In a serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile, a group of stockbrokers plotting to leave a tyrannical boss found a backer in a courtly New Orleans financier who once cornered the cotton market.
Tag: serialized memoir
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Cold Feet on the Coast: A Mobile Broker’s Conscience Nearly Sinks the Plot
The fourteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir finds the conspirators summoned to a financier’s beach house, an office secured in the Waterman Building, and one man losing his nerve.
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The Contract, the Confrontation and the Green-Faced Boss: A Mobile Walkout Remembered
The fifteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir delivers the payoff: a suspiciously generous contract, a coordinated resignation, and a boss confronted at his club.
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Bring Wall Street to Main Street: A Mobile Broker’s First Licensed Years
Part three of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: a Christmas bonus paid in whiskey, an NYSE exam graded by the boss, and a tape so slow a quote took 20 minutes to fetch.
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The Cabal Behind the Stock Board: Five Mobile Brokers Shop for a New Firm
Part twelve of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: five brokers met each afternoon after the boss left for his club, plotting to sell a ready-made Mobile office to a Wall Street firm.
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The Wrecking Ball on South Lawrence Street, and What Was Left Behind
Part nine of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: after years of haggling, the old family house sold for $18,292.80 and came down for a parking lot in the fall of 1964.
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Suppers Alone in an Empty Apartment: A Mobile Landlord Waits Out the Old House
Part eight of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: the author kept going back to his mother’s apartment for supper, while the ledgers told him the old house could not last.
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Sixteen Tenants in Five Apartments: A Reluctant Landlord on South Lawrence Street
Part seven of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: inheriting his mother’s apartment house, the author found himself collecting rent from a cast of tenants the suburbs had left behind.
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The Best Year and the Worst: A Mobile Broker Remembers November 1958
Part six of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: the year the author’s production soared was also the year he lost the mother who had raised three children on a secretary’s salary.
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The Day a Newcomer Called Zenith to 300 and Stopped a Mobile Office Cold
Part five of a memoir of a bygone Mobile: brokers gave a suspicious Northern newcomer a wide berth, until the day he staged a trading feat nobody in the office ever forgot.