Word: connors
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...GUGGENHEIMS - Harvey O'Connor - Covici, Friede...
Last week Harvey O'Connor (Mellon's Millions) offered The Guggenheims, a well-documented unraveling of the complex history of the Guggenheim mining fortune that made U. S. novelists' omission seem even more remarkable. Like the Buddenbrooks and Forsytes, the Guggenheim family began with sober business men, many of whose latest descendants forsook business for the arts, involved complicated family relationships, fierce squabbles. But unlike their counterparts in European fiction, the Guggenheims pictured by Harvey O'Connor have operated on a scale calculated to dazzle the most imaginative novelists...
...epic novelist, certainly no apologist for the rich, Harvey O'Connor tells most of the Guggenheim saga in an objective, critically-cool prose. But occasionally readers may detect a slightly flabbergasted note of left-wing awe as he recounts how the seven sons of Jewish immigrant Meyer Guggenheim of Philadelphia made the family the second or third richest in the U. S., comparable in the scope of its clannish money-making only to the Rothschilds. Starting in 1847 as a pack peddler of household knickknacks along the muddy roads outside Philadelphia, vigorous, good-humored Meyer Guggenheim acquired a peddler...
...first note of awe in Author O'Connor's account comes with his description of how the Guggenheims got into the mining business. Preferring to loan money personally rather than trust the banks. Meyer put up $25,000 with a speculating Quaker named Charles Graham, who for $4,000 had bought a water-filled, 70-ft. silver mine in Leadville, Colo. It turned out to be the richest mine in the Rockies. The only Jew in turbulent Leadville, Meyer, now past 50, decided to build his own smelter because he was annoyed with smelter fees. Said a superintendent...
...Hallin: "Isabelle had rehearsals here in the house because the school hall was too cold. But there were no drinks. I do all the drinking in this family." Also eager to support Teacher Hallin were the parents of students who had attended the rehearsals. Snapped Charles M. O'Connor: "Why didn't the school committee come to the parents? Instead they took matters in their own hands and gave everybody the impression that terrible things went on." Echoed Mrs. Grace Whittredge: "Gossip! The reputation of our family in town is beyond reproach." Asked repeatedly to tell what...