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Chapter Three

By the time Bill was mustered out of the Army, he had proved himself a leader, and the men of his artillery battery had given him a special token of appreciation. He had an acknowledged ability to get along with others; he had some college education, an aptitude for science and mathematics, and lots of drive. He had, too, the constant support of a loving wife who was confident of his imminent rise to great heights.

He also had a sinister new companion — alcohol. Not yet apparent as a problem, a drinking pattern was nonetheless already established. When he drank, it was often excessive and sometimes accompanied by odd behavior and blackouts.

In May 1919, Bill found himself a free man. Intensely ambitious for himself, full of great dreams for the future, he had no specific plans for the present, and like many another veteran, found it difficult to adjust. For him, it was hard to accept the status of ordinary person again, without the rank and privileges of a commissioned officer. “I was much surprised, for example, in the New York subways, when the guards failed to salute me, and when the passengers pushed me around,” he said.

Because he hadn’t finished college and wasn’t really trained for any trade or profession, he also had trouble finding a job.

Lois’s father, Dr. Clark Burnham, with whom Lois and Bill were living, was a prominent man in the Brooklyn community. He used his influence to help Bill get a job as a clerk in the insurance department of the New York Central Railroad. “In fact, I worked for my brother-in-law, Cy Jones, who was at that time the head clerk.

“Well, it was a tremendous comedown from being an officer and awfully, awfully hard to take, especially from a brother-in-law. I worked there some months and turned out to be such a very bad bookkeeper and manager that the New York Central fired me. And that produced a mighty rebellion in me that I would show that town and that I would show these friends of Lois’s, in fact, I would show the whole goddamned world.’’

Bill’s resentment toward the railroad was so intense that it actually moved him, for a short time, to turn his back on the conservative economic views he had held all his life. “At that time, the socialist plum plan for taking over the railroads was in vogue, and very briefly, despite my Vermont training and origin, I turned quite socialist — a reaction, I expect, against the New York Central.”

Bill then had what he remembered as a period of “flunking and slumping’’ in his quest for another job. “Finally, I took a job on one of the New York Central piers, driving spikes in planks after the carpenters sawed them off and laid them down, and that got me up very early in the morning way over in Brooklyn, and I had to work up around 72nd Street, and I ran into the New York unions.

“Well, I wasn’t so socialistic now. I objected very much to joining the union, and I was threatened by force, and I left the job rather than join the union. And meanwhile, the drinking had been crawling up.”

It was partly to give themselves time to think and partly to get Bill away from drinking that Lois persuaded him to take a walking trip with her in Maine. From Boston, they took a boat to Portland, Maine, and walked, carrying packs and Army pup tents, from Portland to Rutland, Vermont.

A passage from the diary Lois kept on the trip shows how lighthearted and happy they were:

“Met an ultra modest red-haired man with his shirttail hanging out through a hole in the back of his pants, who, most properly, kept his eyes away from the shocking spectacle of a woman in knickers. When asked about the Saco River, he said it was three miles down the road but that he hadn’t been that far this summer. . . .

“We got a fairly early start but stopped at the first brook we came to and took our morning baths. Although almost in the center of a place called Ross’s Corners, we managed somehow to find a secluded spot. An auto with a horse hitched on behind passed us. . . .

“Spent the night on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee. We spied a mink hunting among the rocks and heard a loon calling in the stillness. The northern lights were wonderful on this cold night. . . .

“We met a joyous farmer with a broad-brimmed calico hat, who sang to his team as he drove them down the hill. He explained to us his singing encouraged the horses not to stumble.’’

After their return to Brooklyn, Lois found work with the Red Cross, as an occupational therapist at the Brooklyn Navy Hospital. She had taken a course in occupational therapy while Bill was overseas. Unlike Bill, she never had any trouble holding a job.

Bill, too, finally found a job as an investigator in fraud and embezzlement for the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company. He had also given up his somewhat vague ambition of becoming an engineer, and had enrolled instead in night classes at the Brooklyn Law School.

It was at his grandfather’s insistence that he had abandoned engineering and taken up the study of law. Although he was not sure that he wanted to become a lawyer, he knew that a knowledge of the law would be useful, whatever he finally decided on.

While Bill was completing his plans to go to work, he had answered a blind advertisement in the New York Times. To his astonishment, he now received in reply an invitation from Thomas Edison himself. Bill was requested to come to Edison’s laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, for an employment test. A heaven-sent opportunity — Edison was one of Bill’s heroes! Though the inventor was very old and his greatest achievements were behind him, he was still active.

When Bill arrived at the Edison facilities, he and a number of other applicants were taken into Edison’s own laboratory — a long, unpretentious room — and given a written examination. Edison himself was there, seated at a cheap and battered desk in a corner.

