A nasty piece of work.
From New York Social Diary:"There is no great secret in fortune making.
All you do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent."
Wednesday, November 27, 2019. It’s been fair weather leading up to the day of the Big Turkey with the temp reaching up to 60 and the Sun shining. The city is already quieting down. By tonight everyone who is taking a long weekend out of town, will have left.Yesterday JH sent me a Diary I wrote somewhere around the turn of the century. I don’t recall what motivated me at the time, although I knew of the lady in the story when I was growing up because she was a legendary character, famous for her passion. Then, many years ago while sailing on a friend’s yawl out of Padanaram Harbor in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, I saw on a manicured point jutting out into the harbor, a massively imposing mansion. When I learned it had belonged to the lady’s son it aroused my curiosity about her. We’ve run this story before. I must admit that in re-reading, I’m still impressed by her miserliness: Hettie Green.
The press called her “The Witch of Wall Street.” The basis for the name was her irascibility and her personal hygiene. She stunk. In summertime the odor would be so foul that people working in the same bank office where she kept a desk would scheme to stay as far away from her as possible. Her long black dresses, decades out of style, would turn green and ragged from wear and filth. Her fingernails were crusty dirty. She went around for 20 years beleaguered by a painful hernia before she finally had to see the doctor. She was outraged by his fee for surgery ($150 – this was a century ago), but so desperate that she agreed. And later she tried to stiff the doctor, as was her wont whenever it came to paying for anybody’s services.She was known as “the richest woman in America” or “the richest woman in the world.” Therein lay the real reason a lot of men thought she was a witch. She’d inherited almost $7 million from her father and her aunt in 1865. That was a great fortune, comparable to a hundred million in the buying power of today’s currency (there was little or no inflation, save for the time of the Civil War, from 1800 to 1929). Between the ages of 31, when she inherited, and fifty years later, when she died, she single-handedly (and really single-handedly because she trusted no one with her money) turned that into almost $200 million (or approximately $17 billion in today’s currency).She was born Henrietta Howland Robinson in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1834, at the dawn of the Victorian age. Both her mother and father came from old, established Colonial families. Hetty’s great-grandfather went to sea at an early age, got in at the start of the American whaling industry, and eventually owned the country’s greatest whaling fleet. Her father, Edward Robinson, who joined the family whaling-ship business, was strictly interesting making money. Hetty once told a reporter, “My father told me never to give anyone anything, not even a kindness.” (ed.’s note: Doris Duke’s father James B. Duke was more humanitarian on his advice to his daughter and only child – he told her simply never to trust anybody.) With a father like Hetty’s it is no wonder that her mother often sought warmth and refuge in her sister Sylvia’s house. Edward Robinson, however, increased the family inheritance 20 times over.In her youth, Hetty had been sent to a boarding school, but only briefly. She had little interest in any of it. She preferred being at her father’s side as he conducted his daily business in New Bedford. After dinner, the girl would spend her hours reading the financial pages from the New York and Boston bigs.She had been a goodlooking young woman. By 20, attempts were made to present her to society both in Boston and New York. Her father gave her a wardrobe worth $1200 (in the tens of thousands in today’s currency), but she sold the clothes and invested the money in the stock market. She relied on an unwitting cousin she was staying with in New York to buy her what she needed....
....MUCH MORE
