Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [131]
Edwin Grozier’s homage to his son was ratified soon after when Richard Grozier was profiled as a newspaper hero on the cover of Editor & Publisher, a highly regarded trade magazine. It said the judges of the Pulitzer had honored Richard for “public spirit, courage, and persistence.” The deans who had tried to kick him out of Harvard must have been surprised.
Edwin Grozier never regained his health. For the next three years, he was confined to his home while Richard ran the Post. When Edwin Grozier died in 1924, his will named Richard as the paper’s new owner and offered some final fatherly words of advice: “I urge my son, in whose integrity and ability I have full confidence, to conduct The Boston Post . . . not as a mere money-making enterprise, but primarily and zealously in the interests of the people of Boston and New England.”
In his first few years as editor and publisher, Richard exceeded his father’s high expectations, continuing the Post’s aggressive news coverage and driving circulation up above 600,000 copies a day—50 percent more than at the height of his father’s reign. In 1929, when he was forty-two, Richard married a beautiful secretary at the Post, Margaret “Peggy” Murphy. In quick succession they had two sons, Richard Jr. and David. But in 1933, Peggy Grozier died giving birth to a daughter, Mary. Richard Grozier fell into a paralyzing depression from which he never recovered.
He hired a nurse, Helen Doherty, to care for his children, and he married her the next year. But it did little to mend what his children called his broken heart. He became increasingly housebound, overseeing the Post from his Cambridge mansion. He read to his children, taught them chess, and occasionally he would take walks with his sons around the Cambridge reservoir. But as the years passed he ventured out less and withdrew further into his sadness. When depression finally consumed him, his family had him committed to McLean Hospital, where he died in 1946. He was fifty-nine. Of all the tributes he received, it is likely Richard Grozier would have been most touched by a plaque presented to his widow by the printers in the Post’s composing room, the very men he was most concerned about losing money during Ponzi’s run. Inscribed on the plaque were expressions of sorrow and “deep gratitude for the fairness and generosity of Mr. Grozier as an employer and our admiration for his qualities as a man.”
Richard Grozier’s long, slow decline took a heavy toll on the newspaper. By the early 1950s, the Post was struggling to survive. Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of a young U.S. senator with presidential aspirations, offered to buy the Post and the Globe, but only if he could own both. The Globe was not for sale, and so the Post limped further into debt. The paper eventually fell into the hands of an arrogant, shady operator named John Fox, who never paid the Grozier family the $4 million he had promised. By the mid-1950s, nothing was left of the paper Edwin and Richard Grozier had built. The Post published its last edition on October 4, 1956.
The Boston Globe bought the Post’s library and its name, lest someone try to capitalize on the paper’s glory days. Indeed, during the thirty-five years between the Post’s winning the Pulitzer for the Ponzi story and the paper’s demise, it held an enviable distinction: No other Boston newspaper was awarded the gold medal for public service.
While Ponzi was serving his federal prison term, Massachusetts authorities pressed forward with plans to try him on state charges. Ponzi fought the efforts, claiming double jeopardy, but the state prevailed. In October 1922 he was back in court, his small frame thinner and his dark hair grayer than in his heyday. But he still had style, flashing his grin for reporters and sauntering into court in a blue serge suit, a dark tie, and gray spats. His fine clothes notwithstanding, Ponzi was too broke to hire a lawyer, so he acted as his own advocate, in a strange way fulfilling