MOBILE — The serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile, published anonymously under the byline "A" and running under the title Vita Sua, reached its thirteenth installment in February 2005 with the story of how a small band of discontented stockbrokers found the money and the muscle to break away from a boss they despised.
Readers arriving at that point in the series already knew the shape of the trouble. A group of brokers in a Mobile branch office — identified in the memoir only by initials, as all its characters are — had spent years under a branch manager the writer calls X, a man whose tyranny had become the organizing grievance of their working lives. They wanted out. What they needed was a firm willing to take all of them at once, and a patron with the standing to make it happen.
A friend of an uncle
The break came, as such things often did in the mid-century South, through a family connection. One of the conspirators, called R in the memoir, had an uncle who was a good friend of G.T., a senior partner of the brokerage house E.F. Hutton, based in its New Orleans office. R’s uncle made the introduction.
"We now had a live one," the memoirist wrote.
The man who cornered cotton
G.T. was, by any measure, a character worth the trouble of describing. A native Virginian, he had begun in New Orleans as a lowly clerk with the firm of Beer & Co. He was not, the memoirist observed, a man content to sit scratching figures in a ledger.
He dabbled in the cotton market — and did so with such success that, according to the story handed down, he cornered the market one year in the early 1920s and emerged with a profit of ten million dollars.
The memoirist was careful about this. He could not verify the figures, though he had read a yellowed newspaper clipping from the period suggesting the facts, if not the exact numbers, were substantially correct. He added a detail that gives the sum its full weight: in the 1920s the maximum income tax rate was 10 percent. If the ten-million-dollar figure was right, G.T. walked away with at least nine million of it — an almost unimaginable fortune for the era.
Beer & Co. had long been a small, successful New Orleans firm. When G.T. merged it into E.F. Hutton, he presumably took a substantial interest in the combined house, and added considerably to his wealth in the process.
The outsider who bought his way in
What the memoirist found most affecting about G.T. was not the money but the ambition beneath it. He was, in the writer’s description, the epitome of a Southern gentleman: a smallish man, courtly, generally deferential, exaggeratedly polite to women — though the writer would later discover he possessed a formidable temper.
His great ambition was to be accepted as an equal by the old New Orleans families. He remarked often that although he had lived in the Crescent City since 1910 and had played by every rule of its ancient social order, many New Orleanians still regarded him as an outsider.
He had certainly done his part. He was in the front rank of every civic endeavor, and the memoirist believed he had once reigned as king of Mardi Gras — an honor, he noted dryly, "distinguished chiefly by the amount of money it took to acquire it." G.T., he concluded, probably bought his way into the upper tier of New Orleans society. And yet: "money or no, he belonged there. He was indeed, in every way, the gentleman. He could have been transported back a century and played the part of Louisiana planter to perfection."
Nerves, whiskey and a public telephone
With contact established, the conspirators began making their calls to G.T. and his aide-de-camp, identified as J.P. The meetings grew fevered, and the plotters increasingly held them at the Battle House — the grand downtown Mobile hotel — the better, the memoirist admitted, to soothe their nerves with liquid refreshment.
They used the hotel’s public telephones to make their contacts. It was a security measure that carried its own risks.
The writer remembered one such evening vividly. While his colleagues sat in the lounge over a beer, he made his way at the appointed hour to the phone booth to call New Orleans. As he sat talking to J.P., who should pass by but HCL — in the memoirist’s estimation, the town’s greatest male busybody and rumor-monger.
HCL gave him a long, questioning stare, then walked into the lounge, spotted the others at their table, invited himself to sit down, and was still there when the call ended.
"You boys are up to something," he said. "These meetings and phone calls — does your Mr. X know about these?"
They assured him nothing was afoot; they were merely unwinding after a trying day. He plainly did not believe them, though the memoirist doubted he guessed the secret. There was one consolation. HCL’s opinion of X ran roughly as low as their own, and they allowed themselves to hope that, out of sheer distaste for the man, the town’s leading gossip might for once keep his tongue in his mouth.