USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Hampden county, 1636-1936, Volume III > Part 57
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America, having settled in this country at an early date. Nelson M. Carew's paternal grandfather was a farmer and peddler in his day, selling merchandise from trunks that he carried with him, as was the custom at that time.
In the public schools of Monson, his birth- place, Nelson M. Carew received his early education. He was reared on the farm of his family, and so accustomed himself to the rigors of farm life early in his career. In 1883 he came to Hampden, where he has since resided and has become one of the foremost public-spirited citizens. He has been engaged in several different lines of endeavor, including farming, and lumber, charcoal, building and real estate activities, and has been successful in his many under- takings. Mr. Carew has extensive property holdings not only in Hampden, but in Springfield and East Longmeadow as well. He is the largest taxpayer in the town of Hampden. At the same time he has figured prominently as a public worker and as an official in his community. He has been con- sistently a Republican in his partisan affili- ations, and on his party's ticket was elected a selectman of Hampden in 1900. After serving for a number of years in that ca- pacity, he resigned from the office, but was again elected to the same post, whereupon he has since continued as selectman, his term of service covering thirty-five years. He served as a member of the Republican town committee of Hampden for fourteen years.
On November 8, 1883, Nelson M. Carew married (first) Addie Lull, who died July 20, 1904. They became the parents of three children : 1. Kenia, who married Harold W. Ryder. Mrs. Ryder is a leader in the affairs of Rowley Post, No. 92, of the American Le- gion Auxiliary and in the work of numerous church and social organizations of Hamp-
den. 2. Florence E., who became the wife of James A. Hanna of Springfield. 3. Edna L., a registered nurse, of Springfield. Mr. Carew married (second), February 3, 1921, Grace M. Pease, of Hampden, daughter of Mortimer and Ellen M. Pease. Mrs. Carew is one of the very widely known and public- spirited residents of Hampden, being active in the Woman's Aid Society of this place and having been a teacher in the public schools of Hampden for a quarter of a cen- tury.
D. JOSEPH ST. GERMAIN was born in a log cabin in the town of Ellenburg, Clin- .ton County, New York, July 27, 1893, son of Adolphus St. Germain, born in St. An- toine, Province of Quebec, Canada, and Ade- line (Rivers) St. Germain, born in the town of Irona, Clinton County, New York. Like the St. Germain family, which was among the first of the French settlers in Canada, the Rivers family was of pioneer ancestry in northern New York State.
D. Joseph St. Germain had one brother, Arthur, two and one-half years younger, who died in 1924 as a result of World War service. His parents and other relatives were farmers and farm laborers, and such were the rigors of pioneer life in that region and the meagreness of the advantages avail- able, that neither the father nor the mother, nor the grandparents on either side of the family, attended school or learned to read or write. The approach of winter always loomed ominously before them, for there was no certainty that their cornmeal, pota- toes and salt pork would hold out until the next summer. The year Mr. St. Germain was born they were at times reduced to cating herbs and greens gathered from the nearby woods. The father died about the time the son was five years old and his mother re-married shortly thereafter, to
Joseph St Germain
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John Dawson, a farm laborer. The two boys, who had been living with their ma- ternal grandparents, Joseph and Harriet Rivers, in whose home they had been born, then went with their mother and stepfather to a farm in Chateaugay, Franklin County, New York. As a farm laborer, the step- father received a wage of $18 per month, a house to live in, such as it was, sufficient wood to keep the family from freezing, and two quarts of milk daily, from which total he was to feed and clothe himself, his wife, and two children. The mother milked eight or ten cows each night and morning and from the time he was six years old until his eleventh year one of the boy's duties was to bring in the cows both morning and night during the spring, summer and fall. Oliver Smith, for whom they worked, had a large herd and the boy was required to rise at four o'clock in the morning to get the cows. He still has a poignant recollection of the cold dew on his bare feet during the spring and fall mornings as he ran through the grass to the night pasture more than a half mile away, with feet so cold that he could not keep back the tears, and the grate- ful warmth as he reached a spot where a cow had been lying during the night. When he was six years old he was taught to use an axe and from that time chopped all the wood that was needed to keep the fire go- ing in their house. From the age of six until he was eleven he attended the little red country school house about one and one- half miles from their home. From this en- vironment one cannot claim nurture for in- tellectual gifts, but Mr. St. Germain feels that he received from his parents a strong body and an endowment of common sense that is the foundation of substantial accom- plishment.
