0:04 [SPEAKER_01]: long before there was ever a wolf of Wall Street. 0:07 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a witch of Wall Street. 0:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Though that title was hardly earned. 0:13 [SPEAKER_01]: Her name was Heddy Green, and she did her business on Wall Street in the second half of the 19th century, and the very first part of the 20th, until she died in 1916. 0:25 [SPEAKER_01]: As far as finance goes, she was a heavyweight among heavy weights, to the point where she personally bailed out the entire city of New York, multiple times, when it ran out of money. 0:39 [SPEAKER_01]: She was stingy in a bit strange, but her greatest crime may have been simply to dominate his man's world as a woman. 0:49 [SPEAKER_01]: In the words of one of her biographers, Charles Slock, who is here with us today. 0:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Her principle, crime, so to speak, was that she lived life on her own terms. 1:00 [SPEAKER_00]: In an age when women were supposed to behave in an entirely different way. 1:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles's book is called Heddy. 1:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The genius and madness of America's first female tycoon. 1:12 [SPEAKER_01]: I ran into this book a few months ago, and I enjoyed it so much that I asked him to join us here. 1:18 [SPEAKER_01]: things for being here Charlie. 1:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners? 1:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. 1:23 [SPEAKER_00]: My name is Charlie Slack. 1:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I live in Connecticut. 1:27 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a writer. 1:28 [SPEAKER_00]: And I became interested in honey green actually through my mother. 1:35 [SPEAKER_00]: I had published a book recently and I was looking for my next subject and my mother told me she had a book idea for me and I gave her that can't wait to hear it mom look and she told me about this woman named 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And she said this woman was fascinating. 2:03 [SPEAKER_00]: She was known as a miser and was an incredible woman. 2:07 [SPEAKER_00]: So I started poking around. 2:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think to the extent I had ever heard of Hedy Green, it was through the Guinness Book of World Records where she was described as a almost in cartoonish way as the world's greatest miser and a woman so mean she ate 2:25 [SPEAKER_00]: cold oatmeal off of radiators and so forth. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And this sort of cartoonishly awful presentation of her, but the more I started looking into her, the more fascinating she became to me. 2:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And that told me that maybe she was somebody who would be worth writing a book about. 2:42 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's confirmed my assessment that you should always listen to your mother. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: So Hettie Green was born in 1834 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. 2:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And New Bedford is a fascinating place back in Hettie's day. 3:02 [SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the wealthiest towns in the United States and it was the center of the wailing industry. 3:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And the Quaker whaling company owners had become fabulously wealthy. 3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, whale oil at that time, that was the fossil fuels of that age. 3:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And the whales were used in industry and perfume and just about everything. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They released a country in a sense ran on whale oil. 3:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And Heddy was born into a prosperous wailing family. 3:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Her father was a man named Edward Mott Robinson, who married into the family. 3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: The family name was Howland and the Howlands of New Bedford were leaders in the industry. 3:46 [SPEAKER_01]: And did she have an education on everything coming up from my wealthy family? 3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: She did, it's very interesting because there were, as Herman Melville, who shipped out of New Bedford on the voyage that became the basis for Moby Dick, he noted that there were two new Bedfords. 