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
