WOMEN MONEY-MAKERS

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3247, 18 January 1926, Page 10

WOMEN MONEY-MAKERS

VAST FORTUNES AMASSED. MILLION IN THREE WEEKS. i _____ The 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 New York Stock Exchange. Six years ago Mrs Hogan wt£s 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 clever head and a stout heart; and instead of turning a despairing face to the 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 railway shares, and everything I touched turn • ed up trumps. “I cleared 20,000 dollars the first year. Then I became more daring; and still my luck held. At the end of the second year I had 100,000 dollars to my credit. In three years 1 was a millionaire in dollars.”

But Mrs Hogan has had many rivals as money makers among her sex. One of the most extraordinary was Mrs Hetty Green, who by her uncan-, ny finance 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 he left her 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 investment were made on her advice. Thus, when she came into her fortune, she looked on it only as the nucleus of many more millions which she herself would make.

Jj'or 50 years she led as strenuous a life as any 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 the rates were highest, and made fortunes by shrewd investments in railroad stocks and mortgage bonds. “When I see a good thing going cheap because nobody wants it,” she once said, “X buy a lot of it and tuck it away. Then, when the time comes fa Mg price for my holdings.” Before NShe died her fortune was estimated at £122,000,000, and she was one of the half-dozen richest persons in the world. Yet she spent less than £2O a month on herself. Dived in a Modest Flat.

She lived in a modest six-x-oom flat on the third floor of a house in Hoboken (the Whitechapel of New York) She 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 fur niture! You should see it! The whole lot isn't worth 50 dollars! I wouldn’t pay express charges on it!” After half a century of this Spartan life, Hetty determined at 7C( to enjoy the fruits of her gold-wi-ming. From the Hoboken slum she migrated to the Plaza Hctei, 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. Pour Millions In Two Years. Mrs Hermann Oelrichs, showed that a butterfly of society and pleasure could make milliona as easily as she could manipulate a fan or conduct a flirtation. Daughter of Senator Fair, one of the famous “Bohanza 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 real estate holdings in San Francisco for £500,000, she went to New York to pit her brains as a money-maker against the most astute and daring financiers in the world.

Instead of losing her fortune, as waa anticipated, she added to it so rapidly that, within two year*, .she had made £4,000,000.