MEXICO: Hanging up the Homburg

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Setting his Homburg square on his head, a heavy-set Bostonian named William Elaine Richardson departed one day last week for his office, the main Mexico City branch of the First National City Bank of New York. As usual, there was a brisk flutter of papers and a businesslike reaching for telephones when he arrived; Richardson maintains the no-nonsense tra dition of banking, runs his office with taut efficiency. But on that day last week there was more than routine importance to his arrival. It was his last; at 65, the banker who opened First National City's first Mexican branch 27 years ago was hanging up his Homburg.

Despite his down-to-earth reputation, Richardson's brightest memories are of the more unusual aspects of banking. When he arrived late in 1929, for example, there were already frightening signs of depression in the U.S. and in Mexico revolutionary troubles had filled the streets with bandoleered bullyboys and the people with a deep distrust of paper currency. As a result, there was a run on the bank almost as soon as it opened. The new manager ordered the guards to open the vaults and fill large sacks with silver coins. Then he slipped them out the back door with instructions to march in the front door, through the bank, out the back door and in the front again. After two or three of these trips the frantic depositors got the desired idea: the bank's hard-money reserves were obviously inexhaustible; their money was safe and their panic foolish.

Since those early days, Richardson and Mexico have become close friends. Each has done well out of the friendship: in 1932 the bank lent the Mexican government $10 million and in 1936 Richardson married a Mexican girl, now has two children. He owns a handsome home in the fashionable suburb of Coyoacan, has filled it with a collection of art treasures and a cluster of warm friends. When he an nounced, to no one's surprise, that he would remain in Mexico as an investment counselor, his feelings for his adopted country broke through his customary reserve. "The country is dynamic," he said with deep feeling. "No one can stop her."