Oscar Roy Chalk (June 7, 1907 – December 1, 1995) was a New York entrepreneur who owned real estate, airlines, bus companies, newspapers and a rail line that hauled bananas in Central America.
His diverse holdings included DC Transit, Trans Caribbean Airways, the Houdon bust of Thomas Jefferson now at Monticello, the Chalk Emerald, and the New York Spanish-language newspapers El Diario de Nueva York and La Prensa, merging them into El Diario La Prensa.
[2] Chalk owned the Georgetown Car Barn in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the famous steps where the part of "The Exorcist" was filmed.
The building was a streetcar shop erected in 1895 that supported the Capital Transit Company system, which circulated through the District of Columbia.
By Public Law 389, enacted by the United States Congress, Chalk was directed to replace all streetcar operations with buses, which was completed on January 28, 1962.
[8] Recently, Chalk was discovered to have owned for more than 41 years a 1785 painting by the artist Nicolas Benjamin Delapierre that may be the earliest known portrait of Thomas Jefferson.