Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [56]
At any rate, Ned’s bad left leg progressively deteriorated. In July of 1888, Dr. Charles McBurney, an eminent surgeon, removed it above the knee in an operation performed at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. After recovering from the operation, Ned was fitted with a cork leg. The operation, of course, gave a grim permanence to Ned’s affliction. But the procedure at least stabilized his condition, allowing him to move ahead with his life and take his place as his mother’s budding protégé.
In the days when he followed his mother along the canyons of Wall Street, Ned had daydreamed about the important financial positions he would one day inherit. “I sometimes thought that it would be nice if mother would make me president of the Chemical Bank of New York. But I had vague ideas concerning the future,” Ned told journalist James Morrow in a syndicated newspaper article published after Hetty’s death.
If Ned’s ideas were vague, Hetty’s plans for the boy were anything but. She saw bank directorships in his future, but first, he would have to learn business from the ground up. It is to Hetty’s immense credit as a mother—and, perhaps the most persuasive argument against the stereotype of her as uncaring or neglectful—that she never allowed him to use his bad leg as an excuse for inactivity or failure. Had she been a weaker or less attentive parent, she may have allowed Ned to wallow in self-pity as she went about her business. Not even Hetty’s most ardent detractors produced evidence that Ned blamed his mother for the lost leg, and when Morrow asked him to name the most important lesson he had learned from his mother, he replied, without hesitation, “Self-reliance.” That is, of course, a weighted term, and it comes from a man whose rise in business was liberally greased by his mother’s money and influence, and whose moves she would often orchestrate. Nevertheless, he would have to prove himself to his mother in a long apprenticeship.
Ned’s first job was as a clerk and handyman for the Connecticut River Railroad Company. Based in Springfield, Massachusetts, the Connecticut River Railroad provided regular service to Bellows Falls and offered express service for tourists between New York City and the White Mountains. Hetty was both a regular passenger and an investor. “She wanted me to learn railroading,” Ned told Morrow, “and the only place to learn that business is on a railroad, down on the ground among the men.” Artificial leg and all, Ned found himself patrolling a stretch of track for $10 per week, cutting weeds and helping repair track.
His next stint was with the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, based in Cincinnati. In 1890, Hetty gave him a new assignment, in Chicago, helping look after her interests there. Among his early tasks was to manage some mortgages she held that had recently fallen in value. “Get the exact sum due on each mortgage, interest and principal, fixed in your mind,” she told him. “If anyone is fool enough to offer you the full amount, take it. If you are offered less, tell the man you will give him the answer in the morning. Think the matter over carefully in the evening. If you decide that it will be to our advantage to accept the offer, say so the next day. In business generally, don’t close a bargain until you have reflected upon it overnight.”
As Ned left for Chicago, his mother gave him a package of papers, telling him to guard them on the train at all costs. Figuring that he was transporting some vast sum in negotiable bonds or other securities. Ned barely slept on the journey, keeping the package under the mattress in his berth as he lay awake. When he reached Chicago and delivered the package to the appropriate office, it turned out to contain wads of expired fire insurance policies. The delivery was simply, Ned recalled with a laugh, Mother’s way of testing his reliability.
Ned’s arrival in Chicago caused a stir far greater than most twenty-two-year-old