June 20, 2015

Revealing the heretofore unknown Alexander Hamilton/Wichita connection

If it weren’t for the G/H alphabet connection this story would be fiction. Mike Garrett sat next to Rod Hatter when they both were at Columbia Law School. That they were, and grant me the freedom to condense and straight line a lot of stuff, is how I got to know Wichita, 3 and ½ years of it.

Mike Garrett to Rod Hatter to Bob Foulston to Jordan Haines to Alexander Hamilton.

Bob Foulston was a class act. He was the founder and managing partner of Foulston, Powers, Seifkin, Powers & Eberhardt in Wichita, KS. He introduced me to Jordan Haines, the Chairman of the Board of the 4^th National Bank of Wichita.

Skip over the somewhat inartful name of the bank. He and it were big players in the mid-1970s American banking scene. Beyond that, the lobby of the HQ was adorned by Alexander Calder mobiles. Calder, another distinguished alumnus of Stevens Institute in Hoboken, and several bib-overalled farmers with 3000 acres of wheat under cultivation made for an unforgettable tableau of American exceptionalism. [The world is upside down when we, still waiting for the Godot of a never arriving Summer of Recovery, can look back on the 1970s as the “good old days”.]

Jordan Haines showed me the board room where corporate things got done.

I asked what the 3 foot high marble stands were for.

Olive Beech, she of the Beech Aircraft Company, was both a member of the Bank’s board and a serial cigar smoker. Small, thin, somewhat petite, definitely not androgynous – I speak both of her and her smokes – liked to wander around the room. To accommodate her, several ashtrays were strategically placed. She apparently liked to dispose of revolutionary Cuban cigarillos in an environmentally sensitive way, one at a time. The evidence of contraband went, so to speak, up in smoke.

She liked to say that she was descended 3 times out from Alexander Hamilton.

She called him an “octaroon bastard” and would ask what that would make her.

Hamilton, co-author of the Federalist Papers, Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the Bank of New York and the New York Post, a man who got a battlefield commission from George Washington, is about to get his mostly White ass booted off the $10 dollar bill so some broad can get her mug on it.

Oprah? Margaret Sanger? Madonna? Margaret Mead? Lady Macbeth? Secretariat’s mom? Goneril or Regan? Any surviving alumnae of the Boko Harum School of Lady-like conduct? Aunt Jemima? Antigone? Margaret Thatcher?

There is a passing strange sense of absurdity that is beyond, almost, comment.

If we have to put a broad on the $10 dollar bill why not Olive Beech?

What glass ceiling? She went through it like a bat out Hell. She was Jack Welch before he was.

Why not knock Jefferson off the $2 dollar bill? Replace him with Caitlin Jenner, nee Bruce Jenner, and raise the value to adjust for inflation. America’s first $3 dollar bill.

A symbol of how far we’ve come as a nation.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET