In 1847 Thomas Rogers adventurously built himself house in the then suburb S far from the existing center of New York, at the corner of Fortieth street and Seventh avenue, and opened there a general provision store, anticipating that the neighborhood would soon be- come sufficiently well peopled to ensure a large patronage. Here the school days of William J. Rogers continued; 1; they ended in the old public school number 35, under Principal Doan, and also Thomas Hunter, who later be- came president of the Board of Educa- tion of New York City and who is now president of the Normal State college of New York.
 Meanwhile the family once more changed their domicile. From being a successful provision dealer, Thomas Rogers had become successful build ing contractor, sharing in the erection of (among others) the original St Thomas church, on Forty-ninth street and Fifth avenue, and had removed from Fortieth street to Twentieth. William J. Rogers thus had good mor- al and mental training until his ff- teenth year, when he may be said to have first entered upon that business career, which he has never deserted for any other, from which he has never let any other business distract any part of his attention, and to which he has brought the elevating influence of, clean, straightforward principles. This was when he became clerk in the employ of Henry A. Kerr, corner of Broad way and Astor place, one of the lead ing grocers in New York in those days. In that same period the American peo- pie were preparing themselves for the st orm of civil war that was soon to burst. When it did burst William J. Rogers, in his eightee nth year, was one of the first to answer Line ln's ap- peal for men to uphold the Union by force of arms. On April 19, 1861. he was mustered into the United States service as private in Company B, Hawkins Zouaves( Ninth New York Volunteers). Incredible as it may seem, the father followed the sons example only a few months later. For once in his life Thomas Rogers, born in the year 1900, forsook the path of strict veracity when, in July, 1861, he gave his age as forty-fve, in order to be enlisted in Colonel John Cochran's First Regiment, U. s. Chausseurs-a lapse which may well be forgiven him.
 Every history of the Civil war tells of the epxloits of Hawkins Zouaves. Among those exploits was the famous charge at the battle of Antietam, when the regiment lost 67 per cent of its ac- tual strength. In this glorious but bloody engagement William J. Rogers was among the wounded; he stuck to the regiment, however. and was mus tered out with it at the completion of its term of enrolment in 1863. And here it is interesting to note the fact, and the reason for it, that this youth, who had won unstinted praise for his energy. his intelligent initiative and his gallantry during two years of hard campaigning, left the army with no higher rank than that of first sergeant. It was not merely that promotion was more difficult then than at a later stage of the war, but Colonel Rush c. Hawkins, the founder of the reg