It was a difficult test, containing 286 questions, Bill remembered: “In one question, they would want to know what was the diameter of the moon, and the next question would be what are overtones on a stringed instrument, and the next question was where do they make the most shoes, and the next question would be what kind of wood do they use for oil-barrel staves, and it just covered the gamut. The obvious idea was to see whether you’d been observant in your reading and in your observation of things in life in general.

“Well, the afternoon wore on, and people finished their papers and turned them in, and I hadn’t finished. I answered all the questions I could immediately and then went over, because a lot of them were capable of estimate. Comparative populations and some scientific things could be estimated, and others you could remember if you kept working at it. So I answered a very large proportion of the questions in some fashion or other, and the old man came over and asked if I found the exam hard, and I said yes, that I thought it was very difficult.

“In the meanwhile, I’d had quite a glimpse of him. He’d been one of my heroes as an aspiring 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.

Their first stop was East Dorset, where they stayed in the Burnham cottage at Emerald Lake. Bill’s grandfather, Fayette Griffith, had died the previous year — his grandmother, Ella, having died in 1921 — and Bill had a number of tasks in connection with settling the estate.

There, they found their business took longer than they had anticipated, and their slender hoard of cash was shrinking. By the time they arrived in Schenectady, they had only a few dollars.

Their near-penniless state did not keep Bill from donning his one good suit and marching into the main offices of General Electric, where he announced that he was a stockholder and wanted certain information about the company. “They didn’t really know what to make of me — I could see that,’’ he recalled. “I told this naive story of being a small shareholder, and they didn’t know whether to talk little or talk much. And right then, it began to be evident that I had a flair for extracting information, because I did get a couple of pieces of information that were worth a little. But I couldn’t get work there.” He had thought a job there would enable him to make a more thorough investigation.

Bill and Lois were desperate for work. After three days of searching, they answered the advertisement of a farm couple who needed help with the harvest. When they arrived at the Goldfoot farm in Scotia, New York, in a rainstorm, they realized that the Goldfoots were hardly the picture of prosperity. The farm couple, for their part, looked the Wilsons over, and were reluctant to hire them. “But I insisted that I could milk and knew farming, and Lois claimed that she could cook, which was a damned lie,” Bill recalled. “She had a cookbook, but she thought she could cook for a farm. So we began getting up at four in the morning, and Lois, out of the cookbook, began doing the cooking, and that left the old woman and the old man and me out in the field.”

A motorcycle gave the young couple freedom to travel — but Lois’s planned “geographic cure’’ didn’t work out.

At first, the grueling work almost killed Bill. But after about ten days, he got into condition and was even able to spend a few hours studying his Moody’s Manuals after the day’s work was finished.

Now, a piece of incredible luck landed on them. They discovered that the Goldfoots’ farm directly adjoined the General Electric radio research laboratories! “So I got in the habit of running over and getting acquainted with the boys evenings, around the lab,” Bill said, “and pretty soon I was inside the place, and boy, with what I knew about radio, I could see plenty. I got a preview of the whole radio industry five and ten years away. I saw the beginning of sound motion pictures; I saw superheterodyne radios and console sets, and magnetic and tone reproduction, and two-way telephonic communication by shortwave.’’ He began to send in reports that impressed his Wall Street friends. “It was just a break, and I fell right into it,” he remembered.

Bill helped produce his own “breaks.” He had an ability to look and listen, to gather ideas, possibilities, theories, and facts from every available source. He could digest and synthesize that information and then present it in a logical and simplified form that almost anybody could understand. As he himself explained it in a letter to Frank Shaw: “This trip has given me the time and material to indulge in what is to me the greatest pastime in the world — the construction of theories. Nothing seems to give me as great joy as evolving a theory from a set of facts, and then seeing it justified.” If a few facts pointed to the existence of a principle or a law, Bill would test it to see whether it worked in other cases and thus had general application. He was always consolidating what worked, while carefully sidestepping theories that either were unproved or presented known dangers.

He had noticed that the farmers and others in the area used a great deal of cement, and that a considerable amount was going into concrete roads. In Moody’s Manuals, he found several cement companies that seemed to him to merit closer investigation. One that caught his eye was Giant Portland Cement in Egypt, Pennsylvania, near Allentown. The Wilsons decided that Egypt would be their next stop.

They received their $75 for the month’s work at the Goldfoots’ , and moved on. They had worked out well on the farm; in fact, the Goldfoots, so skeptical when the Wilsons first arrived, wrote them the following year to ask them to come back — with a raise!