In the spring of the year that Mr. St. Germain reached eleven, he left home to go to live with relatives of his stepfather in
Trout River, New York, a little hamlet on the Canadian border about ten miles from Chateaugay. These relatives were Phoebe Wilson and her son James, then a young man of twenty-one years, and they lived in a house that would now be called a shack on a little back road farm. Here the boy re- mained until the spring of the year he was fifteen, with the exception of a few months spent with his parents during the middle of this period. He attended school in the winter-time, going to Sunday school and church on Sundays and here completed his education, for the time being, having reached about the fifth grade in a country school. During this time he was alone a great deal and the memory of his lonesome- ness is one of the outstanding recollections of the years spent with the Wilsons.
By this time he had reached the conclu- sion that he must try to earn something be- sides his keep, but the Wilsons were de- termined that he should stay with them and he was obliged to run away, returning to Chateaugay and going to work for Wallace Hill, who owned one of the finest farms in Franklin County. He received $8 a month that summer and $5 a month during the fol- lowing winter, with board, room and wash- ing additional. The next spring he was employed by Patrick J. Ryan, a nearby farmer, and his wage was $13 a month dur- ing the summer. The next fall he returned to Mr. Hill, his winter pay being $8 a month, while the next summer he was able to com- mand $18 per month. Mr. Hill's death oc- curred late that summer and in the fall he went to work for Allan Eaton, at $15 a month wages for the winter and $23 per month the next summer, when he was eight- een years of age. At that time no "hired man" in Chateaugay received higher wages and during that time Mr. St. Germain learned much about dairy and general farm- ing, in a section of New York that is excel-
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lent cattle, hay, grain and potato country, where the good loam soil with a clay bottom yields three tons of timothy and clover hay to the acre or three hundred bushels of potatoes.
In the fall of his eighteenth year Mr. Ger- main decided that he had worked as a farm hand in northern New York long enough and came to Holyoke, where his parents and brother had resided for less than a year. He obtained work driving a team for one John Prew, who lived in Holyoke and owned a brick yard in Willimansett, on the other side of the railroad tracks near the Chicopee line. His wages were $10.50 a week, out of which he had to pay his board and room. Each driver was obliged to care for his own team, so that it was necessary to get up at four o'clock in the morning, and only rarely was work finished before seven o'clock at night. A day's work was four loads of brick hauled from the yard in Willimansett to a place in Holyoke, fully four miles away. After work- ing three weeks, Mr. St. Germain asked his employer for a half day off to attend a wed- ding, a request that was refused with the reply that if he were not there to drive his team on the wedding morning someone else would drive it and he need not return. Mr. St. Germain decided to attend the wedding, in fact was best man at the ceremony.
On the wedding morning the teams filed out of Prew's yard in their invariable order, Mr. St. Germain's uncle driving No. I, his team, No. 2, being driven by a Frenchman who had been a helper. There was a little fog that morning and perhaps the teams were a little later than usual. The uncle's team crossed the railroad tracks that had to be traversed before entering the brick- yard and team No. 2 was on the tracks just as an express train thundered over the cross- ing, smashing the wagon into ten thousand pieces, killing both horses, and throwing the driver nearly a hundred feet, where he
landed against the trunk of a tree, probably breaking every bone in his body and killing him instantly. Mr. Prew bought a new team and cart and sent word by the uncle that he wished young St. Germain to drive it. He, however, had had all of that work that he wanted, and accepted a place with Harvey Strong, in Amherst, owner of a small farm just outside the town and a house and barn and bakery in Amherst. Mr. Strong em- ployed a girl on the counter in the shop, two night bakers, one day baker, and two driver- salesmen who peddled bakery goods in sur- rounding towns. Mr. Strong had four horses and the salesmen changed their horses daily, so that Mr. St. Germain's job was to take care of the furnaces, the two cows, and the horses, being required to have two of the horses fed, curried, harnessed, and at the bakery shop by quarter of seven every morning, excepting Sunday. During the day he hauled the freight for the bakery and did any other work that turned up, oc- casionally helping out downstairs in the bakery, where the operation of the ovens was always very interesting to him. His pay was $25 a month, with board and room and wash- ing supplied in Mr. Strong's house, where also lived four Massachusetts State College students with whom he became friendly and whom he describes as fine boys who have never been forgotten. Coming to New Eng- land was a real experience for the farm boy, for a bathtub was a novelty to him and he had never before seen a trolley car, while the trip from Chateaugay to Holyoke consti- tuted his second ride on a railroad train, his first having been for a distance of thirteen miles, from Chateaugay to Malone, where he attended the circus the previous year.
