Cat & Dog Dealer

Every morning for 50 years Roland M. Smythe entered his musty office at No. 2 Broadway, hung his umbrella on the hatrack, opened the hatbox on his big roller desk and placed his hat therein, brim up. It served as a basket for important papers.

Every evening before Mr. Smythe went home to Brooklyn he baited delicately with his broad fingers a tiny mousetrap, left it on his desk to surprise one of the myriad night inhabitants of the Produce Exchange Building. Such minor prey interested Mr. Smythe not unnaturally, because his business was almost wholly concerned with the minutest values in finance--those of forgotten or extinct securities.

As a young floor trader for a brokerage house in the early 1880s, Mr. Smythe first learned what treasure is sometimes wrapped in apparently worthless paper. Instructed to sell as junk some old Southern State bonds, young Smythe disposed of most of them for $2 apiece, gave one South Carolina bond to a friend who prom-ised to split any profits he might make on a mysterious sale. A month later Smythe received a check for $400. He lost no time in writing to the Treasurer of South Carolina, who informed him that that particular bond had been redeemable for $1,200. Then & there Floorman Smythe decided that such incidents should not be left to chance.

As the first and greatest specialists in the field of obsolete securities, the over-the-counter firm of R. M. Smythe, Inc. gradually gained comfortable renown. President Smythe lined his office with bookcases full of precious old directories, bound volumes of The Commercial & Financial Chronicle and railroad almanacs from 1862 on. The more he studied old security issues the more convinced he became that owners of many forgotten bonds held title to vast if watery wealth. And because out of Sleuth Smythe's capacious hat gratifying miracles sometimes popped, trustees and executors got in the habit of laying the contents of old tin boxes before Mr. Smythe's blazing blue eyes, red face and Edwardian whiskers. Mr. Smythe loved to talk, hated to give any information except for a fee. For the last 20 years of his life he was the only broker in New York who refused to have a telephone.

Smythe directories of obsolete securities, published in 1904, 1911 and 1929, made the name of R. M. Smythe known to every important banker and trust official in the world. In his first two books Mr. Smythe listed the names of dead securities which had no value. In his last he gave away the stored up secrets of his life, listed securities on which money could be recovered. He pointed out that more than $46,000,000 was still being held by the U. S. Treasury for holders of Government bonds long since matured, that among the 1,000 or more railroad bonds foreclosed since 1865 many had a "decree value" for claimants, though no notice was ever given of payments to their owners or trustees. The Depression rather delighted Mr. Smythe with the prospect of numberless new depreciated issues, but he died in 1930 leaving his widow such an accumulation of odd securities that his estate was virtually impossible to probate.

Present owner-president of R. M. Smythe, Inc. is German-born Otto Peretz Schwarzschild, bald, brown-eyed, proud of the fact that the Schwarzschilds and the Rothschilds-were for generations neighboring banking families of Frankfurt-am-Main. Founder in 1928 of National Statistical Service, Inc., Mr. Schwarzschild still supervises the annual publication of famed, authoritative American Underwriting Houses and Their Issues. Believing that the obsolete security business begun by Mr. Smythe needs to get beyond Wall Street and the Produce Exchange into the attics and safe-deposit boxes throughout the East, Mr. Schwarzschild last week announced a campaign to arouse owners of forgotten bonds. This week Smythe, Inc.'s first traveling library will leave Manhattan in a trailer for upstate New York in charge of two young men commissioned to set up as consultants or as buyers of "cats & dogs."

-Schwarzschild: "Black Shield," Rothschild: 'Red Shield."

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