Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

KIRK KAZANJIAN
THE SEARCH FOR WORK
When Stovall returned from Copenhagen in 1949, he dreamed of
becoming a securities analyst. Unfortunately, the United States was
in the midst of a recession and the brokerage business was suffering.
“I tried to find work and couldn’t,” he says. “Through one of my
father’s connections, I got a job with National Distillers, which coincidentally
was big in my native state of Kentucky. It made whiskey
and other beverage products. I had a very boring position as an accounting
clerk. Fortunately, after one year the company put me in
its first executive program. They sent me down to Louisville. I lived
with some of my aunts and had a nice time learning about how to
be a distiller and marketer of alcohol. They also taught me how alcohol
is produced, how the barrels are built, techniques for testing the grain,
and so forth.”
Still, Stovall yearned to do something more challenging, specifically
in the investment field. He left National Distillers in late 1952 to become
a mutual fund wholesaler. In essence, he was a salesperson
charged with getting brokers to sell the two funds he represented. “I
worked for a couple of older men who had a wholesaling partnership.
I was their leg man. The funds I represented no longer exist,” he laments.
“One was called Commonwealth Investment Company. It was
headquartered in San Francisco. The other was known as the Texas
Fund. It featured oil and gas companies that were located primarily
in the Southwest. I drove my little Hillman Minx auto all around
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York state talking to brokers. I
would walk into the firms, discuss our funds with them, and try to
convince them to put our literature in their sales racks. Most weren’t
very interested, but it was a great experience in cold calling.”
Mutual funds in general weren’t too popular back then. The
brokerage community was all aflutter peddling individual stocks and
bonds. “The institutional equities market hardly existed,” Stovall
points out. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s, most institutions bought
bonds and mortgages. They owned very few stocks. What equities
they did buy were local utilities, banks, and the obvious blue chips.
There were very few mutual funds around. Commonwealth was one
of the first to offer a monthly investment plan. The Wellington Fund
was also a powerful seller, particularly in Pennsylvania, where it was
exempt from that state’s personal property tax.” Wellington, incident-
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