SEQUELS: Mother Knew Better

Hetty Green well deserved her reputation as “The Witch of Wall Street.” A genius at stock speculation and a hard-hearted moneybags, she was ever ready to foreclose on a church mortgage or haggle over the price of a peck of potatoes. She lived in grubby solitude in a $12-a-week boarding house in Hoboken. When she died in 1913, she left a $100 million fortune—and a daughter trained in most respects to carry on.

Like her mother, Mrs. Hetty Sylvia Rowland Green Wilks was a lonely, frugal recluse. She dwelt alone in a Manhattan apartment, wore cheap, drab clothing, doted on newspaper comic strips. After her death a year ago at 80, officials found her will stuffed in a tin cabinet along with four cakes of soap. It cut off her closest relative, a cousin, with $5,000 (later raised to $140,000 after court action), divided most of the fortune among 63 charities and educational institutions.

Last week in Manhattan, administrators announced that the estate’s value came to some $95 million. The list of assets included 36 pages of bonds, eight pages of blue-chip stocks, e.g., $2.8 million worth of Dow Chemical. Then came a final, eccentric footnote. As Mrs. Wilks’s biggest single asset, the tabulation revealed a personal checking account which she had used for everything from $2 light bills to multimillion-dollar business deals. The balance at her death: $31 million.

Even in Government bonds that much money would earn at least $600,000 a year; in a checking account it earned nothing. Bankers said they had never heard of anything like it. Said one: “Her mother, old Hetty, would never have let her money lie idle like that.”