'Pass It On'. Anonymous
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electrical engineer. I remember how a former pupil of his, one of the Japanese nobility, had come in to pay him a visit, and then an assistant came in with a bar of platinum, which would be ruinously expensive if they were to plane it and so spoil it. And the old man burst into a volley of oaths. ‘This thing is going to be planed, and you do it! You do as I tell you, see?’ — showing that he was an old martinet on that side of it.”
Some weeks later, after Bill had already started working for the U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty Company, a New York Times reporter called to interview him — as one of the winners in the Edison test! Soon thereafter, Bill received a personal letter from Edison, inviting him to join the laboratories as a researcher in the acoustics department. In the test, Bill had demonstrated his considerable knowledge of sound and stringed instruments, a knowledge obviously related to his interests in radio and the violin.
Receiving an offer from Thomas Edison must have given Bill a tremendous boost; it might even have helped offset his shame at failing the M.I.T. entrance exams. It was well known that Edison placed a high value on persistence and attributed much of his own success to his refusal to give up. Tempting and flattering as the offer must have been, Bill did not accept it. In his recollections of the incident, he offered no reason for his refusal.
In the meantime, he had begun the job with the surety firm and was becoming interested; he was getting his first glimpse of Wall Street and the world of finance.
Although Bill no longer expected to enter engineering, he continued to pursue the interest in radio that had once impressed his East Dorset neighbors. “I built one of the very early superheterodyne sets that were around among amateurs there on Amity Street,” Bill recalled. “Then I began to build sets for sale. We made a little something that way.” His shop was in an attic in the building where he and Lois had now taken their own apartment at 142 Amity Street. “Superheterodyne” was the circuit for radio-frequency selection and amplification; this now common type of circuit was a vast improvement in those early years of radio. Lois remembered that Bill’s sets could pick up stations as far away as Dallas, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. (One of the sets was still in perfect working order when they moved to Bedford Hills 20 years later.)
That was not the only use to which Bill put his ingenuity. Prohibition was a new fact of life. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, it had become law in January 1920.
It did not faze Bill any more than it deterred any other serious drinker. He bought grapes and pressed them out into big crocks. He would often drink the wine, he remembered, before it was half fermented.
While the Wilsons’ life together in the early 1920’s was already troubled by Bill’s drinking, it was also a time of growth. Bill pursued his law studies for more than three years and completed the requirements for a diploma. He was too drunk, however, to pass a final examination. “I did make it up in the fall and then demanded my diploma, which they would never give me, because I was supposed to appear at the following commencement for it,” he said. “But I never appeared, and my diploma as a graduate lawyer still rests in the Brooklyn Law School. I never went back for it. I must do that before I die.”1
The Wilsons deeply desired children, and during the summer of 1922, Lois became pregnant. It was the first of three ectopic pregnancies that she was to suffer. In an ectopic pregnancy, the egg develops outside the uterus — in Lois’s case, in a Fallopian tube.
After the second such misfortune, Bill and Lois were obliged to face the fact that they would never have children of their own. Said Lois: “Bill, even when drunk, took this overwhelming disappointment with grace and with kindness to me. But his drinking had been increasing steadily. It seemed that after all hope of having children had died, his bouts with alcohol had become even more frequent.’’
Years later, when they were better off financially, they applied to adopt a child. Although they waited for a long while and inquired several times, they were told on each occasion that a suitable child had not yet been found. Bill was always sure that they were not given a child because of his drinking.2
Though Bill’s alcoholism affected the early years of his marriage, it had not progressed far enough to interfere seriously with his work. He was proving to be a capable investigator. Some of his investigations took him to Wall Street firms and brokerage houses. The great 1920’s stock market boom was just beginning, and people were already making fortunes in the market. Bill found himself drawn into this exciting new world. In addition to law, he studied business and used the couple’s limited savings to launch what would prove to be a short but spectacular investment program. “Living modestly, my wife and I saved $1,000,’’ he said. “It went into certain securities, then cheap and rather unpopular. I rightly imagined that they would someday have a great rise.”
Bill was primarily interested in electrical and utility stocks. “Lois and I owned two shares of General Electric, which people thought we had paid a fabulous sum for, being as they cost us $180 a share,” he recalled. He was right about their growth potential: “Those same shares on split-ups became worth four or five thousand dollars a share.’’
Bill noticed that while many people made a great deal of money buying and selling stocks on the basis of very little information, others lost a great deal — through similar ignorance. He decided that for a wise investment, more thorough information was needed about the factories and managements that the stocks represented.
An unusual idea in the 1920’s, it resulted in Bill’s becoming one of the market’s first securities analysts. Today, it would be unthinkable to buy shares in a company without knowing something about its management, markets, and business outlook. Brokerage firms, banks, and private companies maintain large departments to study companies and industries. Today’s investors have access to computers and data storage banks. Bill may, in fact, have been one of the very first to realize that investors should look at the real values behind the stocks. As he put it, “I had the shrewd Yankee idea that you’d better look in the horse’s mouth before you buy him.’’
His friends on Wall Street didn’t think much of his idea, and refused to put up money for an extended field trip that Bill now proposed to make to investigate plants and managements. He did interest Frank Shaw, husband of Lois’s best friend. Shaw was a keen-witted Maine Yankee who had started out as a speculator with some of his wife’s capital. He was already worth a million dollars and, as Bill put it, “mighty well knew what I was talking about.” While he refused to underwrite the project, he did ask to see whatever reports Bill wrote.
Though Bill had no guarantee that Shaw or anybody else would pay for his reports, he was so fascinated with General Electric and certain other industries that he decided to undertake a thorough investigation — with or without financial backing.
He and Lois owned a motorcycle, sidecar-equipped, that they had bought for trips to the beach. Now, they packed it with a tent, blankets, Bill’s army locker full of clothes, cooking equipment, camping gear, a set of Moody’s Manuals (financial reference books), and what little cash they possessed. In April 1925, they gave up their jobs and their apartment, and took off for Schenectady to “investigate” the General Electric Company.
Bill described their friends’ reaction to the project: They “thought a lunacy commission should be appointed.” In fact, Lois and Bill were “doing their own thing” — in 1925, an unheard-of notion! They loved camping; there was the lure of travel; and they were doing exactly what they wanted to do. Lois also had a hidden agenda: “I was so concerned about Bill’s drinking that I wanted to get him away from New York and its bars. I felt sure that during a year in the open I would be able to straighten him out.’’
How did Bill feel at that time about his drinking? “I couldn’t be impressed with its seriousness, except now and then when there was a humiliating episode,” he recalled.
As Mr. and Mrs. Wilson roared off, they hardly had the look of people embarked on a serious business venture. Their small vehicle burst from every cranny with books, radio, gasoline stove, food, blankets, a mattress, clothes trunk, and in the sidecar, perched on top of it all, Bill himself, draped and dangling over the cowl. Lois was driving.
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