4:04 [SPEAKER_00]: There was the elite of feet wealthy New Bedford on the hill with the beautiful homes and 4:10 [SPEAKER_00]: gardens and parks, and then down at the water side, there was the earthy training in the New Bedford that smelled of rotten whale oil and money and trade, and heady from the start, as she could well have been part of that defeat elite up on the hill, New Bedford, but her favorite place to be was down at the counting house of the Holland Whalen Company with her father, 4:36 [SPEAKER_00]: and grandfather she just loved business right from the start so she did have formal education in the traditional sense but she also had this drive to understand business which was very rare for her time of course the women were thought to not have a place in finance and had he proved just about all of them wrong which is what i found to be one of the most fascinating things about her so that she'd take over her family's company 5:02 [SPEAKER_00]: What happened was she wound up inheriting when her father died, she inherited some wealth by the time he died, the wailing industry was really going down and she inherited quite a lot of money from her father and in accordance with the traditions of the time she received some of it. 5:24 [SPEAKER_00]: that she had control over it, but the majority of it was bond up and trust that was in control of some men who had nowhere near her financial acumen. 5:35 [SPEAKER_00]: So one of the great battles of her life was with these men to try to gain control over her financial fortune. 5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: And she ultimately did that. 5:45 [SPEAKER_00]: She also had a terrific battle. 5:46 [SPEAKER_00]: for control of the estate of her aunt Sylvia, her Spencer aunt Sylvia who died and left a lot of money. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: So, Eddie battled, she felt that she should control that. 5:59 [SPEAKER_00]: In some ways, as I say, Eddie was fighting against the times when women were considered not to have a place in finance. 6:07 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think also she had, she was an only child, but she had a brother who died in infancy. 6:14 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that was a great disappointment to her father. 6:17 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that in some ways I see Hettie's lifelong obsessive maniacal quest to preserve and grow a fortune, as in a sense, an attempt to prove to her father and to herself that she could handle Loney and 6:37 [SPEAKER_01]: What ended up bringing her to New York? 6:39 [SPEAKER_00]: She wound up in New York. 6:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Family had connections with New York, but she married a man named Edward Green, who was a financial figure from Bello's Falls, Vermont, who had a lot of financial dealings. 6:54 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1885 Edward had used some of heady's money, unbeknownst to her and in some of his investments and used it as collateral and some of that money at risk. 7:07 [SPEAKER_00]: And so in 1885, when Heidi was middle-aged, she stormed down to New York and said to rest control of that money and from then on, spent much of her life in and around New York City and became this figure that became known as the Witch of Wall Street because she was buying and selling and trading. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And she, in Manhattan, she lived in Brooklyn, she lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, 7:37 [SPEAKER_00]: inexpensive apartment buildings. 7:41 [SPEAKER_00]: She didn't want to spend the money even though she owned big swaths of properties on 5th Avenue. 7:46 [SPEAKER_00]: She didn't want to spend money on her own living quarters and also she didn't want tax collectors to ever be able to pin her down too precisely as to where she lived. 7:57 [SPEAKER_01]: What are some stories that would portray to our listeners just the idea or how 8:04 [SPEAKER_01]: out there she was with trying to make sure that she saved as much money as she could. 8:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a great question. 8:11 [SPEAKER_00]: And in every place where she lived, there were stories about her miserliness. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: And it is true. 8:21 [SPEAKER_00]: She had some deeply 8:22 [SPEAKER_00]: unattractive qualities when it came to money and miserliness. 8:28 [SPEAKER_00]: I always felt that caused her financial genius to be overlooked in a way that I don't think if she'd been a man, that would have happened. 8:36 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that men tended to get and maybe still to this day assessed first based on 8:42 [SPEAKER_00]: what kind of a financial genius they were and then secondarily what kind of a quirky personality they had. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: And for heady, it was always the other way around. 8:51 [SPEAKER_00]: It's what kind of a lady was she, why wasn't she wearing fancy dresses, why was she wearing these old rags? 8:57 [SPEAKER_00]: So in each city where she lived, they're developed a cottage industry of stories about her. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And for example, in Bello's Falls, Vermont, there was a story of her turning everything upside down in a frantic search over hours and hours for a two cent posted stamp. 9:15 [SPEAKER_00]: They told stories if her buying, dailed, bread, and haggling with the cleaners to only clean the bottom half of her dress because that's the only part that touched the payment contact with the ground. 