Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [31]
At the Class Day exercises near the end of June, one of Richard’s classmates may have unwittingly explained why the heir to a newspaper fortune had so much trouble with that particular class. That is, aside from his own halfhearted effort. Delivering an address entitled “The College and the Press,” Richard’s classmate told the crowd, “One of our teachers of English composition here at Harvard concludes his classroom work each year with a little advice to his young friends with regard to journalism. The gist of it is that newspaper work, like some medicines, is beneficial only when the dose is small.”
Official word that Richard would graduate with his class came at the very last minute on June 29, 1909, a day before commencement. It was too late for his photograph to appear in the treasured Class Album. Richard had made it through Harvard, but he would not make it down the aisle. He and Vera Rumery broke off their engagement and went their separate ways.
After graduation, Richard’s friend and savior Joseph Ross found an engineering job and moved home to Ipswich for what he later called “a very routine life, interrupted by a few Caribbean cruises.” In 1912, three years after graduating from Harvard, Ross received his reward for rescuing his roommate: He married Vera Rumery.
After college, Richard packed his belongings and moved from his private dormitory to his parents’ new house, less than a mile from Harvard Square, in the most prestigious part of Cambridge. Flush with profits from the Post’s success, in October 1907 Edwin and Alice Grozier bought the enormous Queen Anne–style home at 168 Brattle Street. Alice had found the house by scouring the classified ads in the Post before the paper was printed; she furnished it much the same way, finding ads for estate sales and offering to buy items before the rest of the city knew they were available. Built two decades earlier, the house befit a powerful publisher, with gleaming woodwork, a teak-paneled ballroom designed to hold two hundred people, and a grand staircase. Christened “Riverview” by its original owner, the house allowed the son and grandson of sailing captains to look out over a sweeping lawn to the green-gray waters of the Charles River.
After scraping through college, Richard was uninterested in the routine of a job. He enrolled in Harvard Law School, but he wilted under the rigors of legal scholarship. Within a year he was finished with school and working at the Post. For the next decade, Richard followed the well-worn path of the newspaper heir, working his way through the various departments—reporter, editorial writer, print-shop apprentice—to learn the business he would someday own. For some months he even served as a pressman, laboring amid the clatter of the largest printing plant in New England, which Edwin Grozier had built with much fanfare on five floors directly beneath the Post offices on Washington Street. It was an ideal fit: Richard was a man of mechanical bent, unimpressed by the fancy scrollwork on the face of a watch but awed by its metal intestines, the screws and gears and springs that made the thing tick.
By 1920, Richard was the Post’s general manager, assistant publisher, and assistant editor. But the paper was still firmly in his father’s control, and the titles carried little power. Richard devoted himself to his work, but his performance at Harvard lingered in Edwin Grozier’s mind. Richard was given few chances to prove himself, and nothing he had done during the past decade seemed to win his father’s confidence or approval.
Yet during those years, Richard Grozier had quietly studied his father’s stunts—the elephants, the headless photos, the primitive man, the free cars, the canes. He understood them for what they were: flashes of fireworks that caught the eye and relieved the reader of his two cents before he knew what hit him. Richard also recognized that the gimmicks were a means to an end, a way to foot the bills for solid journalism. Now if only he had some way to prove how much he had learned.