Free Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff Page B

turning up throughout North and South America and everywhere else from Europe and India to China and the South Sea Islands. Ponzi found work as a sixteen-dollar-a-week clerk in the foreign sales department, helping the company live up to its motto: “The Sun Never Sets on a Wichita Truck.”
    The company’s extensive foreign business was done by mail and cable, transacted in a half dozen or so languages that Ponzi knew either fluently or passably. In addition, Ponzi had to school himself in the esoteric business areas of foreign currencies and exchange rates, shipping routes, customs tariffs, and postal and telegraph fees. It was the kind of knowledge he realized he could use to make a name for himself.
    First, though, he had to get out of sleepy Wichita Falls. His chance came in December 1916, when he got word that Italy was seeking emigrants as reservists to reinforce its armies for the Great War. Ponzi was prepared to fight for his homeland, so he went to New York and boarded a steamer bound for Italy. But he never made it out of the harbor.
    Before the ship weighed anchor, he learned from the local consul’s office that the Italian government would not pay reservists’ fares or expenses for the trip home. Fighting was one thing; paying for it was another. Incensed, Ponzi left the ship, though not in time to remove some of his luggage, which went on to Italy without him. By some accounts, he was so eager to avoid paying the fare he jumped overboard and swam the short distance to the pier.
    Stuck in New York, Ponzi again scoured the help wanted ads. One seemed written just for him. The J. R. Poole Company needed a clerk for its import-export business. The salary was only fair, about sixteen dollars a week, but Ponzi liked the location. After thirteen years of roughing it through North America, Ponzi was returning to the city where he had first landed in search of gold: Boston.

Richard Grozier during his difficult years at Harvard.
    Mary Grozier
    C HAPTER F IVE
    â€œA S RESTLESS AS THE SEA ”
    E dwin Grozier’s devotion to the
Post
did not leave much time for family. As he put it, “There were many times when I worked twenty-four hours a day for several days in succession.” Even when he was not on News-paper Row, work followed him home. A frequent guest at his dinner table was the
Globe
’s General Taylor. One observer wrote of Grozier, “The bulk of the work in every department of the paper—business, circulation, editorial—all fell on his shoulders. He did not know what it was to rest. . . . All his work was for the
Post
and there his heart was—with the paper, its employees, and its readers.”
    With his heart at the
Post,
the job of rearing his children fell to his wife, Alice, a serious woman who oversaw the care of their son, Richard, and daughter, Helen. Edwin Grozier was at once distant from and demanding of his children. One of the few pastimes father and son shared was chess. Thanks to Edwin’s success, the family lived increasingly well, taking lavish vacations when he could be pried away from the
Post
and hiring servants at their home in a bowfront town house on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street. A friend of Edwin’s recalled visiting the family there and seeing young Richard dreamily drawing tiny boats and ships on a painted ocean.
    The family summered at an elegant home on Commercial Street in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, with a park and a beach across the street. But Edwin often remained in Boston, missing the chance to see his slender son, Richard, join the other boys diving off a dock for pennies tossed to the bottom of the cool harbor waters. He also found little time to discover that his son had an inventive, if restless, mind, with a gift for math and science.
    When Richard was twelve, his parents sent him north to bucolic Exeter, New Hampshire, to attend one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country, Phillips Exeter