flâneur

Founders Notes: Hetty

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Hetty Charles Slack She was the lone woman among a gallery of nineteenth-century rogue heroes—Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Vanderbilts. She bought and sold real estate, railroads, and entire city blocks. She owned mines, and held mortgages on churches, factories, and office buildings. Major cities, including New York on more than oneoccasion, came to her, hat in hand, when they ran into financial trouble. She adhered all of her life to the simplest yet hardest-to-follow financial wisdom of all: She bought low, sold high, and never panicked during a panic. The rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society's. By casting off the social expectations of her time, she freed herself to do as she pleased, to live life on terms that she and she alone determined. She was full of life. Her personality outsized. She was a pioneer. She was witty. She never backed down from an adversary, no matter how powerful. "I always try to deal justly with everyone," she once said. "But if anyone wants to fight me I'll give him all the fight he wants." From a young age Hetty read the financial news to her father, and to her maternal grandfather, Gideon

Hetty Charles Slack She was the lone woman among a gallery of nineteenth-century rogue heroes—Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Vanderbilts. She bought and sold real estate, railroads, and entire city blocks. She owned mines, and held mortgages on churches, factories, and office buildings. Major cities, including New York on more than oneoccasion, came to her, hat in hand, when they ran into financial trouble. She adhered all of her life to the simplest yet hardest-to-follow financial wisdom of all: She bought low, sold high, and never panicked during a…

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