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Excerpt
from Jack Corbett, Mariner -- Permission Granted to use in
reviews or commentary with the following credit:
From Jack Corbett, Mariner, Copyright © 2003,
Denny Hatch Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Afterword
(Original, Uncut Version)
by
Denny Hatch
laboring
with heavy capitalists in person; investing their own
money in the company's bonds, which they put on the same
basis with those of the Government; and calling to their
aid Richard T. Colburn, an able and experienced
journalist, who, with great skill and judgment, sent
forth upon the wings of the press fact after fact,
showing the greatness of the work and the value and
safety of the Security. At first money came in slowly,
but it soon accumulated like a rolling snowball. The
bonds were rapidly advanced in price to keep them from
selling faster than funds were needed; and finally a
party of European capitalists subscribed at one
transaction for four or five millions of dollars' worth
on condition that the loan should be closed.
During the decade prior to the arrival of Jack Corbett back
into his life, Hatch, at age 42, was in his prime--as family
man, banker and big spender. We learn from Harvey E. Fisk's
history of Fisk & Hatch that the partners drew salaries
of $33,000 each, which today would be the equivalent of
approximately $660,000. Hatch kept meticulous financial
records in a set of leather bound ledgers with tiny brass
locks and stamped with his name in gold. Every penny he
spent over thirty years was accounted for. The four books
are in the possession of his great-granddaughter, Jessamine
(Susy) Brandt, and are truly fascinating documents. It turns
out the salary was just the tip of the iceberg. For example,
in 1865, he recorded income of salary, profits from Fisk
& Hatch, plus some small miscellaneous revenues
totalling $127,312.80. With no income taxes, this was pure
velvet--the equivalent of more than $5 million gross today.
In the income portion of the ledger for that year were
entries for $75,000.00 and $50,000.00 and $1.00 interest
from a loan to T.L. Snyder.
The
Hatch Family Portrait
In 1870, A.S. Hatch commissioned the celebrated American
artist Eastman Johnson to paint a group portrait of his
family including Dr. Horace Hatch, who had sent him to sea
twenty-one years earlier. The fee was $10,000--or roughly
$200,000 in today's dollars. The catalog of New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the painting now hangs in
the American Wing, describes the work as follows:
The Hatch Family, 1870--71
Eastman Johnson (1824--1906)
Oil on canvas; 36 x 50 1/4 in. (91.4 x
127.6 cm)
Gift of Frederic H. Hatch, 1926
(26.97)
Among the finest paintings in
Alfrederick Hatch's art collection was this imposing
group portrait, which shows three generations of his
family. It depicts them in the library of their New York
residence at 49 Park Avenue on the northeast corner of
39th Street. Hatch is seated to the right at his desk,
and his wife, the former Theodosia Ruggles (1829--1908),
leans on the mantel. Her mother is portrayed at her
knitting and his father reads a paper in front of the
window. The most elaborate of Johnson's informal group
portraits in a domestic interior, the painting stems from
the tradition of eighteenth-century English conversation
pieces and seventeenth-century Dutch interiors. Johnson
painted it with the high finish and meticulous
draftsmanship for which he was highly renowned.
Alfrederick Smith Hatch (1829--1904)
was a prominent Wall Street broker in the firm of Fisk
& Hatch and president of the New York Stock Exchange
from 1883 to 1884. Like many of his business associates,
he was an enthusiastic collector of art. He was fond of
Italian and French paintings and also owned an important
group of American paintings, including the landscape by
Sanford Gifford that can be seen on the left wall of the
library.
What you see could easily be a theatrical stage set with
fifteen individuals momentarily frozen as the curtain rises
on a tableau about to erupt into an American family comedy
in the tradition of Cheaper by the Dozen or Life
with Father.
In 1871, Hatch called Johnson back for a
slight revision, paying him an additional $1,000 to
commemorate the birth of Emily Nichols Hatch, born that year
and depicted in her christening dress on the lap of
Dora.
All her long life, it nettled Emily no
end that she was the centerpiece of a very famous painting
that precisely dated the year of her birth. Sometime after
the turn of the century she visited the home of her brother,
my grandfather Frederic H. Hatch (sixth figure from the left
in the portrait), where the picture was hanging. One night
after everyone had gone to bed, Emily crept downstairs with
a can of brown paint and added one small line to the
picture--changing the 1871 to 1877. No one noticed until the
picture was given to the Met, whereupon the conservators
questioned the family. All signs pointed to Emily, who
indignantly denied she would do such a thing. Finally, in
her very old age she 'fessed up and even laughed about it.
Meanwhile, the museum changed the date back to the original.
Today, if you visit the picture at the Met, look closely at
the date by Eastman Johnson's signature; you can discern
just a hint of Emily's mischief.
