STATE OF BUSINESS: Bawl Street

Many a Wall Street broker visualizes himself as a modern Sisyphus in a special kind of New Deal Hell: endlessly rolling a Business boulder up a WPA hill built too steep by Federal spending, sown too thickly with SEC hazards, watered so heavily with Federal supervision that the boulder continually slips out of his hands and rolls back into Depression.

But once a year, when he goes to the annual outing of the Bond Club of New York at Tarrytown’s Sleepy Hollow Country Club, he gets a laugh out of his plight. His laugh-provoker is the Bawl Street Journal, a bawdy scapegrace parody of the highly reputable Wall Street Journal. Edited by stocky, literate John A. Straley, pulp fiction writer and wholesale representative for Calvin Bullock, investment bankers, last week’s 17th annual edition of the Bawl Street Journal (11,000 copies at 50¢) was a sardonic reflection of the state of U. S. Business today.

The best of its cartoons (by Ogg Fitz-Gerald of the Wall Street Journal) showed a wide-eyed, wavy-eared white rabbit with a magician’s wand in its paw (see cut), pulling Franklin Roosevelt from a silk hat, over the caption: “THAT’S NEWS!” Some of its fantastic side lights on Recession II:

> A streamer at the head of page 1 bannered a new proposal for relief of the railroads: “Railroads Demand Mann Act Repeal.”

> A leading article:

“A decision to raze the Stock Exchange building to save taxes and to replace it with a large and spreading buttonwood tree* to save at least a symbol of the famous old market place was unanimously voted yesterday by the three governors who have not forfeited voting rights because of arrearage of dues.

“. . . A strong objection to the tree was that it offers no window from which to jump. As a compromise, the Committee on Arrangements has agreed to have a ladder handy.”

> A news item on Government borrowing:

“One of the vaults of the Cleveland Trust Co., overloaded with U. S. Government bonds, broke through to the third sub-basement yesterday.”

> A mimic advertisement of Manhattan’s Bankers Trust Co. showed its famed pyramidal tower in a trylon & perisphere arrangement partially obscured by a huge black 8-ball.

> Ad for A. E. Ames & Co.:

“Are We Tickled Pink—We’re Only Half in the Red.”

> Ad for Joseph Walker & Sons:

“We Could Do a Big Business in Government Guaranteed Railroad Stocks if Someone Would Guarantee the Government.”

> Ad for Estabrook & Co.:

“We take pleasure in announcing the appointment of Wrong-Way Corrigan as head of our Investment Research Department.”

> Ad for Shields & Co.:

“If you don’t give us orders we’ll vote for him again!”

>An illustrated limerick contest. First prize: twelve bottles of “1929 Heidelbach-Icpleheimer”; second, $2.50; third, a “partnership in Speyer & Co.”

-Forbears of the present Stock Exchange were securities auctioneers who began trading in 1792 under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street.