Chapter ThreeMACKUBIN, GOODRICH & CO., 1925–1927
Rowe joined Mackubin, Goodrich & Co. in 1925. A relatively small financial firm in Baltimore, it was quite different from Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe. He would spend his next twelve years there and form his basic investment beliefs.
George Mackubin started the firm as George Mackubin & Co. in January 1899, after he borrowed $300 to buy a seat on the Baltimore Stock Exchange. G. Clem Goodrich, sixteen years older, joined as its second partner eleven months after the firm opened its doors. John C. Legg, whose name the firm still carries today, was hired a year later as the “board boy.” His job was to keep the prices for the stocks being traded up to date on the large blackboard at the front of the public trading room. Five years after he was hired, John Legg was made a partner, the rapid rise an indication of his ability and the respect that he earned from others.
Mackubin's father was a wealthy lawyer and his mother a direct descendent of Martha Washington. An outgoing man, Mackubin ran the firm in an aggressive way, but was fair and respected by his employees. He believed in focusing on a few industries and companies and researching them very carefully. The oil and gas business around Houston, for example, caught his fancy. To find out what was really going on there, he would camp out for weeks in the hot, humid, mosquito‐ridden oil fields near the Gulf of Mexico. He thus got his information directly from the drillers and the oil exploration ...