Word: merediths
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Money has to be sold the same way that suits and dresses are." Today that slogan is a banker's commonplace. Yet when young Lewis Douglas Meredith argued the point in his Ph.D. thesis at Yale in 1933, it was far from accepted doctrine. Bankers sat on their funds, lent only on the highest-grade collateral. Meredith began developing the idea that, instead of looking mainly to collateral, the loanmakers should consider a man's job and his ability to repay. A mortgage, he argued, is not just a lien on property, but "instead is a means...
Shortly after writing his thesis, Financier Meredith got a chance to prove his case. He joined Vermont's staid old (108 years) National Life Insurance Co., pioneered so many fields for investment that National Life has wielded an influence far beyond its $620 million assets. Last week Meredith, now 51, and National Life's executive vice president, got another selling job. He became president of the New England Council, a post previously held by such eminent New Englanders as former Boston Federal Reserve President Laurence F. Whittemore and Senator Ralph E. Flanders. His task: to bind together...
Modern Banking. The job was tailor-made for Meredith. All through his career -assistant professor of economics at Vermont University, Vermont State banking and insurance commissioner-he has been busy improvising modern banking methods for modern days. Joining National Life in 1935 as an investment analyst, he arrived shortly after the New Deal brought out its Federal Housing Administration to spur home building. While other money men cried socialism and hung back, Meredith turned National Life to investing in FHA, by 1946 had 42% of its money in government mortgages...
...string of other firsts followed. In 1945, as housing boomed, Meredith turned National Life to the package mortgage, permitting cash-short house buyers to tack appliances onto the house purchase price. An estimated half the mortgages written are now package mortgages...
...other hand, he has invented as many tricks of staging as has Shaw of thought. For a while the two showmen get in each other's way, though eventually they set each other off. This is partly owing to an accomplished cast, including Glynis Johns, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach, who particularly scores as Bill Walker. Played straight, this Major Barbara might have been better. But there was never the sense, as of late with other Shaw, that it urgently needed...