MOBILE — The memoirs of ordinary working life rarely get written down, which is part of what makes a retired Mobile stockbroker’s serialized recollections, published in installments in January 2005, worth preserving. This one records a fortnight of controlled panic in the mid-20th-century brokerage business on Alabama’s coast.
The setup was this. The author and several colleagues had resolved to leave the local brokerage house where they had built their careers — referred to here only by initials, as the writer preferred — and to open a new Mobile office under a different firm. The old partners fought it. For a week they held the departing men in place while they arranged reinforcements: two men brought down from New York and another sent over from New Orleans to staff the Mobile office in the interim.
At the end of that week, the partners conceded that their mission was hopeless and told the men they were free to go.
Two Weeks to Build a Business
The new office could not open until August 20. That left roughly a fortnight, and it was, by the author’s account, hectic in the extreme. The men were simultaneously supervising the construction of the new office and working the telephones night and day, calling their customers and asking them to move.
This was no small request. Perhaps 95 percent of these clients had never in their lives transferred an account from one broker to another. The old firm held their stock certificates. Many of the accounts were on margin. And the men were asking them to sign papers moving everything to a firm that most of them had never heard of.
All the while, their former colleague — the man whose conduct had precipitated the walkout — was working the same phones with his new helpers, urging those same clients to stay put.
The Only Real Asset
What the departing brokers had, and all they had, was loyalty. Years of relationships, built one account at a time in a city where business was still conducted largely on the strength of a man’s word and his reputation at the Battle House bar.
The author, having been in the business longer than any of the new firm’s Mobile hires, was the most exposed. If his book of business did not follow him, there was no book of business.
It followed. Within six months he had converted roughly 90 percent of his accounts and very nearly 100 percent of the more valuable ones. He was candid about how narrow the margin had been: had just a few key accounts declined to move, it could have taken two or three years to rebuild to the level he had reached on the day he walked out.
He was also candid about the reason for his success. He would like to think, he wrote, that his sterling personality and those of his cohorts carried the day. Realistically, the clients’ opinion of the man they were leaving behind probably had just as much to do with it.
Managers in Fact, if Not in Name
There was one bureaucratic complication. The author and a colleague were installed as co-managers of the new Mobile office — but only in fact. Until the old firm formally released them, exchange rules required an approved manager of record. That role fell to the manager of the firm’s New Orleans office, who kept a room at the Battle House and spent enough days in Mobile to satisfy the requirement.
The old firm relented within a month or so, and the two men were formally installed.
A Cocktail Party at the Battle House
The opening was celebrated with a glittering reception in the Andrew Jackson Room of the Battle House Hotel — the grand old downtown hotel that had been, for generations, the place where Mobile’s business was celebrated and, often enough, conducted. A large crowd of clients and friends turned out.
The firm’s aging founder came down for the occasion and, by the author’s account, was in fine fettle: charming, sharp, and thoroughly successful at impressing the Mobilians he met.
What stayed with the author was not the business talk but a small gesture at the end of the evening. Preparing to leave early, the old man shook hands all around, then took off his straw hat, danced a brief jig with it in his hand, reached over and kissed his grown son on the temple, and left.
It was, the author wrote, an act of filial love usually reserved for daughters — and he never forgot it. The old man loved that boy.
Why It Is Worth Reading
The installment closes with a warning that all was not to be smooth sailing at the new firm. But the value of the piece lies less in its plot than in its texture: a Mobile in which a brokerage office opened with a party at the Battle House, in which gasoline sold for 18 cents a gallon at the Billups station, and in which the entire economic fate of a group of men rested on whether a few hundred people would sign a piece of paper because they trusted them.