Quality still resides in the New York Times. In a December Magazine retrospective, the paper reviewed the lives of noteworthies lost in 2005.
Here is one man, a man of whom I was unaware prior to reading this.
It is hard to say who was getting the better deal: Bear Stearns, a tiny Wall Street investment house, or Hans Schlesinger, who showed up for an interview in March 1936. Schlesinger, who was then 27, had arrived in New York City from Europe the day before with $50 in his pocket; he had decided to emigrate after the newly enacted Nuremberg laws prompted the president at his Frankfurt sports club, where Schlesinger excelled at field hockey, to strike him from the roster. He was a Jew, the president explained, and the opposing team would not play against a team with a Jew. So Schlesinger came to America, and here he was at 1 Wall Street, and there was the promise of another life ahead if he could only land this job. Bear Stearns, a mainly Jewish partnership, then employed some 50 people. When Joseph Bear offered him a position that day, Schlesinger immediately went to work.
He started as a runner. That meant $15 a week for running trade tickets around the firm's exchange floor.
If you read the entire entry (reproduced below, before it gets lost in the Times' archives), you'll learn about a man who worked his entire life, despite gaining significant wealth. Slade was a man who lived his life according to sensible and moral principles, and life rewarded him.
When some say that you must be "born on third base" to be successful in life, I think of people like John Slade. No guarantees are given to those who live a life as Slade did. But no one can deny that it definitely raises the odds for success.
It is hard to say who was getting the better deal: Bear Stearns, a tiny Wall Street investment house, or Hans Schlesinger, who showed up for an interview in March 1936. Schlesinger, who was then 27, had arrived in New York City from Europe the day before with $50 in his pocket; he had decided to emigrate after the newly enacted Nuremberg laws prompted the president at his Frankfurt sports club, where Schlesinger excelled at field hockey, to strike him from the roster. He was a Jew, the president explained, and the opposing team would not play against a team with a Jew. So Schlesinger came to America, and here he was at 1 Wall Street, and there was the promise of another life ahead if he could only land this job. Bear Stearns, a mainly Jewish partnership, then employed some 50 people. When Joseph Bear offered him a position that day, Schlesinger immediately went to work.
He started as a runner. That meant $15 a week for running trade tickets around the firm's exchange floor. The following year, Schlesinger made it to clerk, a promotion he later attributed to the good impression he made dancing with the partners' wives at the annual holiday party. More likely it was his resourcefulness. In the late 1930's, Schlesinger met boats arriving in New York Harbor and scanned the ship manifests for passengers from families he knew in Germany who might have some money to invest with him at Bear Stearns. Paid a salary, he was given an end-of-year bonus for productivity. He was a terrific, silver-tongued salesman, several former colleagues recall, and by then a passionate American too. In the early 1940's, he decided to change his name; when a first choice, John Sears, elicited some ribbing from co-workers for its Sears, Roebuck echoes, his boss suggested that "Slade" might go over better. So John H. Slade he became.
He served a stint in the U.S. Army, then returned to Bear Stearns and ran its risk-arbitrage department (using the firm's money to make bets on railroads and public-utility holding companies) and its foreign department (selling U.S. securities to institutions overseas). Slade wisely hired interns from all over Europe to work at Bear Stearns - and when those trainees rose to high positions in the great banks of Europe, they created a powerful network of contacts for the firm. In fact, he had an eye for talent throughout his career, mentoring two young men who went on to become top executives at the firm: Alan (Ace) Greenberg and E. John Rosenwald Jr.
When Slade died, he had been with Bear Stearns for 69 of his 97 years.
In the weeks before his death, he still visited his desk to follow the markets. He was, clearly, a man with a regimen. Get up early (he was on his exercise bike before 6 every morning). Love your job (his ardor for Bear Stearns never wavered). Always persist (denied a place on the German Olympic field hockey team in 1936, Slade made the U.S. team in 1948 and became an Olympian at age 40). Don't retire (he merely scaled back his hours). Treat people well (he claimed never to have yelled at an employee). Give back (he was an active philanthropist). Walk to work (he made a daily 23-block trek from his apartment to Bear Stearns). And then, slow down gracefully without giving up (even in his 90's, Slade walked 15 of the blocks to work - a limousine, idling behind, drove him the final 8 blocks).
John Rosenwald recounted in a eulogy how Slade's awareness of his blessings was always infused with gratitude - to his adopted country, to his family, to his firm. Can you believe that a refugee like me, Slade would ask Rosenwald in his heavily accented English, could have such good fortune? But it was more than luck. Slade's career was about the rewards of performance - an athlete to his core, he loved to win in both play and work. It was also about the rewards of adaptation and endurance. His obituary in The Wall Street Journal made a slip in noting that he had worked at Bear Stearns for seven centuries. The newspaper meant seven decades, of course, but the mistake (corrected the next day) was in some ways understandable. The financial world Slade left this year has little resemblance to the one he entered in 1936. Bear Stearns now has 12,000 employees. Wall Street has evolved from an insular culture divided by religion, where Jews and Christians rarely worked at the same firms, to a global and polyglot business. It has progressed from a small-time exchange, where 1,000-share trades were considered substantial, to a place where huge hunks of corporations zip around the world each millisecond. Fealty to your company has diminished, and so has a company's fealty to its employees. And somehow, an early retirement has become a prize rather than a penalty. Few in Slade's generation were known to fantasize about "the number," the shorthand for the millions of dollars a trader wants to amass before leaving a job on the street. Slade, a rich man, never hit the number, because for him there was no number. He would tell friends he equated retirement with death. Work was not about the wealth. Work, to which you should always walk, was about the work.
inspiring, fascinating -
Posted by: Miltiades | Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 12:15 AM