Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [102]
But his interests didn’t end there. He owned a large collection of erotic pictures, many of them on glass negatives, and the enormous dried penis of a whale, which he displayed prominently at the entrance to the mansion, where it loomed over guests who, to Ned’s delight, had no idea what it was. A statue of a naked female stood in the foyer, clutching a fishing pole whose line dangled into the cavity of a gold spittoon.
Despite all of his spending, Ned did not, as is sometimes suggested, blow through his mother’s fortune. In fact, he proved to be a fairly able custodian of the principal that she left to him and to Sylvia. He did not double, triple, or quadruple the money, as his mother would no doubt have done. It was perhaps among his graces that he realized enough was enough. He lacked Hetty’s burning drive to acquire money, and was instead interested in finding ever more creative ways to spend it. But he was careful not to squander the principal. The several million dollars he received in annual interest was more than enough income to cover even his most expensive hobbies and interests. Wilbur Potter, in the offices at 111 Broadway, continued to handle investments for Hetty’s estate, but he cleared purchases of securities through Ned.
Correspondence between Ned and his New York brokers, R. L. Day and Company, reveals him to be an active investor. He stayed true to his mother’s formula of maintaining conservative investments and copious reserves of cash, and was able to navigate the Great Depression more or less unscathed. During the Depression he bought stock, in keeping with Hetty’s dictum to buy when everyone else is selling. R. L. Day sent him detailed reports on blue-chip companies such as Otis Elevator and AT&T. On a single day in June of 1930, eight months after the stock market crash, Ned spent more than $250,000 for 295 shares of AT&T, 500 shares of Chase National Bank, and 1,400 shares of Southern Pacific, the company once owned by his mother’s mortal enemy, Collis P. Huntington. In 1928, Ned had sold his beloved Texas Midland Railroad to Southern Pacific. His financial timing was impeccable, a trait that was clearly passed on to him from his mother and grandfather, Edward Mott Robinson. Shortly after the sale, Walter P. Allen, his old banker from Terrell, wrote to tell him that new, hard-surfaced roads were sprouting all over the state, carrying an influx of trucks and passenger buses along the same route as rail tracks. “I think you sold the Midland just in time,” Allen wrote. The union of the Midland and the Southern Pacific added a final coda to the long feud between Hetty and Huntington.
Ned also continued to use the Round Hill property to explore a spectacular array of interests, sometimes to the chagrin of neighbors. He had a keen eye for emerging technologies and developments. In 1923, he took out a license to operate a radio station on the property. He lavished money on the enterprise, turning it into one of the most technologically advanced stations in the country. Just to the right of the mansion, he built a studio with a fully equipped music room. The station generated a signal strong enough to be picked up by radio operators in England. For the benefit of the many people who did not have radio in those days, Ned had radio features broadcast by amplifiers around the property, and invited the public to come listen. They arrived in droves. As many as 15,000 people turned out on September 14, 1923, to hear an announcer describe boxer Jack Dempsey’s pummeling of Luis Firpo. Cars jamming Smith Neck Road at the entrance to the estate created what historian Elliott Burris Knowlton called “one of the greatest traffic jams in South Dartmouth history.”
Like Jay Gatsby, Ned loved to throw open his gates to the public. They flocked to his beach in the summertime. Knowlton quoted