9:28 [SPEAKER_00]: In Hoboken, she had a furious fight with a city of Hoboken over a $2 dog license for her beloved dog. 9:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Do we? 9:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And so there were these kind of stories on and on that built that built up some of them. 9:41 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure we're true some of them apocryphal. 9:44 [SPEAKER_00]: But she also showed kindness as she would give piggy banks to neighbor children. 9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: and put a dollar in it and give them more money as they saved, there were stories of philanthropy that are very hard to pin down. 10:00 [SPEAKER_00]: She never wanted to be known for philanthropy. 10:03 [SPEAKER_00]: I think she was worried that she would be besieged, but there were some sort of compelling leads that she gave money. 10:11 [SPEAKER_00]: She would stay up nursing sick neighbors. 10:14 [SPEAKER_00]: So she was not this hard-hearted, horrible 10:18 [SPEAKER_00]: 100% horrible person as she was sometimes portrayed. 10:22 [SPEAKER_00]: I think the most famous miser-story involved her son, Ned, who was injured as a child in a sledding accident and badly wrenched his knee and as he walked on it over time, he evolved a really bad leg. 10:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And ultimately, as a young man, he was a very large young man and the leg had to be amputated and he wore a prosthetic leg for the rest of his life. 10:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And Hedy, one of the stories, probably the most unattractive story about her, was that she went to clinics that were meant 11:07 [SPEAKER_00]: free care. 11:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a terrible thing to do. 11:10 [SPEAKER_00]: She mistrusted lawyers and she mistrusted doctors and thought that everybody was trying to rip her off. 11:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Over the years that story morphed into, she didn't care about her son and she stood by while his leg was cut off because she was too cheap. 11:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And that wasn't true. 11:26 [SPEAKER_00]: She loved her son. 11:28 [SPEAKER_00]: She tried any number of home remedies and doctors 11:36 [SPEAKER_01]: And for a hoodie, it seems like she not only didn't trust some doctors and people like that, but there were also stories I saw of, she thought people were following her, was that accurate? 11:49 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that it was accurate and also to a certain extent true. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: She developed, she was in her time, one of if not the most famous woman in America. 11:58 [SPEAKER_00]: She was written about endlessly in the newspapers 12:03 [SPEAKER_00]: She a one point carried a gun with her when she walked around New York and she was I do think that she was certainly had a degree of paranoia about her and maybe sometimes it was it was warranted there were some great stories of her though in many ways she was fearless and. 12:22 [SPEAKER_00]: There was one story of her going to visit one of the bank she frequented and she showed up and she had and the head of the bank said, 12:46 [SPEAKER_01]: There were also another story I saw where she would just do her banking on the floor of the bank. 12:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Was that true? 12:53 [SPEAKER_00]: She did, she had the bank where she did much of her banking, and she became a fixture there. 12:59 [SPEAKER_00]: She had use of the offices, and this was where the story developed that she, one of the apocryphal, heavy stories was that she ate cold oatmeal for lunch, and actually, as it turns out, she would heat the oatmeal on the radiators at this bank that she used for an office, and she would 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: So she was a real fixer in the financial center of New York. 13:24 [SPEAKER_01]: And the vapor just okay with her doing that? 13:27 [SPEAKER_00]: She was such a large depositor that she could pretty much do as she pleased. 13:32 [SPEAKER_01]: How much wealth did she end up coming up with? 13:37 [SPEAKER_00]: She died with about $100 million in wealth, and that, as according to the calculations, when I wrote the book, it's been a while since I wrote the book, but figured that was in the neighborhood of $2 billion. 13:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's no question, but that she inherited a fair amount of money, but she really had a skill for boosting that fortune. 14:00 [SPEAKER_01]: I just ordered your book yesterday and it's not coming yet, but I saw on your website where you mentioned a meeting that JP Morgan put together, can you tell me about that? 14:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, in 1907 there was the Nicarbacher crisis where there was a run on the bank and it was a financial panic and JP Morgan and his library in Manhattan organized meetings of some of the most influential financial people financial men mostly in the United States. 14:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And they got together to try to figure out a way to stabilize the financial system. 14:42 [SPEAKER_00]: There were a couple of prominent trusts that were teetering on the edge of insolvency. 14:47 [SPEAKER_00]: And so through these intensive meetings, they came up with some of the controls that eventually evolved into what is now known as the federal reserve system. 14:59 [SPEAKER_00]: And there was one woman as the newspapers reported, one woman who came in with a black dress and a black veil. 15:06 [SPEAKER_00]: So reporters weren't able to positively identify who that was, but they were pretty certain that it was Hedy Green and that would make sense because she was really the only woman of her time that had the kind of financial light and the financial acumen to go head to head with the people in that room. 15:26 [SPEAKER_00]: So that was a pretty important moment in American financial history and by all appearances, Hedy was at the center of it. 15:34 [SPEAKER_01]: What was the most important thing you learned personally from Hedy and her life as the first American female tycoon? 15:41 [SPEAKER_00]: I think as I said, the most important thing to me was her financial genius and the power that she had, she on several occasions, bailed out New York City when it didn't have the money to operate. 15:55 [SPEAKER_00]: If you can believe that, Hedy would alone money and at a reasonable interest rate to 16:00 [SPEAKER_00]: the city going. 16:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And so she had a wealth on a scale that was extraordinary. 16:07 [SPEAKER_00]: And she was not a speculator. 16:12 [SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of the things that she talked about are great financial lessons. 16:17 [SPEAKER_00]: You can learn a lot from reading about Heady Green about handling your own finances because she never 16:23 [SPEAKER_00]: speculated, she invested and when a panic occurred and other people were losing their hat, she was always there with cash on hand and ready to lend and make money and acquire property, and she built a vast fortune that way. 16:40 [SPEAKER_00]: She followed to a T, the most basic but hardest to follow advice in finance, which is to buy low sell high and the never panic during a panic. 16:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And ultimately, by the end of her life, she had gained a level of respect. 16:59 [SPEAKER_00]: There are some stories that I talk about in the book where she went head to head with some of the toughest financiers of her day. 17:05 [SPEAKER_00]: And really came out on top more often than not. 17:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And for that reason, I think she set an example. 17:14 [SPEAKER_00]: And she was the first woman of Wall Street to do this. 17:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think she's been unjustly neglected 17:21 [SPEAKER_00]: on that score. 17:22 [SPEAKER_00]: She's been to the as I say to the extent she's remembered it's as this miser and this character and on, but I think that she's never quite gotten the do she deserves as a financial genius. 17:34 [SPEAKER_00]: What ever happened to her wealth? 17:36 [SPEAKER_00]: She left it to her son and her daughter in equal proportion. 17:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Both of them had married late in life. 17:43 [SPEAKER_00]: I think one of the things that had he feared most was that her kids would get married and that there would be interlopers and that the family fortune would disappear off into other people's hands. 17:55 [SPEAKER_00]: And both of her children married late in life. 17:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Neither one of them had kids. 17:59 [SPEAKER_00]: When the sun died first, the money went to the daughter Sylvia, she died in around 1950 and gave the money away to a huge number of recipients prominent colleges, the library and the bedford long lost relatives received, so I got scattered in that way, and that's what became a fortune. 18:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Eddie had a reputation for being a hard woman, and in many ways, it sounds like she earned that. 18:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Do you think the show vinnism of that time contributed to her rough exterior? 18:32 [SPEAKER_01]: What a softer woman have been able to thrive as she did? 18:37 [SPEAKER_00]: That's a really wonderful question. 18:39 [SPEAKER_00]: I think you put your finger on something that I talk about in the book, which is that to a certain extent her behavior, her demeanor, her dress was a shield of armor, if she had dressed as a woman at the time was supposed to and. 18:57 [SPEAKER_00]: spent time on her social life and things I don't think that she would have been taken this seriously. 19:04 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that in a way her hard-nosed attitude and her personal characteristics, I think she knew that she needed to be tough as nails and she really rose to that need. 19:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Is that a lesson she learned the hard way? 19:18 [SPEAKER_01]: Are there stories of her getting burned as a younger woman? 