With a fervent belief in the small investor as the foundation of the stock market, "Good Time Charlie" made America the shareholder nation

n 1940, the year Charles Edward Merrill founded the firm we now know as Merrill Lynch & Co., he was 54 years old and had already lived an extraordinarily productive and visible life. A poor boy from the backwaters of Florida, Merrill was forced to leave college by lack of funds. But he schemed his way to Wall Street and made himself wealthy by the time he was 31.

He was the first investment banker to realize that chain stores would one day dominate retailing, and he got rich by underwriting (and often controlling) such future powerhouses as S.S. Kresge (now K Mart) and Safeway Stores. He set up one of America's first wire houses--brokerage firms with branch offices in different cities connected to the main office by Teletype.

He was also the first big-name Wall Streeter to predict the Great Crash of 1929. Indeed, in the months leading up to the Crash, Merrill pleaded (to no avail) with President Calvin Coolidge to speak out against speculation. By February 1929, Merrill was so sure the end was near that he liquidated his firm's stock portfolio, an act that made him famous in October, when the Crash finally came.

Merrill made the gossip pages as regularly as the financial pages. By 1940, he had been married three times, had had countless affairs ("recharging my batteries" was his euphemism for philandering) and had sired three children, the youngest of whom, James Merrill, became one of America's finest poets. A short, self-absorbed, prideful, flamboyant fellow--"Good Time Charlie Merrill," his friends called him--he had the unconscious expectation that Great Men always have: that he should be at the center of any orbit he entered. And so he was. As his son once wrote, "Whatever he decided to serve, the victim was meant to choke it down and be grateful."

BORN Oct. 19, 1885, in Green Grove Springs, Fla.