Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [9]
Only later did Crapo meet Hetty and make the connection; but the scene stayed with him for the rest of his life as representing two of Hetty’s defining characteristics: her fiery stubbornness and her love of money. If most children’s natural inclination is to spend any booty immediately on candy or toys, Hetty showed no such urges, even as a child. Chances are that the half-dollar she earned at the dentist’s office went into a box in her room for safekeeping. She received an allowance of $1.50 per week, but, unlike other children with money in their pockets, she showed no desire to spend it. When she was eight, she later claimed, she marched down to a local bank, savings in hand, and opened her first account.
Her guardians sent Hetty away to school twice. The first time, when she was about eleven, she was sent to a Quaker school at Sandwich on Cape Cod, run by a woman named Eliza Wing. It was an austere, unforgiving, humorless place, where Hetty and the other girls were given simple food, plain rooms, and copious readings in the Bible, and were generally drilled in the virtues of self-denial. She spent a year at Friends Academy, a Quaker School in New Bedford, when she was sixteen, but missed most of the spring term with illness. Not long after that, she was sent to an altogether different school, run by Mrs. James Lowell in Boston. This was a sort of finishing school for young ladies from good Boston families. It was Aunt Sylvia who pushed for Mrs. Lowell’s school, in the hopes that it would rub off some of Hetty’s rough edges and make her a lady.
But none of these institutions made as much of an impression on Hetty as did the education she received in the area where well-brought-up girls were not expected to spend much time at all, the center of New Bedford business, the waterfront. As an older woman, Hetty told journalist Leigh Mitchell Hodges the origins of her interest in commerce: “My grandfather’s eyesight was failing and my father’s, too. And as soon as I learned to read it became my daily duty to read aloud to them the financial news of the world. In this way I came to know what stocks and bonds were, how the markets fluctuated, and the meaning of ‘bulls’ and ‘bears.’”
During these times, Hetty received the closest thing to warmth and approval that she would ever get from her father. More than a half century later, in a March 1900 article for Harper’s Bazar about women and money, she recalled fondly: “When quite a child I was required to read the reports of the stock markets and of various business transactions to my father who would carefully explain to me those things I did not understand. I was also obliged to keep a strict account of personal and household expenses. All these things were most useful in forming the mind for business responsibilities when it became necessary to assume them.”
She could not have had a better teacher than Edward Robinson. He may have married into money, but he was hardly a dandy looking for an easy life. He seized the opportunity and brought Isaac Howland Jr. and Company to its greatest heights. He was feared along the docks but always respected. His nickname, “Black Hawk,” owed itself to his dark whiskers and a certain hawklike arrangement of his features; but it also gave an effective description of a man who was dark by nature and observant of everything around him. Gideon Howland, Hetty’s grandfather and Edward’s father-in-law, died in 1847, when Hetty was thirteen years old. With the exception of minor