Francis I. duPont & Co. Genealogy: Part XII

-

William R. Staats & Co., Continued

William R. Staats & Co. (1951)
William R. Staats & Co., Inc.

In 1947, Jardine stepped down from the presidency and became chairman of the board. He was succeeded by Donald Royce, a former vice president and manager of the southern California branch of Blyth & Co., Inc., a San Francisco firm founded in 1914. In 1951, William R. Staats & Co., Inc. became a partnership, and Jardine, Royce and other Staats executives became general partners. (Jardine died in 1956 but his son, John Earle Jardine, Jr. (1899-1972), joined the firm in 1922.) By that time, the firm has offices in six California cities and Phoenix, Arizona, and a correspondent relationship with Clark, Dodge & Co. of New York. In 1963, Staats & Co. took over the San Francisco firm of Hooker and Fay, Inc. (founded 1938) and Charles W. Fay, the president of Hooker & Fay, joined the firm. Staats & Co. went back to being a corporation by 1964, the year it entered into negotiations to merge with Glore, Forgan & Co.

Glore Forgan, Wm. R. Staats, Inc. (founded 1965, New York)

A Minnesota native and Columbia University graduate (1930), Maurice H. Stans (1908-1998) was the son of Jan Mathias Hubert Stans (1876-1944), a Belgium native and a house painter by trade. Stans studied at Northwestern and Columbia University, but he did not graduate. He had a varied and increasingly high profile and public résume. Over the course of his career, Stans was a stenographer in Harry Levi & Co., a Chicago firm (1925); a partner in Alexander Grant & Co. (1931-1955), an accounting firm; a financial consultant to the postmaster general (1941); deputy postmaster general (1955-57); and budget director for the Eisenhower administration (1958-1961). He joined Staats & Co. in 1961 and became senior partner in 1963 before becoming president of the merged Glore Forgan, William R. Staats Inc. in 1965.

Despite optimistic forecasts, the newly merged firm ran into financial difficulties within a few years, which coincided with executive turnover. In 1969, Maurice Stans left to become Secretary of Commerce under the Nixon administration and withdrew his capital from the firm. A year after Stans resigned, Donald Royce passed away. Archie Albright (1920-1997), a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., replaced Stans as president and took over J. Russell Frogan's duties as chief executive officer. An Ohio native and graduate of Wittenberg College and Yale Law, Albright had a family background in banking; his father, Archie Albright, Sr., had been a secretary at a savings and loan bank in Ohio. Before going into investment baking, however, Albright had a career as a corporate manager at Stauffer Chemical Co.

The New York Times interpreted Albright's former experience as a corporate manager as a sign of changing times. Though Forgan remained chairman, the Times stated that his "decision to take a less active role [was] indicative of a changing of the guard in the securities industry." Albright himself stated, "This is a time when the whole investment banking and securities industry is facing profound changes. It's going to be very exciting to come into this position at a time when a lot of traditional concepts of doing business are undergoing very deep changes."

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange, 1965. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Albright's tenure at Glore Forgan, Staats did not, however, begin under auspicious circumstances. According to Alec Benn, Glore, Forgan & Co. and Wm. R. Staats & Co. had incompatible back office systems. In 1966, Maurice Stans had directed all orders to be processed through the New York office, which overloaded its capacities and led to an increase in fails. In 1969, as trading volume decreased, a "devastating bear market" took hold of Wall Street, Glore Forgan experienced even more losses. The firm was told by the NYSE that it had to increase its capital, which it accomplished first by assessing the partners. Some decided that they would leave the firm, which further decreased its capital leading the NYSE to place restrictions on the firm's activities. At that point, Alec Benn writes, "All the top officers of Glore Forgan recognized that only one alternative remained: Glore Forgan must merge with another firm."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Francis I. duPont & Co. Genealogy: Part XIII

-
Image
William R. Staats & Co., Continued F.I. duPont, Glore Forgan & Co. (1970) Wall Street was particularly interested in the fate of the new firm because duPont, Hirsch and Glore Forgan were all considered "substantial houses prior to the merger, but all were experiencing some kind of financial difficulty." The New York Times reported, "Many of Wall Street's managers believe mergers will provide the key to that future, since they theoretically will enable brokerage houses to find economies of scale that were unavailable to them before F.I. duPont, Glore Forgan & Co. probably will be a case study for the whole industry." The hope was that the merger would diversify the firm's services and its geographic footprint while also cutting costs. Hirsch & Co. was known to have "retail strength in metropolitan New York and Florida as well as Europe" while "Glore was a major-bracket investment banking house with a retail system largely
Read more

Francis I. duPont & Co. Genealogy: Part XVII

-
Image
Walston & Co., Inc., Continued Death of the Founder (1964) Walston & Co., Inc. suffered a terrible blow on May 5, 1964, when its founder, Vernon Walston, committed suicide at his office at 72 Wall Street. On his way to work that morning, he had told his chauffeur, Gustav Puigdollers, that he was going to kill himself. When they got to the office, Puigdollers went to call Walston's wife. Walston was a big-game hunter and his office was full of trophies from his hunting trips and a double barreled shotgun. Walston went into his office, took the shotgun and shot himself through the mouth. No note was left, but his associated noted that Walston has been looking "despondent" and speaking "incoherently." According to The New York Times , the day before Walston killed himself, he had a telephone interview with a Times reporter where, "speaking in an agitated voice, he expressed great dissatisfaction with the amount of stock the Walston firm was
Read more

Francis I. duPont & Co. Genealogy: Part I

-
Image
In 1974, DuPont Walston was liquidated. At that time, the histories of Francis I. duPont & Co., Glore Forgan & Co., Wm. R. Staats, Inc., Hirsch & Co., A.C. Allyn & Co. and Walston & Co., six members of the Ford Motor Company Syndicate, came to an end. Over the next several posts, we will take a closer look into the histories of each of these firms and how they all eventually became a part of DuPont Walston. Origins Eleuthére Irénée du Pont (1771-1834) founded his namesake firm, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., a chemical manufacturer, in 1802. A French immigrant and the son of a watchmaker, E.I. du Pont demonstrated an interest in the study of gunpowder from a young age. His mentor was Antoine Lavoisier , the French chemist. In 1799, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, du Pont's family immigrated to the United States. Though he returned briefly to France in 1801, du Pont settled in Delaware, where he founded the first of many gunpowder mills.
Read more