The Porkchoppers Read Online Free PDF Page A

Coin Kensington.
    Although his formal education had ended with the eighth grade, Kensington still thought of himself as a student and listed that as his occupation whenever some form required it. His first job had been with a small co operative grain elevator where he had mastered double-entry bookkeeping in less than a week, going on at sixteen to become a teller in the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Hutchinson. The bank had had to wait until he was twenty-one before it could make him cashier.
    By 1923 he was the bank’s president, the youngest in the state, possibly the youngest in the country. After not quite a year of it he decided that he had learned all he could about Kansas banking so he resigned. Two months later he was in London, standing underneath the sign of three golden acorns on a grimy street in The City. He took a deep breath, pushed open a forbidding door, and announced to the first person he saw that, “I’m Coin Kensington from Kansas and I’m here to learn about money.”
    After an hour’s conversation and a close study of five letters of recommendation that Kensington had brought along from some Chicago and New York bankers that he had dealt with, the senior partner in the London merchant bank offered Kensington a job—at fifteen shillings a week.
    â€œBut that’s only three-fifty a week.”
    â€œIt’s something more than that, Mr. Kensington.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt’s your first lesson.”

    Three years later the merchant bank sent Kensington to New York to look after its considerable investments. “The day before I left for New York,” Kensington liked to say when telling the story, “the three senior partners had me in. Well, one of them said, ‘It won’t last, of course,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ‘Another two years,’ another one of them said, ‘three possibly.’ ‘Yes, three,’ the first one said. Then they had one of their nice little silences and after a while one of them said, ‘Do keep a sharp eye on things, Kensington,’ and another one of them said, ‘Mmmmm,’ which really meant, ‘You’d goddam better,’ so all I said was, ‘Of course,’ and because that’s all I said they seemed delighted.
    â€œWell, I’d learned about money by then. I don’t mean to brag, but I’d learned what it
is
—and there ain’t maybe two dozen men in the world who know that. So for the next three years I made them money in the New York market, I mean a lot of money. Then in July of twenty-nine I sent ’em a coded cable that had just three words, ‘Get out now.’ Well, they did and that made ’em a whole bunch more money. Then in late August I sent them another coded cable, this time four words: ‘Maximum short position advised.’ Well, they wouldn’t. Now those fellas were about as smart a bunch of moneymen as you’re likely to run across, but when it comes to selling short you got to be just a little bit inhuman like a pirate, if you’re going to make any real money, because you’re betting on catastrophe and when you do that you’re betting against the hopes of millions, which again ain’t natural, and let me tell you it takes brassgutted nerve. Well, these fellas over in London didn’t have that much nerve, although they had a right smart amount, so I sent them a nice little letter of resignation and used every dime I had to sell short on my own. Well, you know what happened. By December of twenty-nine I was a millionaire and not just on paper either and I still wasn’t quite thirty years old.”
    Kensington went on prospering through the next four decades, becoming enormously rich. He contributed sporadically and almost indiscriminately to various Democratic and Republican candidates who caught his fancy, set up a foundation “to ease my conscience,” he told the press, and, in