WOMEN MONEY-MAKERS

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 25, 29 December 1925, Page 11

WOMEN MONEY-MAKERS

VAST FORTUNES AMASSED. MILLION IN THREE WEEKS. Tlie sum of £1,000,000 in three weeks! Such is the colossal sum said to have been cleared by Mrs Hogan during the recent spell of frenzied gambling on the Now York Stock Exchange. Six years ago Mrs Hogan was left a widow with the American equivalent of a few hundred pounds and with three young children to support. Fortunately, she is dowered with a clover head and a stout heart; and instead.of turning a despairing face to tho future decided to try her luck in speculation. . “A palmist once told me,” she says, “that I should make a big fortune one day by speculation. So i decided this was my chance. I began to gamble in a small way in railroad shares, and everything I touched turned up trumps. “1 cleared 20,000 dollars the first year. Then I became more daring; and still my luck hold. At tho end of the second year I had 100,000 dollars to my credit, In three years I was a millionaire in dollars.”

Now Mrs Hogan has crowned her phenomenal success by one of tho most spectacular feats of money-making on record.

But Mrs Hogan has had many rivals as money-makers among her sex. One of tho most extraordinary was Mrs Hetty Green, who by her uncanny financial skill piled up £12,000,000 before she died a short time ago. IN HER BLOOD. Money-making was in Hetty’s blood; for her father before her had done so well that ho left a fortune, variously estimated at from £500,000 to a round million. As a child her favourite study was financial news and stock reports and, it is said, many of her father’s most successful investments wei-e made on her advice. . Thus, when she came into her fortune, she looked on it only as the nucleus of many more millions which sho herself would make.

For fifty years sho led as strenuous a life as ary man in Wall Street, pitting her brains against the cleverest in New York, and generally coming out a winner. She bought land in the direction in which she knew New York must expand, and sold it in later years at a fabulous profit; she lent “call money” when tho rates were highest, and made fortunate by shrewd investments in rail-road stocks and mortgage bonds.

“When I see a good thing going cheap because nobody wants it,” sho once said, “I buy a lot of it and tuck it away. Then, when the time comes, they have to hunt me up and pay me a big price for my holdings.” Before she died her fortune was estimated at £12,000,000 and she was one of the half-dozen richest persons in the world. Yet she spent less than £2O a month on herself. / LIVED IN A MODEST FLAT. She lived in a modest six-roomed flat on the third floor of a house ill Hoboken (the Whitechapel of New York). Sho did her own housework, sallied forth daily with a basket to do her shopping at the cheapest stores, and was never known to enter a cab.

Of her home, one of her poor neighbours contemptuously said: “Such furniture! You should seo it! The whole lot isn’t worth 50 dollars! I wouldn’t pay express charges on it!” After half a century of fliis Spartan life, Hetty determined at 70 to enjoy the fruits of her gold-winning. From the Hoboken slum she migrated to the Plaza Hotel, one of the most fashionable and expensive in New York, where she engaged a sumptuous suite of rooms at £IOO a month. To celebrate the transformation she gave a regal banquet to her friends—the most splendid feast money could command, served on gold plates and accompanied by “seas of champagne.” And, to crown her emancipation, she paid 60 guineas to a well-known beauty specialist to repair the ravages of time, and restore something of her lost looks. £4,000,000 IN TWO YEARS. . Mrs Hermann Oelrichs showed that a butterfly of society and pleasure could make millions as easily as sho could manipulate a fan or conduct a flirtation. Daughter of Senator Fair, one of tho famous “Bonanza Kings” of California, a very wealthy man, she decided to take the management of her fortune into her own hands, and, selling out all her r.eal estate holdings in San Francisco for £500,000, she went to New York to pit her brains as a moneymaker against the most astute and daring financiers in the world. Instead of losing her fortune, as was anticipated, she added to it so rapidly that, within two years, she had made £4,000,000.