Business: Chicago Buyers

When anything extraordinary and un- accountable has happened lately on the New York Stock Exchange it has become more or less of a habit to account for it airily by saying: "That's Chicago buying." Many an offerer of this glib information when asked what he means by Chicago, answers: "Oh, Arthur Cutten and the rest—yon know." Two announcements from Chicago last fortnight illustrated in part of whom "the rest" consist. One was the announcement of a new investment corporation — Manhattan-Dearborn Corp. The other news was sale of new stock by Chicago Investors' Corp. The directorates of these new invest ment trusts each represent a distinct "set" in Chicago finance. One represents the Loop.* the other the North Shore; one represents a self-made generation, the other a second generation of inherited wealth and social prominence. Loop Team (Manhattan-Dearborn Corp.) John Daniel Hertz, Austrian born, "re tired" at 50, is the man who brought the Yellow Cab to Chicago and collected a fortune from its clicking meters. Once he wrote about sportsmen for the Chicago Record (extinct). Now he is himself a sportsman (chiefly horses) and winters in a cream-colored house on the Florida bank of the Atlantic Ocean. Albert Davis Lasker, chairman of Lord & Thomas and Logan (erstwhile Lord & Thomas) is head of the advertising agency which numbers among its accounts American Tobacco Co., Radio Corp. of America and many another. Once an $18 a week messenger boy in a Chicago agency, he now has a private barber shop in his agency office. Every morning he seats himself in a Koch barber chair and is shaved so close that he nearly bleeds. He always tips the barber $1. Mr. Lasker winters in a stucco house next door to Mr. Hertz's. President Harding was his good friend. For a time (1921-23) he ran the U. S. Shipping Board.

William Wrigley Jr. of Catalina Island, baseball (Chicago ''Cubs''), gum and the Wrigley Building, is stout, bluff, good-natured, always ready to clasp the hand, to pass the Spearmint. He is fond of telling how, many years ago, he paused before a South Clark street restaurant, with holes in his shoes and snow on the ground, and spent his last dime for the "Biggest Bowl of Bean Soup in Chicago." Mr. Wrigley will be 68 on the last day of the present month.

Charles A. McCulloch is chairman of Parmalee Co., whose buses take trunks and travelers to and fro between Chicago's many railroad stations. He is largely interested in both the Chicago and New York Yellow Cabs. A onetime newsboy, he took part (in 1915) in an Old Newsboys' Day, stood on a corner with his newspapers, sold them out swiftly by the expedient of crying, falsely, facetiously, "Doubleuxtree! Charlie Ross is found!" There is a Loop story that when the late J. Ogden Armour was in a state of acute financial difficulty, Mr. McCulloch offered him a check for one million dollars. "Thank you, Charlie," said Mr. Armour, "but it wouldn't be a drop in the bucket." Mr. McCulloch lives at No. 936 Lake Shore Drive.