Honest Zimmermann

Leopold Zimmermann has lived for three-quarters of a century and he has often played a lone hand. A peddler, with a willow basket full of shoe strings and suspenders, driving bargains in a German accent on the doorsteps of Manhattan. That was Leopold Zimmermann in 1870. A thriving broker, with offices on Wall Street where the New York Stock Exchange now stands. In those days (the '80s) the sign above the door said Zimmermann & Forshay. But David F. S. Forshay died in 1895 and Leopold Zimmermann went on alone. A rich and feverishly busy potentate, with his offices at No. 170 Broadway jammed with speculators. That was Leopold Zimmermann in 1919 when the German mark was behaving in a dizzy manner. A bankrupt. That was Leopold Zimmermann in 1923 when the German mark went shooting down to nothing. His firm failed for more than $7,000,000. He paid creditors $5,000,000 of what he owed them with his own fortune and with some money that the Mixed Claims Commission awarded his firm. Then the courts said, last summer, that he need pay no more.

But Leopold Zimmermann is a man who pays back every cent. He re-opened the firm of Zimmermann & Forshay and has already used the profits to pay $100,000 of the remaining $2,000,000. He keeps a list of the old creditors on his desk, smiles sternly as he checks off names. He lives with his wife in a two-room hotel suite costing $1,400 a year, rides to work at 8 a. m. on the subway. He has no children, no partners. He swears he will tear up that list on his desk before he dies. That is why he wants to live to be 85, 95, a century. . . . Citizens recalled a younger broker, whose firm failed in 1905 and who has paid all debts with interest for 22 years. He is Reuben H. Donnelley, 63, now famed as president of the Reuben H. Donnelley Corp. and vice president of R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., able Chicago printers (TIME, Jan. 16).