Back in his office he called his floor broker and said firmly: “Cronin, get this straight. I want you to sell every share of stock and every bond in my personal account immediately, at the market, and to require certified checks in payment.”
Cronin asked forthrightly: “Chief, have you gone crazy?”
“I have not. Don’t waste a moment, and report regularly to me. Get your boys to work. Drop everything else.”
Born had a light, bland lunch sent in and refused to see anybody or take any calls except from the floor broker.
Cronin kept reporting that the dumping was going right along, that Mr. Born must be crazy, that the unheard-of demand for certified checks was causing alarm, and finally at the close, that Mr. Bern’s wishes were being carried out. Born told him to get the checks to him immediately.
They arrived in an hour, drawn on a dozen New York banks. W. J. Born called hi a dozen senior messengers, and dealt out the checks, one bank to a messenger. He told them to withdraw the cash, rent safe-deposit boxes of the necessary sizes in those banks where he did not already have boxes, and deposit the cash.
He then phoned the banks to confirm the weird arrangement. He was on first-name terms with at least one vice president in each bank, which helped enormously.
W. J. Born leaned back, a happy man. Let the smash come. He turned on his flashboard for the first time that day. The New York closing was sharply off. Chicago was worse. San Francisco was shaky—as he watched, the flashing figures on the composite price index at San Francisco began to drop. In five minutes it was a screaming nosedive into the pit. The closing bell stopped it short of catastrophe.
W. J. Born went out to dinner after phoning his wife that he would not be home. He returned to the office and watched a board in one of the outer rooms that carried Tokyo Exchange through the night hours, and congratulated himself as the figures told a tale of panic and rum. The dominoes were toppling, toppling, toppling.
He went to his club for the night and woke early, eating alone in an almost-deserted breakfast room. The ticker, in the lobby sputtered a good-morning as he drew on his gloves against the chilly April dawn. He stopped to watch. The ticker began spewing a tale of disaster on the great bourses of Europe, and Mr. Born walked to his office. Brokers a-plenty were arriving early, muttering hi little crowds hi the lobby and elevators.
“What do you make of it, Born?” one of them asked.
“What goes up must come down,” he said. “I’m safely out.”
“So I hear,” the man told him, with a look that Born decided was envious.
Vienna, Milan, Paris and London were telling their sorry story on the boards in the customers’ rooms. There were a few clients silting up the place already, and the night staff had been busy taking orders by phone ‘for the opening. They all were to sell at the market.
W. J. Born grinned at one of the night men and cracked a rare joke: “Want to buy a brokerage house, Willard?”
Willard glanced at the board and said: “No thanks, Mr. Born. But it was nice of you to keep me in mind.”
Most of the staff drifted hi early; the sense of crisis was heavy hi the air. Born instructed his staff to do what they could for his personal clients first, and holed up in his office.
The opening bell was the signal for hell to break loose. The tickers never had the ghost of a chance of keeping up with the crash, unquestionably the biggest and steepest hi the history of finance. Born got some pleasure out of the fact that his boys’ promptness had cut the losses of his personal clients a little. A very important banker called in midmorning to ask Born into a billion-dollar pool that would shore up the market by a show of confidence. Born said no, knowing that no show of confidence would keep Moon Mining and Smelting from opening at 27 on September llth, 1977. The banker hung up abruptly.