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banker there but one of the brightest and most promising individuals in financial history.” William Read died of pneumonia the very next month, leaving each of the partners—including Fiske—twenty-five thousand dollars, but the company without a head. Dillon, despite being the junior partner, took over from him. He’d always said that hewas reluctant to take on the job. But according to the Wall Street gossip of the time, the partners had been discussing the succession when Dillon simply stood up, walked into Read’s vacant corner office, and took his seat. Which sounds about right. Certainly when he decided to rename the firm Dillon, Read & Co. in 1920, the first Fiske and the other partners heard of it was when Dillon told them, “Gentlemen, I have bought in 85 percent of the business here. Those who do not like it can withdraw.”
    Dillon was infamously ruthless, “hard and inhuman” according to his associate Hugh Bullock. “The stories about Dillon being a mean, tight-fisted bastard were true,” he said. “I have never met a man that was as tough and hard-boiled.” And the economist Eliot Janeway memorably described Dillon as “nothing but a money guy” who “wouldn’t have bought God with a whorehouse attached if it wasn’t a bargain.” Long before Jordan Belfort borrowed the title for his book, or Martin Scorsese used it for his movie, Dillon was known as “the Wolf of Wall Street,” a name he was given by his employee James Forrestal. But Dillon was well known, too, for the fierce loyalty he showed to his old friends. He personally bailed out a bunch of his old partners and associates during the Wall Street crash a decade later. And he never forgot the debt of thanks, and friendship, he owed Fiske from their early days in Chicago, when Dillon got his start in the industry as a bond salesman. He liked Fiske—saw in him qualities he admired, even desired. As Dillon’s grandson put it, “My grandfather had brains but he always wanted to be socially acceptable . . . It was the one thing he didn’t have himself. So I think he was conscious about doing things for himself and for his children and grandchildren to make them socially acceptable.” William Meade Lindsley Fiske II, worldly, well-spoken, from old blue-blood stock, could teach Dillon a thing or two, even, while working alongside him, lend him a little of his social standing. So long as Dillon was in charge, Fiske had a job for life. And so did his family. Dillon employed Fiske’s nephew, Dean Mathey, right out of college. There was always a job waiting for Billy, too, whenever he wanted it.
    Back in Chicago, Fiske and his family thrived. They had a house on East Chestnut, just a couple of blocks up from the lakefront. They lived there with three female staff: a cook, a servant, and a nurse. They had a couple of dogs too: a dachshund they called Riley Grogan and a border terrier, Billy’s, who went by the name of Cuddly Demon. In 1919 they traveled up to Canada for a vacation in Banff National Park, a trip Peggy documented assiduously in her scrapbooks. Happy days, these. Billy was eight. It was here, up in the Canadian Rockies, that he got his first taste of life in the mountains, as a small blond boy scurryingaround the hiking trails on Big Beehive and around Lake Louise. Their father was a keen horse rider, swimmer, and golfer, and he encouraged a love of the outdoor life in his children. Billy, Peggy remembered, “was always interested in keeping fit.” He used to prop his feet up on the top edge of the large freestanding tub in the bathroom and do push-ups. She was a bit of a tomboy herself, who wore her hair cut short, and the two of them would rough-and-tumble together, wrestle.
    For much of their childhood, Billy and Peggy were taught by private tutors, which meant that their parents also took on a lot of the responsibility for