UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA.

Shannon News, 31 December 1925, Page 1

UNKNOWN AUSTRALIA.

VAST FORTUNES AMASSED MILLION IN THREE WEEKS NOTABLE CASES IN AMERICA The sum of £1,000,000 in three weeks! Such is the colossal sum said to have been cleared by Mrs. Hpgan during the recent spell of frenzied gambling on the New York Stock Exchange. Six years ago' Mrs: Hogan was left a widow with the American equivalent of a few hundred pounds, and. 1 with three young children to support. Fortunately, she is dowered with a clever head and a stout heart; and instead of turning a despairing face to the future decided to try her luck in speculation. "A palmist once told me," she says, "that I should make a big fortune one day by speculation. So I decided this was my chance. I decided to gamble in a small way in railroad shares, and everything I touched turned up trumps. "I cleared 20,00.0 dollars the first j year. Then ,1 became more daring; and still my luck held. At the end of the second year I had 100,000 dollars to my credit. In three years I was a millionaire in dollars." Now Mrs. Hogan has crowned her phenomenal success by one of the most spectacular feats of money-mak-ing on record. But Mrs. Hogan has had many rivals as money-makers among her sex. One Of the most extraordinary was Mrs. Hetty Green, who by her uncanny financial skill piled up £12,000,000 before she died a short time ago. . In Her Blood. Money-making was in Hetty's blood; for her father before her had done so well that he left her a fortune, variously estimated at from £500,000 to a round million. As a. child her favourite study was financial news and stock reports; and, it is said, many of her father's most successful investments were made on her advice. Thus, when she came into her fortune she looked on it only as the nucleus of many more millions which she herself would make. For fifty years she led as strenuous a life as any man in Wall Street, pitting her brains against the cleverest in New York, and generally coming out a winner. She bought land in the direction in which she knew New York must expand, and sold it i,n later years at a fabulous profit; she lent "call money" when the rates were highest, and made fortunes by shrewd investments in railroad stocks and mortgage bonds. "When I see a good thing going cheap because nobody wants it," she once said, "I buy a lot of it and tuck it away. Then, when the time comes, they have to hunt me up and pay me a big price for my holdings." Before she died her fortune was estimated at £12,000,000 and she was one of the richest persons in the Avorld. Yet she spent less than £25 a month on herself. laved in a Modest Flat. She lived in a modest six-roomed flat on the third floor of a house in Hoboken (the Whitechapel of New York). She did her own housework, sallied forth daily with a basket to do her shopping at the cheapest stores, and was never known to enter a cab. Of her home, one of her poor neighbours contemptuously said: "Such furniture! You should see it! The whole lot isn't worth 50 dollars! I wouldn't pay express charges on it!" After half a century of this Spartan life, Hetty determined at 70 to enjoy the fruits of her gold-winning. From the Hoboken slum she migrated to the Plaza Hotel, one of the most fashionable and expensive in New York, where she engaged a sumptuous suite of rooms at £IOO a month. To celebrate the transformation she gave a regal banquet to her friends —the most splendid feast money could command, served on gold plates and accompanied by "seas of champagne." And, to crown her emancipation, she paid 60 guineas to a well-known beauty specialist to repair the ravages of time, and restore something of heT> lost looks. £4,000,000 in Two Years. Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs showed that a butterfly of society and pleasure could make millions as easily as she could manipulate a fan or conduct a flirtation. Daughter of Senator Fair, one of the famous "Bonanza Kings" of California, a very wealthy man, she decided to take the management of her fortune into her own hands, and, selling out all her real estate holdings in San Francisco for £500,000, she went to New York to pit her brains as a money-maker against the most astute and daring financiers in the world. Instead of losing her fortune, as was anticipated, she added to it so rapidly that, within two years, she had made £4,000,000.