By the next spring he decided that it was time to be on the move on the way up again, and he obtained work with H. P. Hinckley, who was manager of the Springfield branch of Armour & Company and who owned a
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farm in Agawam, across the Connecticut River. He was made manager of the farm, lived at his employer's house, and received $30 a month, a wage and condition which made him feel that he counted for some- thing. Here Mr. St. Germain's own words take up the story :
I shall never forget Mr. Hinckley. At that time he was thirty-six years old, had a wife and four fine children. He had been with Armour & Company since leaving college, where he was on the football team. He was six feet tall, weighed about two hundred pounds, and was one of the most handsome men I've ever seen. He was greatly impressed with the way I handled things on the farm and made me feel as if I were his younger brother. By the fall of that year of 1912, I was restless again and wanted to work in the city of Springfield. After Mr. Hinckley realized it was no use trying to keep me on the farm, he offered me a job driving one of the delivery wagons for Armour & Company. (I can still see the gray horses and yellow wagons.) The wages were $12 a week. Mr. Hinckley felt sure I would be ready to go back to the farm by the next spring. The drivers were expected to have their wagons in front of the beef house platform by 6:30 in the morning. We usually got through at 5:00 at night, with the exception of Friday, when it was sometimes 11:00, and 1:00 Satur- day noon. That was a job! For the first time in my life I had Saturday afternoons and Sundays off. There I learned to lug quarters of beef, weighing anywhere from one hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds. I never weighed over one hundred and fifty-two. There I learned to hold my own with hard-boiled Irish beef luggers, who were thirty, forty, and fifty pounds heavier than myself and who were strong as oxen and hard as nails. I didn't go back to the farm the next spring, and after I had driven a wagon about one and one-half years, Mr. Hinckley promoted me to assistant of the man who ran the beef box. There I learned to "break up" a side of beef, keep track of the various shipments of beef, and weigh out the beef leaving the box. Each quarter of beef and its com- ponent parts carried the car letter and a number and there were usually some four to seven carloads in the box at one time. It was there I began to want at least some education and learn how to sell. I began to see that the men who wore the better clothes and sold the goods were the ones who were the best paid. I finally began to realize that a man was paid for what he had above his ears rather than below; that
the men who did the hardest physical work and worked the longest hours were the poorest paid. I began going to night school, studying such elementary sub- jects as Business English. Business Arithmetic and Bookkeeping. I took a course in salesmanship with the International Correspondence School, finally com- pleted it and got my first diploma. I joined the Mas- sachusetts Militia, B Company of the old 2d Regiment. This gave me an opportunity to go to camp for a week every summer and learn something of the ele- ments of military science. During the summer of 1916, I was on the Mexican Border as part of Gen- eral Pershing's punitive expedition. That was a great experience and gave me a chance to see something of my country. At that time army pay was $15 a month. When I returned in October, Armour & Company paid me the difference between my regular wages and what I received in the service. I had several hun- dred dollars in cash for the first time in my life. I might say that I didn't have Saturday afternoons and evenings to myself very long after going to work for Armour & Company, as I got a job with the Mohican Company of Springfield for Saturday afternoons and evenings. I was there several years and learned some- thing of the retail end of the meat business. I also worked a couple of evenings a week for a friend of mine who ran a meat cart, and he taught me all he knew about cutting up a side of beef as well as hams and lambs, and the rest of the meat business. When my company was called back into the service in the spring of 1917, I was let out because of defective eye- sight. Aside from that no man in the service was in better physical condition than I was. As a member of the Young Men's Christian Association for several years, I had learned to wrestle and in 1916 was rec- ognized as the best wrestler in my regiment. During those years, I did a little professional wrestling with more than average success. In the spring of 1917, I left Armour & Company. I was getting $16 a week. I had $500 in cash, which I paid my friend for his horse, cart, and meat route. He was glad to get rid of it during the summer months. During that summer I worked as I never had before; on Saturday, from four in the morning until eleven at night. I got all the good breaks and saved $1,300 and in the fall my friend was glad to buy back his meat business for exactly what I had paid for it, $500. I took my $1,800 and entered New York University, School of Com- merce, Accounts and Finance, as a special student. I studied under such men as David Friday, John R. Turner, Charles W. Gerstenburg, and George Bur- ton Hotchkiss. I used to see Joseph French John- son quite often and heard him lecture several times.
