Speed Kings Read Free Page B

through familial connections had obtained a post and, drawing on past favors and old friendships, have the door opened for him.” A couple of Fiske’s superiors at Vermilye had attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, including William Read, the top earner in the firm.
    It was in Chicago that Fiske met and married Beulah Bexford. That was in 1906. They took a house in Winnetka, up on the North Shore. It was a good time. Twelve months earlier there had been a schism in the ranks of Vermilye. Sensing that there would be more opportunities in the new firm, Fiske left to work for the new breakaway company run by Read. He was right. In 1905, Read made Fiske the bank’s head of operations in Chicago. Business was good. They had a small staff, but that didn’t stop them from expanding into Canada, Britain, and South America. And in 1909, Read made Fiske a full partner in the firm. By then he was a father. His daughter, named Beulah, just like her mother, but known to all as Peggy, had been born in 1907. Billy followed four years later, on June 4, 1911.
    Two years later, another new arrival made an even bigger impression on the Fiske family. In 1913, Read sent a young man down from New York to start work underneath him in the Chicago office. His name was Clarence Lapowski, though the world would come to know him as Clarence Dillon. He would become, in short time, one of the most influential men on Wall Street.
    Lapowski was the son of a Polish Jew, a dry goods merchant. He was educated at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and then Harvard, though he failed the Latin portion of his entrance exam three times over. While there, he lost the Lapowski and adopted his mother’s maiden name of Dillon. Despite the switch, his friends said that Dillon never tried to deny his Jewish heritage. Certainly, enough people knew to ensure that he was blackballed from plenty of members’ clubs in New York—which explains why he felt he should hide it in the first place. At Harvard, anyhow, his classmates knew him by the nickname “Baron,” given in recognition, he said, of his love of gambling, poker, and horse racing. Much as he enjoyed money, Baron Dillon never planned to work in high finance. The story goes that he bumped into a college friend out on a walk in Manhattan, and the friend asked him, “What are you doing nowadays?” Not much, was Dillon’s answer. “You should get into the banking business. Come on over and meet William Read. He is a man worth knowing.” So they strolled on over to Read’s offices. “I never had less intention of becoming a banker than on that day,” Dillon remembered. “But Mr. Read seemed well disposed.” Read was no less impressed. He asked Dillon to take a desk in the office and decide for himself whether he wanted to be a banker. Dillon replied that he would have to talk it over with his wife, since she would be reluctant to leave their home in the Midwest. So Read offered to fix him up with a job in Chicago on a starting salary of $250 a month.
    In Chicago, working as a bond salesman under Fiske, Dillon made a name for himself when he convinced the millionaire William Horlick, president of the malted milk company, to let the firm handle his investment portfolio. That was just the start of it. Dillon said he found the banking business “more fascinating than a game of no-limit stud poker,” and he went on to make a series of remarkable deals, most notably when he set up a chemical firm to produce phenol, needed for the manufacture of TNT—a shrewd move given how great demand would be once war broke out. It made him the best part of his eight-million-dollar fortune. By then Read had summoned him to New York.
    By 1916 Dillon had been made a partner at Read & Co., just three years after he started working at the firm. He was thirty-three and already, as the company history puts it, “considered not only the critical