There, they found their business took longer than they had anticipated, and their slender hoard of cash was shrinking. By the time they arrived in Schenectady, they had only a few dollars.
Their near-penniless state did not keep Bill from donning his one good suit and marching into the main offices of General Electric, where he announced that he was a stockholder and wanted certain information about the company. “They didn’t really know what to make of me — I could see that,’’ he recalled. “I told this naive story of being a small shareholder, and they didn’t know whether to talk little or talk much. And right then, it began to be evident that I had a flair for extracting information, because I did get a couple of pieces of information that were worth a little. But I couldn’t get work there.” He had thought a job there would enable him to make a more thorough investigation.
Bill and Lois were desperate for work. After three days of searching, they answered the advertisement of a farm couple who needed help with the harvest. When they arrived at the Goldfoot farm in Scotia, New York, in a rainstorm, they realized that the Goldfoots were hardly the picture of prosperity. The farm couple, for their part, looked the Wilsons over, and were reluctant to hire them. “But I insisted that I could milk and knew farming, and Lois claimed that she could cook, which was a damned lie,” Bill recalled. “She had a cookbook, but she thought she could cook for a farm. So we began getting up at four in the morning, and Lois, out of the cookbook, began doing the cooking, and that left the old woman and the old man and me out in the field.”
A motorcycle gave the young couple freedom to travel — but Lois’s planned “geographic cure’’ didn’t work out.
At first, the grueling work almost killed Bill. But after about ten days, he got into condition and was even able to spend a few hours studying his Moody’s Manuals after the day’s work was finished.
Now, a piece of incredible luck landed on them. They discovered that the Goldfoots’ farm directly adjoined the General Electric radio research laboratories! “So I got in the habit of running over and getting acquainted with the boys evenings, around the lab,” Bill said, “and pretty soon I was inside the place, and boy, with what I knew about radio, I could see plenty. I got a preview of the whole radio industry five and ten years away. I saw the beginning of sound motion pictures; I saw superheterodyne radios and console sets, and magnetic and tone reproduction, and two-way telephonic communication by shortwave.’’ He began to send in reports that impressed his Wall Street friends. “It was just a break, and I fell right into it,” he remembered.
Bill helped produce his own “breaks.” He had an ability to look and listen, to gather ideas, possibilities, theories, and facts from every available source. He could digest and synthesize that information and then present it in a logical and simplified form that almost anybody could understand. As he himself explained it in a letter to Frank Shaw: “This trip has given me the time and material to indulge in what is to me the greatest pastime in the world — the construction of theories. Nothing seems to give me as great joy as evolving a theory from a set of facts, and then seeing it justified.” If a few facts pointed to the existence of a principle or a law, Bill would test it to see whether it worked in other cases and thus had general application. He was always consolidating what worked, while carefully sidestepping theories that either were unproved or presented known dangers.
He had noticed that the farmers and others in the area used a great deal of cement, and that a considerable amount was going into concrete roads. In Moody’s Manuals, he found several cement companies that seemed to him to merit closer investigation. One that caught his eye was Giant Portland Cement in Egypt, Pennsylvania, near Allentown. The Wilsons decided that Egypt would be their next stop.
They received their $75 for the month’s work at the Goldfoots’ , and moved on. They had worked out well on the farm; in fact, the Goldfoots, so skeptical when the Wilsons first arrived, wrote them the following year to ask them to come back — with a raise!
In a field near Egypt, Bill and Lois were confined to their tent by a four-day rain- and windstorm. When a neighbor dropped in with a bottle, Bill started to drink. After the neighbor departed, Bill went into town to get another bottle. That was actually one of the very few bad drinking bouts of the entire trip — and so their year on the road did in a way do what Lois had hoped. It helped to retard the progression of Bill’s alcoholism.
During another episode, when Bill had put in enough liquor to keep himself supplied for the weekend, Lois decided to get drunk herself, to “hold a mirror up to him and show him what a fool a person appears when drunk.” Of course, her plan backfired. Bill, tight himself, thought it was all wonderful fun and kept encouraging her to drink more. Finally, she was so sick she could hardly hold her head up. The next morning, as she suffered through a hangover, Bill sat calmly curing his mild discomfort by nipping away at the hair of the dog that bit him.
Bill managed to worm his way into the Giant factory, where he discovered some important facts: “I found out how much coal they were burning to make a barrel of cement,” he said. “I read the meters on their power input and saw what that was doing. I saw how much stuff they were shipping. I took their financial statements, and this information and the discovery that they had just installed more efficient equipment meant worlds to production costs. I figured that they were making cement for less than a dollar a barrel, which was way down the line in costs. And still the stock was dawdling around in the Philadelphia market for very low figures, down around $15 a share.”
Frank Shaw was impressed. On the basis of Bill’s reports, his firm bought 5,000 shares of Giant Portland Cement for itself and 100 shares for Bill. The actual buying price was $20, which quickly climbed to $24, giving Bill a $500 profit and convincing the principals at Shaw’s firm, the J. K. Rice Company, that Bill knew what he was doing. Now, Bill received the go-ahead to look into other companies and industries. He was also authorized to draw money against the rising price of his Giant shares, which eventually reached $75 a share!
On their motorcycle, Bill and Lois headed south. In Washington, D.C., they finally enjoyed the rare luxury of a hotel room. Lois went visiting. She called on Peggy Beckwith, President Lincoln’s great-granddaughter, who summered at the family estate in Manchester. The two young women toured the Corcoran Art Gallery and then had luncheon at Peggy’s Georgetown home — quite a turnabout from Lois’s recent hobo status. Bill took himself to the U.S. Patent Office and to the Library of Congress.
Once Washington had drained their cash, they were on the road again, roaring across the Carolinas and Georgia. As they proceeded south, Bill made a number of significant investigations: the Aluminum Company of America, American Cyanamid, U.S. Cast Iron Pipe, the Southern Power Company, and the Florida real estate situation.
In Fort Myers, Florida, they visited Bill’s mother, who had remarried and was living with her new husband, Dr. Charles Strobel, on a double-decker houseboat.
Dr. Strobel had been Emily’s general practitioner from the East Dorset days; at that time, he had lived in Rutland. Dr. Strobel was also a cancer specialist, and for a time was connected with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. After Emily — who was now Dr. Emily — married him in 1923, they lived for a time in Florida, where her son and daughter-in-law now visited them.
In the spring, Bill and Lois headed north again, still traveling by motorcycle and camping. Their stops included the Coronet Phosphate Company and the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Bill had other plants that he wanted to investigate, but they also wanted to be back in Brooklyn by the middle of June — Lois’s sister Kitty was going to be married on the 17th.
Near Dayton, Tennessee, the motorcycle part of their journey ended abruptly when Lois failed to make a turn in the road because of deep sand. Lois injured her knee, and Bill, in the sidecar, went sailing over her head and broke his collarbone. They spent the next ten days in a Dayton hotel, recovering from their injuries. Finally, they shipped