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I also listened to an inspiring talk by Frank A. Van- derlip. That year was the greatest experience of my life, because it made me realize that the men in high places were after all just men; and that America offered every man a chance to better his circumstances, providing he was willing to pay the price in hard work and perseverance, and got his share of breaks.
Later these courses were supplemented by Mr. St. Germain through further study and research at Northeastern University and extension work at Columbia University, his study of business subjects accompany- ing an interest in the arts and sciences. After leaving New York University in 1918, he entered a unit of the Students Army Training Corps and served until December Io of that year. This course of training, a steady grind from 5:30 in the morning to 9:00 o'clock at night, demonstrated to him the value of organized effort and he bene- fited through the study of such subjects as mathematics, military science, French, to- pography, war aims, and various phases of military drills, manœuvers and setting up exercises. Within three days after being mustered out of the army he suffered an illness of several weeks. After recovery, an inventory of his resources showed that his time at New York University and in the army had left him without funds and, apply- ing again to Armour & Company, he was engaged as a salesman and assigned to the Waltham, Massachusetts, territory, where he remained from January to September, 1919. During this time he discovered that he could sell, and thus added a most valu- able bit of equipment to the arduous train- ing he had undergone. He usually stood among the first ten of over sixty salesmen in the Boston territory, received $25 a week and an expense account, and was considered as well paid by his employers. He differed with this belief, resigned in September, 1919, and, having savings of $300, married Dorothy May Himmelmann, of Brooklyn,
New York, daughter of John M. W. and Mary (Brewster) Himmelmann, whom he had met while attending New York University. The ceremony was performed at the Little Church Around the Corner, New York City, September 17, 1919.
Mr. St. Germain's connection with the se- curities field began at this time with a sales- man's job in marketing the capital stock of a Boston automobile finance company on a commission basis. "It was pretty tough going," but he was able to make a living during the next few months and in January, 1920, he secured a position as Springfield sales manager in the sale of the capital stock of a Boston company whose business was loaning money on automobiles and second mortgages, the General Mortgage and Loan Corporation. With this company he re- mained in the same capacity until April, 1924, and the improvement in the family finances was indicated in paying for furni- ture for two rooms, then for a Ford car that he might make better time and see more prospects, and later, in 1922, by the pur- chase of a little house in West Springfield, carrying three mortgages, the second and third of which he paid off during the next year or so. Here, at the strategic point in his business career, Mr. St. Germain's own words best tell the story :
During the years I had been selling securities I had become very much interested in the stock of estab- lished banks and insurance companies, especially the large New York banks and the large American stock fire and life insurance companies. The better part of five years I spent peddling the stock of new companies taught me that the safest and in the long run the most profitable investments one could make lay in buying the shares of established companies, having manage- ment of unswer ving integrity. So in the spring of 1924, when the management of the General Mortgage and Loan Corporation began quarrelling about control of the company, I resigned. Later that year I estab- lished D. J. St. Germain & Company, 1490 Main Street, to specialize in the purchase and sale of bank
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and insurance stocks. We still have the same offices. I had a cash capital of $1,000. But American bank and insurance stocks were on the threshold of what turned out to be the greatest rise in their history, to be followed by the most drastic decline in their his- tory. The bank and insurance stocks in which I was most interested sold from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars a share. Most of my clients were people of small and modest means, which pre- cluded their buying such securities. In the latter part of 1925, I conceived the idea of forming a corporation to buy, hold and sell these high-priced bank and insur- ance stocks and to in turn sell the shares of the corporation in units of $100 or more to investors. So in January, 1926, the