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COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation
MERRILL, CHARLES EDWARD
As cofounder of Merrill, Lynch stockbrokerage firm in 1914, Charles E. Merrill (1885–1956) launched a Wall Street dynasty that would long outlive him. Building on the slogan "Bring Wall Street to Main Street" he designed his business around middle-class investors, not stock exchange insiders. By the time of his death in 1956 his firm had offices in 106 cities across North America; the firm has continued to grow ever since.
Charles E. Merrill was born on October 19, 1885, in Green Cove Springs, Florida, the son of Dr. Charles and Octavia Wilson Merrill. His father, a local physician, also owned a drug store where Merrill worked as a boy in addition to having a paper route. Merrill attended a preparatory school affiliated with Stetson University and was later sent on a partial athletic scholarship to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1904 to 1906. He left Amherst without graduating and returned to Florida where he dabbled in newspaper journalism at West Palm Beach's Tropical Sun. Later in life he commented that the job provided him with "the best training I ever had; I learned human nature."
After one year of law school at the University of Michigan Merrill abandoned plans for a legal career and went to Mississippi to play baseball for a minor league team during the summer of 1907. When the season ended he moved to New York City to look for work and his first job was in the office of the Patchogue Plymouth Mills in Patchogue, New York. Here what Merrill acquired "turned out to be the equivalent of a university course in general and credit finance, cost accounting, and administration, in particular." This training would be invaluable to his future success.
The skills Merrill learned at his early jobs enabled him to become one of the most innovative leaders in the field of financial services. With a sound...
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