1929: The Great Crash Page #3

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the company that makes that product that I like. "

By the mid-20s, around 3 million

Americans were in the market,

and Wall Street gripped the public imagination.

With tales of fortunes being made overnight,

the idea of a great bull market - where

shares only seemed to go up - took hold.

Every popular magazine,

every newspaper, every radio station

was fascinated by what was going on

in the Stock Market.

People charted the activities of celebrities

like Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx

and were fascinated by what stocks

they happened to be speculating in.

The young comic actor Groucho Marx

invested all his savings into the market

and was so pleased with his profits on paper

that he persuaded his brothers to invest, too.

What an easy racket.

RCA went up seven points

since this morning.

I just made myself

7,000 dollars.

But it wasn't just

celebrities becoming speculators.

The big Wall Street speculators

were becoming celebrities themselves.

They were thought of as creative,

entrepreneurial and bringing wealth to America.

Joseph Kennedy, father of

the future President Kennedy,

was one of this new breed

of shrewd financial superstar.

People were fascinated because some of these

men, like Joseph Kennedy, were ordinary folks.

They were men from nowhere

and their rapid rise on the market

was a kind of inspiration to ordinary folk that

that might even be possible for them some day.

Stories circulated that anyone from bellboys

to barbers could make easy money on the market.

A shoeshine boy on Wall Street, Pat Bologna, was one

of those inspired by these tales of rags to riches.

Everyone was going

to make a fortune.

If you lived in New York,

the Stock Market was king.

My father was

probably about 17 or 18.

On a daily basis,

he would shine the shoes

of, literally,

the great men of America.

People like Joseph Kennedy,

executives like Mitchell.

He would converse with them and became somewhat

of an expert on things like the Federal Reserve

and things that you wouldn't think

that a shoeshine would be expert on.

But he was talking to the great minds

of Wall Street every day, all day.

So my father began to invest

in the Stock Market.

If the truth be told, I learned how

to read reading the stock pages.

Cos that was what my father did. I

mean, we grew up with the Stock Market.

There was the Stock Market for breakfast,

and for dinner when he came home.

The Stock Market was the world.

I started in 1928 because,

like many young people,

I wanted to go to the place where

everybody was making all this money.

My first job was to be a messenger

boy on the floor of the Exchange.

It took only a week or two to find out

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