Financial Securities Corporation, the first organized in New England and the second in the United States to deal exclusively in the securities of financial institutions, came into existence. It was organized under the corporation laws of Massachu- setts. Incidentally, Dr. Charles W. Gerstenburg, then as now head of Prentice-Hall, Inc., New York, sup- plying tax and investment service on a nation-wide basis, assisted me in forming the corporation. The corporation began business with the paid-in capital of $106,000. This was supplied by something over one hundred stockholders, who subscribed to the original shares. By October, 1929, the paid-in capital was about $500,000. However, the value of the corpora- tion's assets was just under $1,600,000, against which the corporation owed $500,000, leaving a net worth of about $1,100,000. During the years from 1925 to 1929, my business had grown steadily. The years from 1925 to the end of 1929 seem like a feverish dream. Bank and insurance stocks were rising so rap- idly and my original $1,000 was multiplying so fast that at times I wondered where it all came from. During these years, I became convinced that the way to make money was to borrow the other fellow's money through the banks and buy bank and insurance stocks. Bank loans proved my undoing. A large part of the time that elapsed from the latter part of 1929 until the early months of 1933 constituted a nightmare for me that shall ever be indelibly impressed in my memory. By the fall of 1931, when the English Government was forced off the gold standard, bank and insurance stock (they didn't suffer any worse or as badly as many other classes of securities) were selling for a mere fraction of the values they had com- manded in 1929. By June of 1932 they could not command ten per cent. of their 1929 prices. The banks were frantically calling their loans and we were trying our best to satisfy them and still retain at least some of our bank and insurance stocks. Even- tually everything was gone. Some 10,000 American
banks had failed. Those still afloat were panicky. At times the shares of relatively strong banks and insurance companies could not command any bid at all. My corporation was broken and I had thrown every dollar of resources I could command into the corporation trying to save it, and I was broke. In the early part of 1929, I bought our beautiful home, "Seven Oaks," the finest type of Georgian colonial architecture in this section of New England. The only reason I didn't lose it with everything else was be- cause at the time I bought it the president of a savings bank with which I was doing business persuaded me to let his bank loan me $21,000 on the property. The time came in subsequent years when he very much feared that his bank would have to own the property for the amount of the loan. A single sixteen-room house, on which the taxes are over $1,200 a year, would not be a good $21,000 investment for a bank faced with the necessity of paying interest to its de- positors on this amount. In the fall of 1931, we formed The National Union Corporation to try and salvage what we could of what there might be left of the Financial Securities Corporation when our creditors got through with us. (Incidentally, during all the darkest years of the depression I never doubted for one minute that the shares of the stronger bank and insurance companies such as we owned would come back marketwise. I believe in the American tradition, in American enterprise, and the form of government that has made America the great nation that it is.) As an indication of what our resources had shrunk to, The National Union Corporation was launched with a capital of exactly $6,000 and was made up by at least thirty original subscribers. Today our National Union Corporation is worth $150,000 and has paid uninterrupted dividends of not less than five per cent. per annum since organization. We all look forward to the future with confidence. Strange as it may seem, as we emerged from the depression I found myself, although without any appreciable material assets, with more prestige and a better business than I had ever enjoyed before. Nineteen thirty-four was a pretty fair year. During the year 1935, my dealings in the shares of bank and insurance stocks were among the largest of that of any firm in the East, outside of New York City. Nineteen thirty-six looks like a record year. During the long night of this depression that we've gone through, I have learned there are much greater values than just money-the unswerving confidence of those who have trusted you, when everything is crashing around you and when everything you do seems wrong; abiding friendship regardless of what has happened. If God gives me the wisdom and strength to justify the confidence and
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