The following fictional account describes how Rowe might have been introduced to his first job, shortly after graduation from Swarthmore. It is based on photographs of the plant, an interview with Ralph Mehler of the nearby town of Sharpsville Historical Society in Pennsylvania, and the author's experience working at Westinghouse Electric at its oldest plant, then located on Turtle Creek in Pittsburgh. The basic facts are accurate, such as location of the plant, its size, and the principal characters. Only the words of the conversations are completely made up.

Rowe and his fraternity brother Lindsay Cornug stepped off the train into the summer heat of western Pennsylvania in 1919. They had arrived in Leechburg, a small town of four thousand souls planted on the banks of the polluted Kiskiminetas River. The town earned its living by building products made of the steel produced in large quantities in Pittsburgh, thirty‐five miles to the west. The men's immediate destination was the Fort Pitt Enamel and Stamping Company.

The air was thick and humid with an industrial haze and a faint smell of sulfur.

The two young men looked at each other. Rowe rubbed a tear from his eye. For a moment, he could not figure out why he was crying. Then he realized it was from the chemicals and other pollutants in the air. It was certainly very different from the clear blue skies and tree‐shaded campus at Swarthmore.

They found the company right on the river. It was early afternoon and the hot sun generated a metallic smell from the slowly moving dark waters. The company consisted of several buildings; the office was a simple wooden structure painted white. When they opened the door, they entered a large room with employees busily typing and operating large adding machines behind big desks and counters. Seeing the two new arrivals, a young man hurried over with an outstretched hand.

“Hi, I'm Charlie Bischoff. Remember me? The guy that hired you two!” Even in these industrial surroundings, he was the consummate salesman who had so impressed the two young men. He was well dressed, with a tie and high collar. He also sported a striped blazer and a ring bearing the Princeton seal, class of 1916

“Welcome to Fort Pitt,” he said. “Let me show you around.”

Rowe and Lindsay were assigned to desks in a small chemistry lab in the rear of the enameling building, behind hot molten tubs of zinc. This was where the enamel was heated preparatory to being coated on sheet steel in a continuous process. It was very warm and the noise was intense. They stowed their bags under their desks, rolled up their sleeves, and began to explore the new equipment. Rowe noted that the large blowers that brought in fresh air and removed the fumes from the laboratories at Swarthmore were absent here. Open windows had to suffice.

Rowe was hired as a chemist and would be exploring fresh surroundings far from Glyndon. He would also hope to be learning about how the subjects he had learned in class were actually applied in a real business. But within a month, the company's fortunes took an abrupt turn for the worse. The factory workforce went on strike. Financing from the bank ceased, putting the company near bankruptcy. With production shut down, Rowe and Lindsay's jobs disappeared. They were soon on the train heading east.

Rowe had just learned some important, if costly, lessons that would stand him in good stead when he ultimately began to invest in companies for himself, and later for clients. He experienced first‐hand how important strong finances are, particularly when business conditions suddenly change for the worse. He learned about the importance of good labor relations. He learned about the danger of working for a small company without a proprietary product in a competitive industry. Finally, he had been convinced to take the job based on a very good sales pitch delivered by a master salesman. He had not done the research to find out the facts for himself.

Rowe's next job was as an industrial chemist at the DuPont plant in Arlington, New Jersey, which produced plastic products. Even then, DuPont was a large company. With a thousand employees, the Arlington plant was much bigger than the close‐knit group of twenty‐eight at Fort Pitt. DuPont was known for its research and development of new innovative chemical products. It appeared to be an ideal place to work for a young chemist just getting started, perhaps a bit like going to work for IBM as a young computer scientist in the 1960s or for Google as a software engineer in the 2000s. The company also enjoyed a very healthy balance sheet. Its labor relations were excellent.

Located beside the marshy Passaic River, Arlington had a population of about two thousand. There was not much for a young man of twenty‐two to do after work in the 1920s. Rowe said later that it was at DuPont that he began to read financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Barron's. He found that he was more drawn to them than he was to the latest news concerning new chemical products and processes in thick technical chemical journals. Such financial news media exposed him to a whole new world. He became fascinated by how companies were built, the new products that could form large businesses, and how all of that was financed in the stock and bond markets.

These publications would also have alerted him to the fact that all was not well in the financial and business world. The stock market began to fall sharply in 1921, reflecting deteriorating business conditions – particularly in financially leveraged industries like automotive and real estate. Even the mighty DuPont found itself embarrassed financially in the downturn as its profits nosedived. Pierre S. du Pont, the company's president, had bought a personal stock position in General Motors in 1914. GM was being built at that time primarily from acquisitions engineered by the charismatic William C. Durant, into the largest automaker in the U.S. Pierre du Pont was invited on the General Motors board in 1915.

After World War I, John Jakob Raskob, DuPont's treasurer, convinced the DuPont board to invest $25 million of the company's capital into General Motors stock. This was based on the significant opportunity for profits that he saw from General Motors' leading position in the exploding automobile market. The investment would also help cement DuPont's position as a major supplier of plastic products and paint, not only to General Motors, but to the auto industry as a whole.

For several years, General Motors and its stock did prosper. DuPont became its dominant paint supplier and also developed a number of plastic products for the auto industry. By 1920, General Motors accounted for 50 percent of DuPont's earnings.

Unfortunately, things began to unravel during the short recession of 1920–21. Industrial production declined 30 percent, the stock market fell by almost half, and automobile sales as a whole dropped 60 percent. The General Motors Corporation plunged into a deep loss. Durant, although a visionary with the persuasive power to have put together a General Motors, could not run the resulting conglomerate. In 1920, in a radical move, Durant resigned as CEO of General Motors and Pierre du Pont became president. His brother, Irénée, succeeded him as the president of DuPont.

