Original YTMP material by Peter J Reilly.
“He who sells what isn’t hissen, buys it back or goes to prison”. I learned that poem, made relevant by the GameStop short squeeze, when I was about 8 or so. If you study the cartoon above you will see a guy standing up yelling “Up we go”. That’s who taught me the poem, my old man, as Jean Shepherd would say. I don’t remember when I started referring to him that way in my mind, but it was long after I was grown up. It might be after my son started calling me “Old Man”.
My guess for a date on the drawing is about 1958. There is no question that it is the order room of Estabrook & Company in New York. The company was Boston based, but had a good sized New York office. I think the drawing is at 40 Wall Street, because the order room looks different than the one at 80 Pine Street where the old man sometimes took me on Saturday and where I worked two summers. Don’t know when they moved from 40 Wall to 80 Pine.
The guys are order clerks. My father was a senior order clerk. The fellow leaning over the counter is the interface between the reps who deal with customers and the order clerks who will decipher the scrawl of the reps on little slips of paper and relay the information to traders on the floor of the exchange. Elsewhere perhaps in a lesser building a couple of blocks a way a squad of purchase and sales clerks will straighten it all out.
In 1968, my second summer on Wall Street I would listen to the P&S clerks labor long into the night trying to balance. I had no idea what they were doing and actually don’t really know now, despite having spent long hours trying to balance things other than a brokerage firm’s business for the day. After a day of delivering stock certificates in the morning and picking up checks in the afternoon, I was sitting in the sort of waiting room where runners sat waiting for a highly trained professional operating a key punch machine to finish typing up the days business. My job was to carry the box of cards a couple of blocks to 80 Pine where the transmission to Boston would take place. Overtime just sitting and reading. It was heaven.
During my first summer I had worked at 80 Pine the main office where customers would call and the reps sat in an open bank of desks with partners having office along the wall. There was a panoramic view of the harbor on one side and a screen with the NYSE and Amex trade tapes and the Dow Jones news feed. I was in there one day when one of the reps cried out that tanks were on the street in Newark. – 1967 Summer of Love, my ass.
Among the many random things in my mother’s house was a stock certificate for some sort of toy company, so my father must have actually bought some stock at some point. There is one story about my father giving investment advice, but I have to explain the neighborhood a bit to give you context. Fairview NJ is just a bit west of the Hudson River. In the sixties it was the poorest town in the richest county (Bergen) in the country. We lived on Broad Street (later Kennedy Drive) roughly the center of the town geographically.
My mother’s family- Lyons – had been major players in town politics and quite a bit more prosperous prior to the depression. The town had peacefully transitioned from Irish to Italian rule. Our house, owned by my maternal grandmother, was deteriorating around us as everyone else’s was improving. We were the only family on the block that still heated with coal (That became a fad later, but my mother had gone to gas by then) and the only one that did not own a car. Still. My father worked on Wall Street. He put on a suit everyday to catch the Orange And Black bus to the Port Authority Bus terminal to the Eighth Avenue Subway.
The family to the right consisted of “Uncle Mike” whose actual first name I would learn when I started delivering papers was Genaro, his wife, who like quite a few of the Italian immigrant women did not speak much English, his married daughter, son-in-law, unmarried son and grandson who was a year older than me. The uncle and aunt thing confused the hell out of me. My mother was an only child and my father had two sisters and a brother. Counting spouses that gave me three uncles and three aunts, but there were a legion of others.
Uncle Mike was retired. I don’t know from what. The two other grown up men had good paying union blue collar jobs. My mother kind of resented the unmarried one having all that money. He always had a very nice car in the driveway. He was occasionally drafted into driving us someplace.
Uncle MIke was really special though. Any major event in the life of myself, my brother and my sister was likely to include having our picture taken with Uncle Mike. At any rate, the story goes that Uncle Mike came into a serious sum of money at some point. It might have been from his number hitting. (Discussion of “the numbers” will be in the advanced course on Fairview history). Uncle Mike decided to consult with his Wall Street neighbor, my old man, about investing in stocks. The old man told the much older man to pay off his mortgage. As the story goes Uncle Mike was grateful for his advice.
And extra principal payments on the mortgage is what I did with excess cash flow, after maxing tax deferred accounts, in the eighties so that my ex-house was mortgage free when full ownership went to my ex-wife. I really didn’t want to get rich so much as to avoid poverty and knock on wood it has worked out, so I can have one more fond memory of the fellow who never actually got to be an old man, dying at 53 when I was 13, but leaving me that connection that got me two summers working on Wall Street.
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