19:23 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that she felt very burned in a very public battle over her aunt Sylvia's fortune. 19:31 [SPEAKER_00]: After her aunt Sylvia died in New Bedford and left money and there was a colossal fight over the fortune. 19:37 [SPEAKER_00]: He tried to prove that Sylvia had intended to leave her. 19:41 [SPEAKER_00]: all the money to her because she wanted to control it and she lost that battle. 19:48 [SPEAKER_00]: She got some money but nowhere near as much as she thought she should get and that was one of the great humiliation of her life incidentally on a social scene when she wanted to. 19:59 [SPEAKER_00]: She was from the wealthy family in New Bedford and 20:02 [SPEAKER_00]: She could, and on occasion, did join social circles and knew exactly how to do it one time when she was a young woman. 20:11 [SPEAKER_00]: She was a beautiful young woman and she was visiting New York spending a month or more within New York and went to a ball and danced with the Prince of Wales. 20:21 [SPEAKER_00]: There were all of these stories and later when her daughter married much later in life, a heavy took a suite of rooms at a fancy hotel and went and did got herself made up and dressed to the health and so forth. 20:35 [SPEAKER_00]: So she knew how to engage socially. 20:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But back to your earlier question, I think that she felt most comfortable presenting her as this hard-nosed scary woman 20:50 [SPEAKER_01]: So she probably embraced this caricature of the witch of Wall Street, at least this meant that people were taking her seriously. 20:58 [SPEAKER_01]: She undoubtedly preferred her other nickname, the Queen of Wall Street, but that doesn't have the same ring to it. 21:05 [SPEAKER_01]: What are some misconceptions about Hedi that we might clear up? 21:09 [SPEAKER_01]: I think most of us come to her with this very two-dimensional idea of basically a female scrooge. 21:16 [SPEAKER_01]: But you've described things like giving piggy banks to kids that suggest that she was a warmer person than we might assume. 21:23 [SPEAKER_00]: I would say, I want to be careful to not overstate that I just think that it's been so overstated the other side, but let me emphasize that there were unattractive things that she did, and certainly the miser, and she could be very tough in business. 21:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And as I say, haggling over a $2 dog license, I think, so she definitely had that side to her, but there was this sort of other side to her that was attractive. 21:52 [SPEAKER_00]: that I think got hidden and sometimes she deliberately hit. 21:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that would be the main misconception about her. 22:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And another thing is that she didn't, as I said, there were stories that she gave money, but she disavowed those and there was a lot of misbehavior during that yielded age and the robber barons and so forth. 22:13 [SPEAKER_00]: And then a lot of cases, 22:15 [SPEAKER_00]: people from that era rehabilitated their image by building universities and libraries. 22:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And you can see their names on buildings all across the country to this day and starting foundations. 22:28 [SPEAKER_00]: And Hedy never did that. 22:29 [SPEAKER_00]: She wanted to hand her fortune off to her kids. 22:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The only building that I know of that bears her name is the administration hall at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and that was done by her son and I think he would have resisted that. 22:45 [SPEAKER_00]: She would have maybe rolled over in her grave. 22:48 [SPEAKER_00]: But to that extent, he did her own posterity of disservice because she didn't leave behind these libraries and foundations of people who could set about busily rehabbing her image. 23:00 [SPEAKER_01]: that's really too bad because it sounds like almost all of her money ended up going to charities anyway. 23:06 [SPEAKER_01]: She didn't get the positive press of Carnegie or Rockefeller, but really wasn't so different from those guys. 23:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Her belief was in, I think you could see it in that 23:18 [SPEAKER_00]: giving the piggy banks to the kids and encouraging them to say. 23:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, rightly or wrongly, and you can argue this to the health about this. 23:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I love philanthropy, and but her belief was in what she considered to be fair business. 23:32 [SPEAKER_00]: So she would loan money to New York at a prevailing but not extortionant interest rate. 23:38 [SPEAKER_00]: She loaned money. 23:39 [SPEAKER_00]: to many churches at low interest rates when they needed money for improvements. 23:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Municipalities, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Tucson, Arizona built its sewer system based on a bond issue that Eddie bought. 23:53 [SPEAKER_00]: But that's what she believed her capital could be used for, and that's what she believed in. 23:59 [SPEAKER_01]: My first instinct with a lot of the miserly antidotes you were sharing was that most of them were a apocryphalm, but it sounds like for all of the good that she did, most of those stories are true, the haggling over a $2 dollar dog license, and that sort of thing. 24:16 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know about the oatmeal off of a radiator thing, that sounds just a bit too colorful to be true, but it seems like we can get lost on either side of heavy story. 24:28 [SPEAKER_01]: We can demonize her like the media did, and she was alive, or we can redeem her to the point of basically leaving the real woman behind. 24:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly. 24:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And she, no, there's no question that she was hardnosed and she saw her life as a nonstop battle against people who were trying to take her money, you thought she couldn't do things and she had a furious battle with Colis Huntington, the railroad magnet and 24:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She fused it went on for years and years and she said at one point I'll outlive them all that's the way she looked at life, but but you mentioned misconceptions and one of here's one that one of the primary misconceptions about her was that she was a miserable woman in terms of her own. 25:12 [SPEAKER_00]: feelings her own outlook on life that she was unhappy and to me that was one of the most prevailing images of her but it was really a projection from other people because they were thinking if I had millions and millions of dollars I would not be living in a cheap apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. 25:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I'd be over there in Fifth Avenue. 25:34 [SPEAKER_00]: I'd be traveling the world. 25:35 [SPEAKER_00]: I'd be, everybody thinks that way and rightly or wrongly I would be much more 25:41 [SPEAKER_00]: pretending towards that as well in myself, I think. 25:45 [SPEAKER_00]: But her lifestyle made her happy, I believe. 25:47 [SPEAKER_00]: I think she was a pretty happy person. 25:50 [SPEAKER_00]: I think people misconstrued because they wouldn't have lived that way that she must have been miserable living that way. 25:58 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that really what she did, her principal crime, so to speak, was that she lived life on her own terms in an age when women were supposed to behave 26:11 [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned that we might learn from the way Hedi invested. 26:15 [SPEAKER_01]: What else can we learn from her life? 26:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Certainly her degree of financial success often comes at great personal sacrifice. 26:24 [SPEAKER_01]: People with that kind of wealth often accumulate it at the expense of personal relationships. 26:30 [SPEAKER_01]: What can we learn from both the good and the bad of Hedi's life? 26:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. 26:35 [SPEAKER_00]: I wrote a previous book about the inventor Charles Goodyer, and it was called Noble Obsession. 26:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And he went on this lifelong quest to find a way to vulcanize rubber to make it impervious to heater cold. 26:49 [SPEAKER_00]: And it wound up changing the world. 26:51 [SPEAKER_00]: But along the way, his kids were starving. 26:54 [SPEAKER_00]: His life was falling apart. 26:56 [SPEAKER_00]: And he had this maniacal, 26:58 [SPEAKER_00]: obsession with solving the scientific problem. 27:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And I find the two characters, Charles Goodier, and Hettie similar in that sense that she was absolutely obsessive and maniacal about saving money 27:14 [SPEAKER_00]: earning money, growing money. 27:16 [SPEAKER_00]: For her, I do believe I don't, I'm not a psychologist, but I do believe that her life was lived in a request to prove to her father that she could grow the wealth better than any man. 27:27 [SPEAKER_00]: But I think as with all obsessives, it had its sort of, it had to definitely this cost, this tremendous cost and a negative effect on her family and in a way on her life. 27:38 [SPEAKER_00]: So I think there are 27:39 [SPEAKER_00]: as with any person who's obsessive like that, there are things to admire and then cautionary aspects. 27:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you again, Charlie. 27:49 [SPEAKER_01]: It's been a pleasure. 27:51 [SPEAKER_01]: If you want to know more about Heddy Green, you can find Charlie's book, Eddie, the Genius and Madness of America's first female tycoon. 27:59 [SPEAKER_01]: On his personal website, boronambazon.com. 28:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Charlie's website is CharlesSlaikOther.com.
Show full transcript (237 segments)
