The third installment of a serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile finds its author in the spring of 1952, age 31, beginning a new career with a new house, a new baby and three jobs. He and his wife had built a house in a community seven miles west of downtown Mobile and moved in the week after he started at the brokerage. Their first child had arrived a month before that. It was, he concedes, a hard stretch for his wife. The neighborhood was isolated then, with virtually no commercial establishment within three miles, and he was gone almost continuously — Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings at the brokerage, then on to the newspaper on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights until 11 p.m. or later, plus Saturday and Sunday shifts. Mobile in the early 1950s was still a city where a young man with ambition could build several careers at once, and the author’s story captures that reality in detail.
No Desk, and No Soliciting
At the brokerage he was not even given a desk. There was none to spare, and the manager, not yet convinced the new man would last, was in no hurry to buy one. He filled his days with correspondence work, helped the young women mark the quotation board, changed the paper on the ticker machines and, being a decent typist, ran the wire — a simple enough device in those days that anyone who could type could operate it. He had been told plainly that he was not to solicit orders. A six-month training period was required before the New York Stock Exchange examination could be administered, and soliciting without a license was strictly forbidden. Two months in, with business slow and the manager fortified, the rule was reversed by shouting. Go out, he was told, and do some business. So he did.
His First Clients
His first account, opened May 3, 1952, bought ten shares of American Standard at 15 7/8. He opened an account for his mother the same day, and by the end of the month he had six clients. In June the manager, fortified again, reversed himself: didn’t he know he wasn’t supposed to be soliciting business, and did he want to get them all fired? That was that. He returned to his books, though he managed to sign two more clients before the end of the summer, both referrals from people he had met through his other work. The brokerage business, like much of Mobile’s white-collar economy in the 1950s, ran on personal relationships and word of mouth. The author learned quickly that a single introduction could turn into several accounts, and that the worst thing a young broker could do was to push too hard before his clients had time to settle into the relationship.
The Training Period
The six-month training period was structured around the New York Stock Exchange examination, which tested a candidate’s knowledge of securities, market structure and the rules governing brokerage firms. In the 1950s, passing the exam was a significant professional milestone, and the author took it seriously. He studied in the evenings, after his shifts at the brokerage and the newspaper, using textbooks borrowed from older brokers in the office. The exam itself was administered only a few times a year, and the failure rate was high. The author passed on his first attempt, earning the right to solicit business in his own name. That moment, more than any single client or trade, marked the true beginning of his career as a broker.
Mobile in 1952
The Mobile of the early 1950s was a city of about 130,000 people, dominated by shipbuilding, the port and the paper mills that lined the banks of the Mobile River. The downtown business district was compact, walkable and largely unchanged from the 1920s. Brokerage offices were concentrated along a few blocks of St. Joseph and St. Francis streets, within easy walking distance of the major banks and the federal courthouse. The author describes the scene as one where everybody knew everybody, where a reputation could be built or destroyed over a single handshake, and where the same names appeared on the rolls of every important institution in the city. That sense of community was both a help and a hindrance to a young broker trying to break in. It meant that introductions came easier, but it also meant that mistakes were remembered for a long time.
The Other Two Jobs
The two other jobs the author held in those years were at a local newspaper and a National Guard armory. The newspaper job, he explains, was a part-time reporting gig that he had picked up years earlier and kept on for the additional income. The armory job was a weekend obligation that paid almost nothing but gave him a title and a uniform. Both jobs, he concedes, were exhausting to maintain alongside the brokerage work, but they were also how he met the people who would become his earliest clients. Many of his first accounts came from people he had interviewed for the paper, or from fellow soldiers in the guard. In a small Southern city in the 1950s, every connection mattered, and the young broker quickly learned to treat each conversation as a potential introduction.
Lessons From the First Year
By the end of his first year in the brokerage business, the author had learned several lessons that would stay with him for the rest of his career. The first was that a single recommendation from a satisfied client could be worth more than any advertising or cold call. The second was that the worst clients were the ones who called every day with questions but never placed an order. The third, more sobering, was that the brokerage business in Mobile in 1952 was still small enough that one bad quarter could cost a young broker his job. He survived that first year, but only barely, and only because the manager who had hired him decided, at the last minute, to give him one more chance. The author would later describe that reprieve as the turning point of his entire career, the moment when he decided to commit fully to the business and stop treating it as one of three jobs he was juggling at the same time.
A Wife’s Endurance
The author is candid about what those first years cost his wife, who had married a man with three jobs and a long commute and who quickly learned that her husband’s idea of a quiet evening at home was a quick dinner and a stack of brokerage textbooks. She was several months pregnant when they moved into the new house, and the baby came early that summer. With her husband gone most of the day and most evenings, she managed the household, raised the new baby and waited for the rare evenings when he was actually home before 10 p.m. The author admits in later installments that the strain of those years nearly broke the marriage, and that he has never entirely forgiven himself for the time he missed with his first child. That kind of honest accounting is part of what gives the memoir its lasting power.
The Stock Market in 1952
The author’s first year in the brokerage business coincided with a relatively quiet period in the U.S. stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1952 traded mostly in a narrow range, with occasional dips that tested the nerves of new investors and older brokers alike. Most of the author’s early clients were buying for the long term, holding positions that they expected to appreciate over years rather than months. The kind of short-term, momentum-driven trading that would dominate later decades was almost unheard of in a small-city office like the one the author worked in. Clients bought on tips from friends, on the recommendation of their broker, or on the strength of a company’s reputation in the local community. There was little in the way of fundamental analysis, and almost no institutional research available to a small retail broker in Mobile.
The Ticker and the Quotation Board
One of the author’s early jobs at the brokerage was maintaining the quotation board, a large wooden panel that listed the prices of the most actively traded stocks. Each morning, a young woman on the staff would update the prices by hand, marking the latest quote with a small piece of chalk or a pencil. The ticker machine, which sat in a corner of the office, churned out a continuous ribbon of paper that recorded every trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The author’s job was to change the paper on the ticker several times a day and to make sure the ribbon did not back up. The technology was primitive by later standards, but it was how a Mobile brokerage in the 1950s kept up with what was happening on Wall Street in real time. The author describes the sound of the ticker as the soundtrack of his early career, a steady mechanical click that would come to mean as much to him as the ringing of a telephone.
Looking Back
The third installment of the memoir ends with the author on the cusp of his first full year as a broker. He has passed his exam, signed his first clients and learned enough of the business to begin thinking of himself as a professional rather than a trainee. The hard years of three jobs and a long commute are not over, but the trajectory is clear. By the end of the decade, he will have built a book of business large enough to support his family on brokerage income alone. The rest of the memoir, as it unfolds in subsequent installments, traces the path that took him from that modest beginning to one of the more successful brokerage careers in mid-century Mobile. The story is told without self-pity and without exaggeration, and it remains one of the more useful records of what working life was actually like in a small Southern city in the years after the war.