In a field near Egypt, Bill and Lois were confined to their tent by a four-day rain- and windstorm. When a neighbor dropped in with a bottle, Bill started to drink. After the neighbor departed, Bill went into town to get another bottle. That was actually one of the very few bad drinking bouts of the entire trip — and so their year on the road did in a way do what Lois had hoped. It helped to retard the progression of Bill’s alcoholism.

During another episode, when Bill had put in enough liquor to keep himself supplied for the weekend, Lois decided to get drunk herself, to “hold a mirror up to him and show him what a fool a person appears when drunk.” Of course, her plan backfired. Bill, tight himself, thought it was all wonderful fun and kept encouraging her to drink more. Finally, she was so sick she could hardly hold her head up. The next morning, as she suffered through a hangover, Bill sat calmly curing his mild discomfort by nipping away at the hair of the dog that bit him.

Bill managed to worm his way into the Giant factory, where he discovered some important facts: “I found out how much coal they were burning to make a barrel of cement,” he said. “I read the meters on their power input and saw what that was doing. I saw how much stuff they were shipping. I took their financial statements, and this information and the discovery that they had just installed more efficient equipment meant worlds to production costs. I figured that they were making cement for less than a dollar a barrel, which was way down the line in costs. And still the stock was dawdling around in the Philadelphia market for very low figures, down around $15 a share.”

Frank Shaw was impressed. On the basis of Bill’s reports, his firm bought 5,000 shares of Giant Portland Cement for itself and 100 shares for Bill. The actual buying price was $20, which quickly climbed to $24, giving Bill a $500 profit and convincing the principals at Shaw’s firm, the J. K. Rice Company, that Bill knew what he was doing. Now, Bill received the go-ahead to look into other companies and industries. He was also authorized to draw money against the rising price of his Giant shares, which eventually reached $75 a share!

On their motorcycle, Bill and Lois headed south. In Washington, D.C., they finally enjoyed the rare luxury of a hotel room. Lois went visiting. She called on Peggy Beckwith, President Lincoln’s great-granddaughter, who summered at the family estate in Manchester. The two young women toured the Corcoran Art Gallery and then had luncheon at Peggy’s Georgetown home — quite a turnabout from Lois’s recent hobo status. Bill took himself to the U.S. Patent Office and to the Library of Congress.

Once Washington had drained their cash, they were on the road again, roaring across the Carolinas and Georgia. As they proceeded south, Bill made a number of significant investigations: the Aluminum Company of America, American Cyanamid, U.S. Cast Iron Pipe, the Southern Power Company, and the Florida real estate situation.

In Fort Myers, Florida, they visited Bill’s mother, who had remarried and was living with her new husband, Dr. Charles Strobel, on a double-decker houseboat.

Dr. Strobel had been Emily’s general practitioner from the East Dorset days; at that time, he had lived in Rutland. Dr. Strobel was also a cancer specialist, and for a time was connected with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. After Emily — who was now Dr. Emily — married him in 1923, they lived for a time in Florida, where her son and daughter-in-law now visited them.

In the spring, Bill and Lois headed north again, still traveling by motorcycle and camping. Their stops included the Coronet Phosphate Company and the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Bill had other plants that he wanted to investigate, but they also wanted to be back in Brooklyn by the middle of June — Lois’s sister Kitty was going to be married on the 17th.

Near Dayton, Tennessee, the motorcycle part of their journey ended abruptly when Lois failed to make a turn in the road because of deep sand. Lois injured her knee, and Bill, in the sidecar, went sailing over her head and broke his collarbone. They spent the next ten days in a Dayton hotel, recovering from their injuries. Finally, they shipped the motorcycle and their equipment home, and caught the train to New York, arriving in Brooklyn just in time for Lois to limp up the aisle as Kitty’s matron of honor.

It was June 1926. Bill was on the threshold of what promised to be one of the most exciting periods of his life. His financial reports to Shaw were proving enormously successful. He was given a position with the firm, an expense account, and a $20,000 line of credit for buying stocks. He described it thus:

“For the next few years fortune threw money and applause my way. I had arrived. My judgment and ideas were followed by many to the tune of paper millions. The great boom of the late twenties was seething and swelling. Drink was taking an important and exhilarating part in my life. There was loud talk in the jazz places uptown. Everyone spent in thousands and chattered in millions. Scoffers could scoff and be damned. I made a host of fair-weather friends.’’

Bill had been right in believing that his on-site investigations would yield results. Lois had been wrong in believing that a year away from the New York bars would end his drinking.

1. He never did obtain the diploma. In later years, he would discuss this phenomenon at some length as a symptom — i.e., the alcoholic’s tendency to get drunk and so destroy the well-deserved fruits of hard work and sustained effort.

2. After his death, Lois learned that this was true. They had given the names of friends as references to the adoption agency. One of these friends told the agency that they would not make reliable parents, because Bill drank so much.