commissioner. He helped found the Racquet Club in St. Louis and the Deepdale Golf Club in Great Neck, Long Island. He became president of the U.S. Golf Association and donated the three-foot silver trophy for amateur golf that became known as the Walker Cup.
Even as a young married, he lived better than most. The census of 1900 shows that when Bert was twenty-five, he and his wife and one baby had three live-in servants—a maid, a nanny, and a cook. Years later Bert outgrew St. Louis, and he moved his wife, two daughters, four sons, and four servants to a sumptuous residence in New York City. He eventually added to the size of his father’s property in Kennebunkport, purchased a mansion on Long Island, New York, with marble floors, butlers, and two Rolls-Royces, and bought the ten-thousand-acre Duncannon Plantation in South Carolina, which he used for shooting parties every Thanksgiving. With his own private railroad cars, he lived like the Maharaja of Missouri.
A virtuoso wheeler-dealer, Bert Walker calibrated numbers faster than a riverboat gambler. Unhampered by business ethics, he embraced the frenzy of stock-market speculation and seized the financial advantages of short selling stocks, fee splitting, split-stock arbitrage, and buying on margin. He founded his own brokerage and ratcheted up commissions by trading on margin for securities that could then be highly leveraged. He made his fortune before insider trading became illegal. In 1929 he judged the stock market to be overpriced and sold short in the months before the crash, bolstering his riches. His business prospered so rapidly that before he was thirty, he was well known in financial circles for his ability to “make deals.”
One of his “first and biggest killings” occurred when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway Company went into receivership. Bert arranged for G. H. Walker and Company to acquire its principal subsidiary, the New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico Railway. He took commissions for negotiating the acquisition and then for selling it later at a stupendous profit.
He never let anything stand in the way of making money, and that included political principles or religious beliefs. At the age of sixty-two, he was one of the Wall Streeters publicly rapped by then-Senator Harry S. Truman for “rampaging greed” and “the larger evil of money worship.” Bert flicked off the reprimand like a pesky mosquito and continued piling up large commissions from the various offices of G. H. Walker and Company in St. Louis, Clayton, and Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; Waterloo, Iowa; Chicago; New York City; Philadelphia; White Plains, New York; Bridgeport, Waterbury, and Hartford, Connecticut; Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island.
Within a few years, Bert had built a financial empire that would become the family’s mother lode, bankrolling the fortunes of Walker and Bush sons and sons-in-law through the generations. At various times in various offices, the following members of the Walker-Bush tribe worked for G. H. Walker and Company: George Herbert Walker Sr., George Herbert Walker Jr., George Herbert Walker III, James Wear Walker, James Smith Bush, Louis Walker, John M. Walker, Jonathan James Bush, and Ray Carter Walker.
Like a dog marking his territory, Bert Walker left his name as his imprint: the Walker Cup; Walker’s Point in Maine; G. H. Walker and Company; and, not incidentally, his son George Herbert Walker Jr.
Bert became the amateur heavyweight-boxing champion of Missouri while in law school at Washington University. A man with an explosive temper, he head-butted his way through life, pummeling anyone who got in his way. “We left the holes in the ceiling in the dining room where Mr. Walker shot at a wasp that had stung him,” said Suzanne McMillan, whose family purchased Duncannon Plantation after World War II.
Burly and barrel-chested, he looked like a bull encased in a Hathaway shirt. He was not a
Even as a young married, he lived better than most. The census of 1900 shows that when Bert was twenty-five, he and his wife and one baby had three live-in servants—a maid, a nanny, and a cook. Years later Bert outgrew St. Louis, and he moved his wife, two daughters, four sons, and four servants to a sumptuous residence in New York City. He eventually added to the size of his father’s property in Kennebunkport, purchased a mansion on Long Island, New York, with marble floors, butlers, and two Rolls-Royces, and bought the ten-thousand-acre Duncannon Plantation in South Carolina, which he used for shooting parties every Thanksgiving. With his own private railroad cars, he lived like the Maharaja of Missouri.
A virtuoso wheeler-dealer, Bert Walker calibrated numbers faster than a riverboat gambler. Unhampered by business ethics, he embraced the frenzy of stock-market speculation and seized the financial advantages of short selling stocks, fee splitting, split-stock arbitrage, and buying on margin. He founded his own brokerage and ratcheted up commissions by trading on margin for securities that could then be highly leveraged. He made his fortune before insider trading became illegal. In 1929 he judged the stock market to be overpriced and sold short in the months before the crash, bolstering his riches. His business prospered so rapidly that before he was thirty, he was well known in financial circles for his ability to “make deals.”
One of his “first and biggest killings” occurred when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway Company went into receivership. Bert arranged for G. H. Walker and Company to acquire its principal subsidiary, the New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico Railway. He took commissions for negotiating the acquisition and then for selling it later at a stupendous profit.
He never let anything stand in the way of making money, and that included political principles or religious beliefs. At the age of sixty-two, he was one of the Wall Streeters publicly rapped by then-Senator Harry S. Truman for “rampaging greed” and “the larger evil of money worship.” Bert flicked off the reprimand like a pesky mosquito and continued piling up large commissions from the various offices of G. H. Walker and Company in St. Louis, Clayton, and Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; Waterloo, Iowa; Chicago; New York City; Philadelphia; White Plains, New York; Bridgeport, Waterbury, and Hartford, Connecticut; Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island.
Within a few years, Bert had built a financial empire that would become the family’s mother lode, bankrolling the fortunes of Walker and Bush sons and sons-in-law through the generations. At various times in various offices, the following members of the Walker-Bush tribe worked for G. H. Walker and Company: George Herbert Walker Sr., George Herbert Walker Jr., George Herbert Walker III, James Wear Walker, James Smith Bush, Louis Walker, John M. Walker, Jonathan James Bush, and Ray Carter Walker.
Like a dog marking his territory, Bert Walker left his name as his imprint: the Walker Cup; Walker’s Point in Maine; G. H. Walker and Company; and, not incidentally, his son George Herbert Walker Jr.
Bert became the amateur heavyweight-boxing champion of Missouri while in law school at Washington University. A man with an explosive temper, he head-butted his way through life, pummeling anyone who got in his way. “We left the holes in the ceiling in the dining room where Mr. Walker shot at a wasp that had stung him,” said Suzanne McMillan, whose family purchased Duncannon Plantation after World War II.
Burly and barrel-chested, he looked like a bull encased in a Hathaway shirt. He was not a
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