Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
of a class of around 100. “Women didn’t have that many opportunities
back then,” she points out. “My Bryn Mawr classmates went into
teaching, medicine, law, or government. There was also an undercurrent
that anything to do with the private sector was bad. For me, it
was fun being a pioneer and having no role models.”
Among her classmates at Columbia was a red-headed, freckle-faced
man named Mario Gabelli. The two would subsequently cross paths
many times throughout their careers and would eventually work together.
“We had an accounting course together my first year and
other classes in subsequent semesters,” Bramwell says. “Columbia
didn’t have as many students then as it does now. The faculty and
deans’ wives served us tea every afternoon in a spacious first-floor
lounge that has now become a busy, crowded cafeteria. It was a great
way to get to know your classmates. I made several friends at the
school as a result, many of whom I still have to this day.”
STARTING ON WALL STREET
After earning her MBA, Bramwell became an analyst at Morgan
Guaranty Trust Company. Mario Gabelli joined Loeb Rhoads. Although
they were at separate firms, they followed several of the same companies.
“While our research overlapped, he was on the sell side and
I was on the buy side,” she says. “I went into Morgan’s investment
research department and started covering leisure time, entertainment,
and specialty retailing. The bank was in the process of expanding its
investment universe from large-cap stocks, such as Sears Roebuck,
IBM, and General Motors, to smaller companies. It was a time when
small-cap funds were being launched. Young companies like Home
Depot and McDonald’s were just starting out. Two of the earliest
stocks I followed were American Greetings, which is still an independent
company, and Lenox china, which isn’t.”
Personal computers didn’t exist at that time, and analysts worked
largely off printed annual and quarterly reports. They also attended
company meetings. “We used slide rules during my first year and a
half on the job,” Bramwell recalls. “When calculators were initially
introduced, they were the size of today’s personal computers. The
bank kept them in a special room. The creation of handheld calculators
was revolutionary. They accelerated the numbers-crunching process
immensely. The same thing has happened in recent years with com-
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