Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
KIRK KAZANJIAN<br />
that if he wanted to enjoy the highest chance for success and a good<br />
in<strong>com</strong>e, the best thing he could do was prepare for a career in finance.<br />
“When I graduated from college, advertising was the big thing,” he<br />
says. “That’s where people were making premium dollars. But I figured<br />
that wasn’t going to last permanently. Ten years later, everybody<br />
wanted to be a doctor, feeling that was the sure path to success. Engineering<br />
was also very important then, because the war was ending<br />
and we were going to rebuild the world. But I was always interested<br />
in math and science. That’s why this was a very logical business for<br />
me.”<br />
STARTING AT STEIN ROE<br />
Stein Roe & Farnham was founded in 1932 by partners Sydney<br />
Stein, Frederick Roe, and Wells Farnham. “Farnham and Stein were<br />
the two bright ones who understood stocks better than anybody else,”<br />
Papp claims. “Roe ran the research department.” When Papp joined<br />
the firm in 1955, he worked closely with Farnham as part of the<br />
money management team. “I was a clerk to begin with,” he remembers.<br />
“I had a unique opportunity to see Farnham working and learned a<br />
lot. I also learned from Stein, although we seemed to have constant<br />
problems with each other. I wasn’t there very long before we started<br />
having some differences of opinion. The attitude of the firm was they<br />
really didn’t want new recruits to have an opinion on anything for a<br />
couple of years. They wanted you to just sit back and listen. They<br />
weren’t in a hurry for you to be dollar-productive. You were in<br />
school.”<br />
The three main partners were occasionally at odds with each other<br />
as well, according to Papp. “I remember Farnham disliked cigarette<br />
stocks because he thought there would be a law passed banning them<br />
after we had the original scare in the early 1950s. He was on vacation<br />
once and Stein’s <strong>com</strong>mittee put a cigarette <strong>com</strong>pany on the buy list.<br />
Farnham came back and said, ‘I see that we’ve decided to purchase<br />
cigarettes.’ He didn’t say ‘while I was gone.’ He was much more subtle<br />
than that. Instead he said, ‘I see we bought them for this and that<br />
reason. That’s a perfect description of the kinds of stocks we want in<br />
our fund, so we should definitely put that in.’ He then bought the<br />
stock for our funds, even though he hated cigarettes. He knew that<br />
doing so would make Stein furious, since he was expecting the oppos-<br />
172
Change language