Word: trusting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Very Model. Few men are better suited to present the public image of trust and integrity fostered by the funds than Dwight Robinson. He is the very model of a Proper Bostonian, from his steel-rimmed spectacles and dark, conservative suits-he always wears a vest in the office -to his clubs (Union, Longwood Cricket) and his finely polished sense of discretion...
Quirk of Fate. Robinson joined M.I.T. in 1932, eight years after a stock salesman named Edward Leffler teamed up with Boston Broker Charles Learoyd to form the trust. Leffler thought that the ordinary investor usually bought the wrong stock, should have help in investing. At first the financial world laughed at him for his radical new ideas: the redemption feature of the fund and the disclosure of portfolio. He bowed out of M.I.T. six months later, and in came Boston Banker Merrill Griswold, an early buyer of M.I.T. shares who became M.I.T.'s first chairman...
...Shares. Easygoing, brilliant Merrill Griswold and sober, diligent Dwight Robinson made a crack team. With his flair for drama, Griswold pulled Massachusetts Investors Trust through a major test in 1932. Despite the fund's respectable performance in the crash, the idea persisted that it could not handle a run on its shares. When a Boston bank was forced to cash in 40,000 M.I.T. shares held as collateral, it called up Griswold, advised him that it would deliver the blow gently by selling over a period of several weeks. Snapped Griswold: "Send them in this afternoon." M.I.T. redeemed...
...trust listed the market value of its stock at just half of what it had paid for it. M.I.T. slimmed its portfolio from 128 to 77 stocks, concentrated in defensive stocks (utilities, foods, tobacco, etc.), better able to withstand the Depression. By 1933 Robinson and his staff saw light ahead, and M.I.T. began switching out of defensive stocks and into railroads, automobiles, mining and steel. With a poker player's eye, Robinson could look at a company's present and guess its future. He personally researched the Texas Co. (now Texaco, Inc.), persuaded the trustees...
...investors continued to pour their money into M.I.T., the trust moved into first place among the nation's mutual funds in 1936, with assets of $130 million (v. $15.1 million in 1930). Despite its bullish position, M.I.T. sailed through the sharp market break of 1937 with hardly a change in its portfolio; it simply put new cash into Treasury notes as a defensive measure. In that year, Dwight Robinson was rewarded for his work by being moved up to trustee. In 1954, when Merrill Griswold moved up to honorary chairman of the advisory board, Robinson slipped into his chair...