Old residents of New York will recall that long before the days of Canfield's gilded palace, and long before the era of the present district attorney, Mr. Jerome, there was a gambling-house known to the commercial traveller and man-about-town as "818 Broadway," and that one of the backers of the game was William F. Waldron, or "Billy Waldron," as he was usually called. Waldron retired nearly thirty years ago from the syndicate that controlled this house and moved to Providence, where he interested himself in gambling and what, for lack of a better term, may be called the cognate industries. One of these latter was a bucket-shop of the ordinary country town type.
This bucket-shop was confined to the tender mercies of one "Jo" Lumpkin as manager. Lumpkin failed to make the business profitable, and Waldron, after attaching $500.00 that Lumpkin had on deposit in a bank in New York, turned him out. In his place he installed the present loquacious reformer of American finance, Thomas W. Lawson, or "Billy" Lawson as he was then known to the gamblers, race-track touts, and confidence men who made Providence their head-quarters.
My readers will agree with me that such weak and feeble rot is beneath any man's attention, for even if what is here charged were true, namely, that a young man of twenty-one had been so employed, it would have no bearing on his work twenty-six years afterward; but as I have decided to take cognizance of this stuff, here are the facts:
What to-day is known as the bucket-shop evil—that is, the speculation in stocks over the counter at offices conducted by brokers outside the pale of the law or the Stock Exchange—did not exist at the period mentioned. This method of conducting speculation, however, had just been invented, and many of the legitimate brokers, Stock-Exchange members, utilized the new form in their ventures. Indeed, the number of brokers and brokerage shops outside the Stock Exchange was as large, if not larger, than that of the regular houses. At the time Donohoe treats of I was doing considerable business for a young man, as will be evidenced by my business card of that period:
THOMAS W. LAWSON & CO.,
bankers and brokers.
Dealers in First-class Investment Bonds and Stocks.
Offices: Boston, Providence, New York, and Chicago.
President of the Lawson Manufacturing Company.
President of the McDonald-Lawson Manufacturing Company.
Vice-President of the Briggs Printing Machine Company.
I regularly visited every week my offices in Boston, Providence, and New York. At one time I had a Providence office in the building marked in the cut in the Donohoe story, and the sign over the door was "Thomas W. Lawson & Co."