The Stock Exchange from Within

by William C. Van Antwerp

The dean of the Stock Exchange, for example, who has been an active member for fifty-five years, and who is now eighty, spends several months of each year in exploring all the little nooks and crannies of the globe, remote and inaccessible places that are terra incognita to your casual tourist. He is a mine of information; to know him means, in a way, a liberal education. If you are fortunate enough to have an hour’s chat with him (for when at work on the floor he is quite as active as any other youngster), you will find yourself in contact with a traveler of rare charm and culture, who will take you into strange lands of which the mere existence is but a faint recollection of your schoolboy studies.

He will tell you, with all his delightfully fresh and buoyant enthusiasm, of Agra and its Pearl Mosque, and of the surpassing beauty of the world’s architectural masterpiece—the Taj Mahal—with its marbles, its mosaics, and its lapis-lazuli. He will take you into Thibet, the Forbidden Land, through the jungles of the faraway Celebes, into the least-known corners of the Straits Settlements, and to the lonely isle of Robinson Crusoe. On his vacation next year he is going to the Falkland Islands, somewhere down Patagonia way, and the year after a letter may come from him sent out from the headwaters of the Yukon, or ferried down the Congo from Stanley Falls. Wherever his fancy roams, there this adventurer goes; no thought of sickness or danger or difficulty is permitted to interfere with his delightful hobby.

Naturally, in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Stock Exchange tastes are catholic and run to wide extremes. One of the members is a student of Russian literature in all its phases; he can tell you of its folklore, its peasantism, its liberal thought and its ethical ideals of society; Dostoyevski is his hobby and Melshin the poet. Beside him stands a man who has mastered the culinary art; the joy of his life is to prepare with his own hands, for the palates of his fastidious guests, dainty dishes and wonderful sauces that make an invitation to his table something worth having. One of the members is an animated concordance of Shelley, whom he studies with almost fanatical zeal; another is a disciple of Heine, whom he adores. There stands a man who went into the heart of Africa as no white man had ever done—through Somaliland into Abyssinia, thence to Lake Rudolph to hunt elephants, south to Victoria Nyanza, and finally, after hunting all the wild game of the district, on foot to the West Coast.

Near by is a traveler fresh from Mukden, the scene of the world’s greatest battle; he can tell you, too, some curious and little-known details of the awful engagement at 203-Metre Hill. Our Civil War has its survivors in a dozen Board members of to-day. One of them was shot twice at Shiloh and lived to fight the Sioux; another was a captain under Burnside at Antietam, charged the bridge at the head of all that was left of his company, and was rewarded for conspicuous gallantry; another was shot through the lungs at the second battle of Bull Run and lived through the carnage at Gettysburg; another was thrice wounded at Gettysburg and again in the Wilderness.

Here are some who charged up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and there are men who served in the navy throughout that war. Officers of high rank in the National Guard and the Naval Reserve, members of important public bodies, such as the Municipal Art Commission, the Palisades Commission, the Public School Board and the various hospital boards; mayors and other officers of suburban communities, sheriffs and deputy-sheriffs, presidents of clubs, wardens and vestrymen of churches, men beloved for their philanthropies, Oxford men, Cambridge men, Heidelberg men, graduates of all the American universities—with these and very many more like them, one is brought into intimate daily contact.

There is a legion of collectors, and these are always interesting people. One of them “goes in” for old silver, of which he has gathered a valuable display; many others collect prints, etchings, or paintings; another takes pardonable pride in his Elizabethan early editions, particularly his First Folio; another has published a standard work on the portraits of Lincoln, of which he possesses nine original negatives and many rare copies of negatives; others devote leisure hours to collecting porcelains and ceramics of all kinds, postage-stamps, coins, rugs, and tapestries. You will find here men of bucolic tastes, with hobbies in farms and extensive country estates, where one grows rare orchids and another breeds highly prized cattle, or sheep, or horses, or dogs, or poultry.

As you pause in the day’s work to listen to these interesting people talking of their pet diversions, you see why it is that hobbies are so necessary to the modern mind, and particularly to the worried mind of the Stock Exchange man. You see that the man who has nothing to divert him in leisure hours is becoming a really rare type, whereas the man of curious, busy, and active brain, who must have a hobby to be happy, is becoming more and more common. In this very marked tendency among the members of the Exchange there has been a great improvement within the last decade, and one, as I have said, that not only serves to banish the cares of to-day, but promises to become a valuable investment for the years that lie ahead.

There are some talented musicians on the floor, men who are not only proficient themselves, but who by their liberal support of all forms of music do much to encourage and maintain New York’s supremacy as a musical centre. Grand opera, the Philharmonic Society, the symphony orchestras, the choral organizations, and the army of virtuosi from abroad who have earned applause and money on these shores—all are accorded cordial support by Stock Exchange members. One of them gives rein to his altruistic tendencies by providing free concerts once a week for the submerged tenth in a crowded foreign quarter of the East Side.

In the realm of amateur sport and sportsmanship the Exchange has many enthusiastic devotees. There are several tennis champions, one of them holding a title in singles for seven years, and another a title in doubles for five years. Famous university oarsmen, football and baseball players, American golf champions, expert yachtsmen and commodores of fleets, four-in-hand drivers, polo players, horse-show judges, breeders and owners of famous stables, racquet, court-tennis, and squash champions, deep-sea fishermen and disciples of the placid Izaak, who lure their game from cowslip banks; hunters in every quarter of the world, motor-boat racers, swimmers, men of muscle and mind, men of brain and brawn, these are types that keep ever in mind the joie de vivre, the blue sky above, and all the stimulating enthusiasms of youth.

There is little need to speak of the New York Stock Exchange’s charities and benefactions, because these are well known. Scarcely a day passes that some one of the members does not ask of his fellows a contribution, however small, for a worthy charity with which he or the ladies of his family have come in contact, and invariably the mite is freely given, although there may not be time to spare to hear the story. The private and unostentatious benefactions of members go on at all times, and cannot be discussed here.