11 Irish Tiger by Andrew M Greeley

Author:Andrew M Greeley [Greeley, Andrew M]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Dermot

THE OFFICES of DAM were peaceful the morning after my ride through the North Side. Joe McMahon was presiding with a sure touch in Jack’s office. He confidently assured all callers that “the boss” is fine. Highly strong guy. “He’ll probably be home tomorrow. You know the Irish! We all have hard heads! We got a computer over to St. Joseph’s so he can watch the indexes. Both Frodo and Samwise slipped a little in early trading, but they’re doing fine now. No, this stuff isn’t doing any good, but not much harm either. Yeah, I’ll tell him you called.”

Despite his smooth responses to the phone calls Joseph Xavier McMahon seemed woefully out of place at John Donlan’s desk. A short, round man in an off-the-rack grey suit with patches of hair around a bald head, a constant frown and darting eyes, he did not look like the market wizard he was alleged to be.

“The last time this happened was when the old fella died. He had stepped back from the business and Jackie was running it with the same intelligence as the old fella and a lot more flair. He was out in California at the place where his wife went to dry out. I’m here by myself and I don’t even know whether I have a job and people are calling me from all over the country. Jackie flew back of course and commuted to Los Angeles on weekends. Tough times for all of us, but things settled down and his poor wife came home all bright and shiny. I asked him whether I still had a job the first day he was back. ‘Of course you do, Joey,’ he says to me with a puzzled look. ‘As long as you want and with a lot more money than you’re getting.’ That’s the kind of man Jackie is.”

“You’ve been here how long?”

“Fifty-five years come next June. I came when I was eighteen and I’ll be seventy-three next month. Old enough to retire. No reason to do that. My sainted wife is dead, my two fine sons are highly successful doctors at opposite ends of the country. I’ll die in the harness.”

“And you started out as an office boy and a clerk?”

“Yeah and the old man was a tough guy to work for. Demanding, ridiculed your mistakes, but a great teacher… I loved the old bastard.”

“And when did you start making investment recommendations?”

“First year I was here. The old man made fun of me. But he wrote them down in a notebook. I kept on making them, he kept on ridiculing them, but he also followed my advice sometimes. When I was twenty-three, twenty-four, he said to me one day out of the blue, ‘I’ve followed some of your hunches, Mac, as you’ve probably noticed. We made a lot of money on them. So I’m promoting you to the title of investment adviser. Your job is to find good investments. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars more a week.’ He was a hard man with the buck, but that’s what comes of growing up during the Depression.

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