MOBILE — Having walked out of one brokerage house and carried most of their clients across town to another, the Mobile brokers whose story is told in this serialized recollection expected the hard part to be over. It was not.
Business developed slowly at the new firm. Transferring accounts turned out to be a grinding, paper-by-paper process. And although the bear market had technically ended two months before the men made their move, its demise was not apparent for many months afterward — as is nearly always the case. People were not exactly falling over themselves to buy stocks from anyone.
Rules They Had Never Heard Of
The deeper shock was cultural. The new employers operated under far tighter rules than the men had known at their old shop.
- Every new account had to pass a rigid credit survey.
- Any time a customer was late paying for a purchase, an extension had to be formally obtained, with a good reason given.
- Every order had to be marked solicited or unsolicited.
- And there was a long list of other nagging requirements, a good many of which the men discovered only at the moment they broke them.
The awkward truth, as the author acknowledged, was that most of these were stock exchange rules that should have been enforced at the old firm too, and simply never were. Their new employers had no idea the men were ignorant of them. So each violation was met with a mix of unhappiness and frank disbelief when the Mobile office explained that it had not known the rule existed.
The Voice on the Wire
The back-office work for the Mobile branch was performed in New Orleans, by a staff already unhappy at having a new burden dropped on them with no additional pay or help. The Mobile men’s unfamiliarity with the firm’s procedures did nothing to improve relations.
The kingpin of that New Orleans operation was a gentleman the author calls Merlin H. A larynx operation had robbed him of ordinary speech, and communication with him was difficult. He regarded himself — with some justification — as the final authority on every rule and regulation in the business.
His favorite expression, delivered over the wire connecting the two offices, was four words long: “You’re in deep trouble.”
He seemed, the author wrote, to take genuine delight in finding something wrong and exaggerating its importance. It reached the point where the Mobile brokers were in deep trouble as soon as they stepped through the office door in the morning.
This was not merely irritating; it was expensive. A salesman, the author observed, needs to be a happy, vibrant person if he is going to persuade anyone to buy anything. There were mornings when he arrived brightly primed to do a ton of business, took one of those deep-trouble calls, lost the bounce entirely and finished the day with nothing to show for it.
He closed that first year with mediocre production — a sharp drop from the year before — and a combined income, counting both firms, that fell accordingly.
The Christmas Cards
The episode the author clearly relished retelling concerned six or seven hundred ornate Christmas cards.
In early December, the Mobile office decided to send them to its better customers. The reasoning seemed sound: in the very first year, while the men were struggling desperately to bring their accounts over to the new firm, a card in the mail was cheap goodwill. The bill came to a little over $200. They did not seek the owner’s approval, judging the sum unremarkable under the circumstances.
They had misjudged their man. The firm’s owner — wealthy, and by this account a parsimonious old soul — got the invoice and exploded. The telephone rang in Mobile at once.
“What’s this bill for Christmas cards? Did you okay this?”
“Yes, sir,” the author replied.
“You know we can’t spend money for this. You had no business doing it.”
“Yes, sir.”
More expostulations followed from the New Orleans end of the line, each one answered with the same courteous, immovable, two-word reply. Finally the old man’s patience gave out.
“Goddamn it, can’t you say anything but ‘yes, sir’?”
“No, sir,” the author replied.
The cards went out. They were, he noted with some satisfaction, well received.
A Portrait of a Vanished Trade
What makes the installment valuable, decades on, is its unsentimental picture of how the securities business actually worked before compliance departments, electronic order entry and consolidated national firms. Rules existed but enforcement was uneven and local. Back offices were staffed by human beings with grudges and telephones. A regional office’s fortunes could turn on the mood of a man in another city.
And an argument over $200 worth of Christmas cards could reach the owner of the company personally — and be remembered, with evident pleasure, forty years later.