I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that Ben Graham witnessed worldwide panic in his first summer on Wall Street. My twenty-year-old grandfather was no seasoned investor. In July 1914, he must have noted with alarm that Britain was suffering a bank panic due to an...
Benjamin Graham met my grandmother Hazel Mazur when they were both driven teenagers. Ben attended Columbia College on scholarship, excelling at his rigorous course load while working more than full-time, on track to graduate second in his class. Hazel, still in high...
Long before protests erupted on the Columbia College campus, pictured above in 1910, the teenaged Benjamin Graham attended Columbia on scholarship and took his first investment risk. Most college students don’t think about investing—they have no cash to spare. That...
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...
