How did a nerdy math major like Benjamin Graham meet girls? My grandfather was a nineteen-year-old scholarship student at Columbia when he met a girl named Alda Miller. In the 1910s, Columbia was a men’s college. Barnard educated women at a separate location. Ben’s...
While Benjamin Graham spent the summer of 1910 toiling on a farm, he pinned his hopes on newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer as his future benefactor. This portrait of Joseph Pulitzer, painted in 1905 by John Singer Sargent, conveys the power the man held in Ben...
If you just read Ben Graham’s Blunder (#11), you might wonder as I do how Ben explained his late arrival in New Milford to Mr. Barman—the farmer who sent him a ticket and instructed him to catch the 4:30 p.m. train. Ben missed that train and battled to stay awake all...
Ben Graham hefted his black valise and bade his tearful mother goodbye. In June of 1910, Ben had just graduated third in his class at Brooklyn’s elite Boys High School. He had recently turned sixteen—two years younger than his classmates due to skipped grades. He’d...
When Benjamin Graham was born in 1894, he became a member of a family which consisted of his parents, Dorothy and Isaac, and his two older brothers, Leon and Victor. In the first chapter of Benjamin Graham: The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street, Ben hints at the...
I never thought I’d be saying this, but I was wrong about Ben Graham’s mother. In my last post, I sat in judgement on my great-grandmother Dorothy Gesundheit Graham. I focused on the ways she was one of “those who loved him dearly [who] would so often wound him,...
