GAMBLING IS A VICE, BUT—
Famous Speculator Who Tries to Limit
His Investments to "Sure Things"
Has Had Many Stumbles.
James R. Keene, famous as a leader of the Wall Street bulls—or occasionally of the bears—asserts that he never gambles in stocks, and that gambling is one of the worst of vices.
"I try not to touch anything that is not worth while," he said. "If a stock is good and is selling under price it is legitimate to take that stock and push it up to its real value."
Several times in attempting to do that Keene has been cleaned out and left as poor as he was when he started out in California in the fifties. He was a sickly, nervous, near-sighted boy of twelve when he arrived in the West. Three years of life in the open built him up, and he started in as a prospector on his own account. It didn't pan out well, and he turned farmer for a while, left that work as a cowboy, and then put in a year as a newspaper reporter.
But the mines drew him back, and he managed to get ten thousand dollars out of the Comstock lode. With this he went to San Francisco, and when he saw how things were run on the exchange there he decided that he would enter the game. It took him three months to turn his ten thousand dollars into a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it took his opponents two days to take that away from him and leave him not only without a cent, but also heavily in debt.