FAIRY GOLD.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 30 December 1927, Page 7

FAIRY GOLD.

FORTUNES FADE. HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS. Two of the greatest fortunes in all American history have just disappeared, sunk with scarcely a trace, and in then parsing there is an instructive chaptei jn the nimbleness of vanishing millions i writes the New York cor respondent oi ■ ri-e “Sydney Sun.” Eleven years ago -J. Ogden Armour, heir to one of the two biggest packing plants in the world as wool as a. host of other -industries, was con sera vtively estimated to fxD worth 125,000,000 dollars. He died the other day -in London, and his heirs are now wondering if his estate is solvent. For several years his income has been so small that it was not taxable. A few days earlier, Arthur 1. Walker died and left a five million dollars to show for the 50.000,(XX) dollars which Mark Hapkins bm.lt up in Western Railways. No otliisr man in the history of the world ever lost so much of his own money as Mr Armour. Corporations have been set hack for heavier losses; promoters have thrown as many millions into forlorn hopes; empires have buen lost, hut no one of the losers was ever playing with only his own private fortuneDENTS AND CRASHES. Everything that Armour’s father toyched turned .into money for him. His son was almost as adept at dispersing it, and the. climax came when the Armour Grain Co. was recently ordered to pay 3,000,000 dollars to a farmers’ co-operative organisation which the Armour concern was .said to have swindled. Armour himself had nothing to do with the management of the concern, but it was his money that went to the farmers in settlement. The Supreme Court decision that the packing companies must get rid of most of their subsidiary corporations made another large dent, in thei Armour forcune. Then came a crash in the meat industry, and it left J. Ogden Armour owing his own corporation 50,000,000 dollars. „ , , , , , For years before that he had been dropping millions in speculative ventures that never showed a profit. He built a railway 'for freight hauling under the city of Chicago, and the bonds of the company he forme-d to build it are worthless. Twenty million dollars was Armour’s shuns of the loss. His next step wa sone- of the most ambitious irrigation projects ever attempted. It .was too ambitious and tried out on too large a scale. Armour tier son ally guaranteed the bonds, 13,000.000 dollars worth, and they are otherwise worth nothing.

THE SIMPLE LIFE. Mr Armour reacted strongly against ostentatious display, and his own life was always quite 'simp-le. His only extravagance was his daughter, Lolita, who gained great fame as “the incubator babv,” because she was .so de'ir are and‘had to be brought up in a '••n-Of.iallv-hea.ted room, kept always at ‘lui same high temperature. She was • ''-innlr? besides, hut was cured by Dt. Lorenz, the famous Viennese surgeon, hrouo-ht over specially to treat the ■ldld. By the time Lolita grew up she was a leading athlete of her sex and is now married to the son of John JMitchell, one of the country’s leading V) a n kors. The great Hopkins fortune was lost in a different manner, and a more spectacular. When the great railroad builder died a handsome young man named Searles married the widow, although shei was twenty odd years his *fMiior. He had a contract with some of his financial hackers, by which thev handled the fortune of his wife, and it shrank a hit before .she died four years later. . ... Her adopted son. cut off m the will, sued to break the document, and got a i'l 000,000-dollar settlement out of Co -1 rt Searles practically retired from i-V world, and when he died six years urn he left .his entire estate to his ■:n retarv, Arthur T. Walker But hv ♦ hat, time the. -50.000,000 dollars had shrunk to 13,000.000. . From then until a few months before he died, a few weeks ago. Walker was in constant litigat/ion vutb, the relatives- of his benefactor. He settled most of the cases out of Court and won the rest, hut he has divided among hu -•rrht brothers and .sisters only o.OUU.UUO dollars The rest went to the lawyers.