Free The Family by Kitty Kelley Page A

feel that we could never get out from under. Indeed we have had some pretty difficult years together before the tide turned and we gradually paid off our debts and began to save for the security of our growing family.”
    Prescott continued selling rubber-tile flooring for another two years until his father-in-law pulled the golden cord that transformed an itinerant salesman into an investment banker. Prescott never forgot the day.
    “I do remember that I left U.S. Rubber on May 1, 1926, to become associated with W. A. Harriman and Co., which was an investment banking organization, principally owned by Averell Harriman and his brother, Roland,” he said in an oral history. “Mrs. Bush’s father, G. H. Walker, was the president of it, but Averell was the chairman, and my father-in-law had a substantial interest in it.”
    Lest the interviewer assume that this professional elevation to vice president of W. A. Harriman and Company was merely a matter of the son-in-law also rises, Prescott emphasized his friendship with Roland “Bunny” Harriman (Yale 1917; Skull and Bones) while acknowledging the confidence his father-in-law had in him. “We [Averell and Roland Harriman and G. H. Walker] talked it over and they seemed to think that I would have some possibilities in that field that they were looking for . . . At any rate, they offered me a job.”
    Going from selling rubber flooring to representing the prestigious name of Harriman on Wall Street energized Prescott, who was thirty-one years old when he started his new job. He joined the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich and began playing golf with his father-in-law, who drew him into the U.S. Golf Association, of which Bert was then president. Prescott would follow in those footsteps, serving on the executive committee for eight years before he, too, became president.
    In 1926, W. A. Harriman and Company was a brokerage firm that concentrated on foreign stocks and bonds. Through its offices in Berlin, Germany, opened in 1922, it became one of the first American investment houses to assist in rebuilding European industry after the war. As an incorporated underwriting organization, the company was prohibited from doing any type of banking. So when the Harrimans decided they wanted to start a private bank for high-net-worth clients, they turned to Roland’s classmate and close friend Knight Woolley (Yale 1917; Skull and Bones), who had been a groomsman in Prescott’s wedding and was godfather to his son George Herbert Walker Bush. In 1927, Woolley became general manager of the private bank known as Harriman Brothers and Company.
    The two companies—W. A. Harriman and Company and Harriman Brothers and Company—made their offices in one room at 39 Broadway after the Harrimans’ accountant bought six rolltop desks from a secondhand-furniture dealer. “By any standards,” recalled Knight Woolley, “it was all pretty crummy.”
    Within a few months, ferocious “powwows” began as the two groups discussed general policy. “Roland and Averell were for doing a cash business only and having no margin accounts,” Woolley wrote in his memoir. “The dissenter was Bert Walker. His firm in St. Louis took margin accounts. In fact, such accounts were probably the backbone of their business.”
    Woolley did not know too much about the problem of margin accounts then, but he objected on the purely snobbish grounds of NOCD, code for “Not Our Class, Dear.”
    “At that time, Ira Haupt & Co. occupied most of a floor at 39 Broadway, the Harriman Building,” Woolley wrote in a privately published memoir for his family. “On active days their customers crowded the lobby, and even the fire stairs, where they sometimes ate picnic lunches. The men’s toilets were completely fouled up. They were a terrible bunch of people. If they represented typical margin account clients, I was against margin accounts.”
    It didn’t take long for Woolley to learn that lending money to