Adventures of a Bystander by Drucker Peter; Drucker Peter F.;

Author:Drucker, Peter; Drucker, Peter F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 1994-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Ernest Freedberg's World

I owe my career, in large measure, to a cuckoo clock, and a particularly ugly one at that. I had returned for Christmas to my parents’ home in Vienna in the winter of 1933/34. When I finally decided to return to England and start on what I knew was an unpromising, and suspected would be a long, search for a job, my father asked me to take along a “small present” that an old friend wanted to send his son in London. It turned out to be a cuckoo clock, 5 feet tall and so heavy I could barely lift it. The train was crowded and I had to move the bulky clock to let people get on and off every time we stopped. I had to lug it from one station in Paris to another and get it on and off the cross-Channel boat. As soon as I reached Victoria Station in London, I called Richard Mosell, the recipient of the “small present”—it was then ten in the morning or so. “Why don’t you hop into a cab and deliver the clock to me right now?” he said. “Then you won’t have to carry it back home first.”

I had met Mosell casually a few times in the preceding year, but knew only that he had something to do with a bank in the City. He took me to lunch, during which we chatted about my background and my plans. Then he said, “We could use someone like you at Freedberg & Co. as analyst and economist, report writer, and executive secretary to the partners. Let’s go back to my office, and if my partners don’t object, you can start work as soon as you’re ready.”

I started the following morning and stayed with the firm until I moved to New York, three years later. During the three years at Freedberg & Co., the cuckoo clock—which Richard Mosell liked as little as I did—stood next to my desk and annoyed me every fifteen minutes by the silly noises it made.

I was told that I was a great success as a merchant banker; Freedberg & Co. certainly treated and paid me as if I were. When I finally decided to leave, they tried to dissuade me, promised me a full partnership within a few years, gave me a princely present—a first-class cabin on a two-week luxury cruise through the Mediterranean to New York for my wife and myself—and retained me for two years in a pure sinecure as their New York investment adviser. But I never enjoyed the work very much, and never felt that I was doing it well. Still, I looked forward to each day at the office. For the people were fascinating, both the members of the firm and the firm’s clients.

The firm had been started during World War I by three stock-brokers who had been forced to resign their membership in the Lon-don Stock Exchange because they were of German, and therefore enemy, birth: Max Cantor, Otto Bernheim, and Ernest Freedberg.

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