From an unpublished memoir by my father,
Alden Hatch, son of Frederic:
They were a hardy lot those Hatch children. Despite the
infant mortality rate of the times and the lack of modern
drugs, they all grew up and most of them married. The
first to die, at the age of forty-five, was John, who
drank himself to death. All the others reached their
sixties or better.
It was great fun growing up in that big rambunctious
family. Every one of the children was an individualist
and an extrovert. Of course they fought like wildcats.
Even when they were middle-aged they argued so violently
that an outsider might have expected them to come to
blows. When father gave a family party, my brother and I
would listen with delight to the roaring noise coming
from the dining room. But they were intensely loyal. If
that unwary outsider had tried to take part in the fight,
the whole pack would have turned to rend him.
The
Yachts
In Jack Corbett, Mariner are several mentions of A.S.
Hatch's yachts. In the ledgers, I was able to find records
of four yachts--Escort (1866-1869), Calypso
(1866-1868), Resolute (1871-1873), and the sloop Jack
Shaw (1872-1877). Of the four, Resolute was the most
lavish and set him back a total of $53,306.91--the
equivalent of over $1 million today--plus, of course,
running expenses that included salaries for captain and
crew, uniforms, endless repairs and "sundries."
Alden Hatch writes:
Sailing was a great part of their lives. About 1866,
Grandpa acquired a schooner yacht that he christened
Calypso after Ulysses' sea nymph. As is the way of
yachtsmen, Grandfather soon got a bigger and better boat,
the schooner Resolute, 108 feet long with a crew
of twelve. Father loved her like nothing before or since.
In 1870, he sailed Calypso in the first America's
Cup race in the United States, wherein the British yacht,
Cambria, challenged for the America's cup. Because
the America had defeated the entire Royal Yacht Club in a
race around the Isle of Wight, the Englishman had to race
the whole New York Yacht Club fleet in New York harbor.
As Grandfather described the race, every American skipper
but one thought only of blanketing the Britisher. The
poor chap never had a chance. The little American sloop,
Magic, tending strictly to business, slipped
through the fleet and won the race. The Britisher
finished twelfth and Grandpa came in fifteenth.
Quite frequently Grandfather would
plan an adult cruise with only the older children
invited. But it was very difficult to keep track of
eleven children. Very early on sailing morning, Freddie,
aged ten or twelve, would sneak aboard and stow away.
When the lift of the ship informed him that they were too
far out to sea to turn back, he would appear on deck.
Howling with simulated rage Grandpa would start after
him. Freddie would go up the mainmast like a monkey. If
Grandfather sent a sailor after him, Freddie would slide
down the main topmast eighty feet above the deck, to the
foremast. Another sailor up the foremast would send him
sliding down the forestay to the bowsprit. It would take
half the crew to catch him. But Grandpa did not really
get mad. He was proud that his son also loved the
sea.
In his later years, Father recalled
with retrospective horror how Grandfather brought
Resolute up New York Harbor before a strong
southwest wind, sitting at the wheel roaring out hymns at
the top of his lungs, paying no attention to where he was
going, while the harbor traffic from tugs to ocean liners
frantically maneuvered out of his way in a din of
blasting whistles. Of course then, as now, sail had the
right of way over steam.
Exactly 100 years after the Hatch family portrait was
painted, the owner of a maritime gallery in Newport, Rhode
Island, got it in his head to find a yacht painting by J.P.
Newell, the premier portraitist of private yachts in the
late 19th century, so that he could sell reproductions. At
The Old Print shop in New York City, he found a Newell
watercolor of a two-masted private sailing yacht under
overcast skies on choppy gray water off Newport, Rhode
Island. Both the crew and the children were attired in
smart, white sailor outfits. One of the burgees flying from
the mast was that of The New York Yacht Club; the other was
the owner's flag. The gallery owner went to The New York
Yacht Club library and discovered it was A.S. Hatch's
Resolute. He offered the resultant prints by mail for
$30. I bought one for myself and several others for family
members.
One day in 1972, the gallery owner showed
up on my doorstep in Stamford, Connecticut, and offered to
sell me the original painting for $3,000. At the time, I did
not have two nickels to rub together. What's more, the print
looked better than that original, so I declined.
I was once told by an eminent yacht
portraitist of the 1960s that the secret of making boat
owners puff up with pride was to cheat--to depict the vessel
slightly larger than life and the people on deck slightly
smaller. Newell, I think, espoused that philosophy. The
yacht portrait was dated the same year as the family
portrait--1871. Clearly it was a year when Hatch was
spending like a sailor--on art works as well as yachts and a
very lavish lifestyle.
Temporary
Setback
The great Wall Street Panic of 1873 came along two years
later and temporarily put Hatch & Fisk into what today
would be called Chapter 11. In his novel, The
Financier, Theodore Dreiser wrote:
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