As a relatively inexperienced chemist who was among the last to arrive at DuPont, it was not surprising that Rowe was laid off in these trying conditions. He spent the summer of 1921 back home in Glyndon. It was a time to reflect on his short, traumatic business career. In two years, two very different companies had employed him. In both cases, he had been laid off. The first time was due to financial problems following labor issues; the second time was due to a sharp decline in business as a result of a recession.

More fundamentally, Rowe discovered that while his interest and enthusiasm for a career in chemistry had waned, growing businesses and the people who ran them fascinated him. He had also discovered the world of finance, particularly the stock market. It seemed to him that it might be possible here to make a reasonable living and, at the same time, to enjoy what he was doing. This was a heady discovery for a young man in his twenties who had been pursuing a profession simply out of the necessity to earn a living.

However, there were no stockbrokers in the immediate family, and at that time stockbrokers were commonly looked upon with some suspicion by businessmen and professionals. Real estate, his grandfather's major asset and business, was a tangible asset that one could touch and see. But even his grandfather might not have supported a move into the stock brokerage business. Real estate increased in price because of supply and demand, which was easy to understand. Investing in stocks seemed to many then – and does still today – to be more like gambling, with stock prices moving up and down for mysterious, emotional reasons. For most people, there was nothing tangible about a stock. Few had an understanding of the actual worth of the companies that these stocks represented.

Years after Mr. Price's death, Steve Jobs, the principal founder of Apple, which today is among the most valuable companies in the world, would tell the Stanford graduating class of 2005: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.” Rowe believed, despite the probable misgivings of his family, that he had found it.

At the end of the summer in 1921, Rowe probably began to comb the few want ads in the financial sections of the local papers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average continued to decline until August 24, when it tumbled to a low on light volume. After Labor Day, brokers came back to their offices and, for no apparent reason, suddenly began to buy stocks again. The market rose sharply and the want ads finally began to appear again for brokers. When the economy begins to recover, salesmen are often the first to be hired. Salesmen of stocks can generate profits quickly in a rising market. Commissions were then the major compensation for brokers, so the financial risk of hiring them was low.

With only enthusiasm and youth and no experience to recommend him, Rowe was not a top candidate to enter the brokerage business. After what must have been considerable searching and rejections, according to the 1983 Baltimore Sun article, he was finally offered, through a distant relative of his mother, a position as a stockbroker in a small Baltimore stock brokerage firm where his mother had a small account.

It didn't take Rowe long, however, to realize that he really didn't enjoy selling stocks. In fact, as reported in The History of T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., he “intensely disliked it,” but remained enormously interested in the business of finance, how the stock market rewarded long‐term investors in fine companies like DuPont, and how they were built. But this was not to be his job at Smith, Lockhart, despite their promises to the contrary. It was not how the firm made money. Buying and holding the stock of a great company, no matter how good this might be for the client, did not represent any income for Smith, Lockhart. Their income was primarily from the commissions from buying and selling stocks, as was generally true for brokerage firms at that time.

Most stocks then were bought and sold on a fixed commission basis and at prices quoted on an open exchange like the New York Stock Exchange. Transactions involving small companies were based on prices published in the so‐called “pink sheets” that were then published weekly (on pink paper). Such purchases or sales generated a much bigger reward for the broker.

The best way to maximize a brokerage firm's profits was to sell shares of stock in companies for which the firm – usually in a syndicate of other firms ‐ was raising capital. Here, the profits were even higher because the firm sold the shares at a very handsome predetermined commission at no risk to its capital because it didn't have to buy the stock in the market. Moreover, the total dollar profits were large because of the size of the transaction. Rowe loathed the intense pressure that was brought to bear on the stockbrokers to sell stocks to clients in these offerings, whether or not it was good for the client. As Rowe cynically wrote, “I observed that in many instances, the salesmen who made the biggest earnings were the ones who were least conscientious about their clients' best interests,” as recorded in The History of T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

Although Rowe did not support such practices – and others that were even more suspect – he did prove to be a good investor. By late spring 1922, the young man had accumulated enough money to take a three‐month trip to Europe with a friend. He sailed on what he called a cattle boat that June and enjoyed a good vacation in a Europe still suffering from the aftereffects of World War I. The dollar went a very long way and three months was a luxurious time to learn about a new environment, to mix with the people, and to enjoy the food.

Travel would become one of his favorite hobbies. He would later tell us in the firm that, when married, he and his wife even enjoyed traveling in the passenger cabins of freighters to Asia and other far‐off ports during the depths of the Depression. But travel was also important to Rowe in developing his ideas about business. He was a keen and exceptional observer and evaluator of people and their cultures. He learned from his travels how the world really worked, how different countries had very different personalities, and how these personalities would help or hinder their success in business and war. He put all this to good use when he developed and then published his own strategies for successful investment. When he was asked, late in his career, for an article in the October 1980 issue of Baltimore magazine (“We're Off to See the Wizard”), what the keys were to his success, he replied, “Growing up on a farm [where he learned about human nature], travel, and hard work.”

When he returned to Baltimore in September, Rowe, to his surprise, found Smith, Lockhart in bankruptcy; the partners would be charged with defrauding their customers and head to prison. The company had for many years followed a practice of selling stocks to their customers on an installment basis. The company would buy the stock, collect a down payment, and use the shares as collateral until the transaction was paid off. In the meantime, they collected their full commission and a very good rate of interest. The shares would only be transferred to the customer's account after they were fully paid for.

This way of doing business had gone off the tracks during the sharp stock market decline in 1921. As their collateral declined, many clients didn't or couldn't make their payments. The firm ran short of cash and fell into a classic pyramid scheme, similar to that made famous much later by Bernie Madoff. Instead of actually buying the shares of stock for their customers, Smith, Lockhart would collect the cash from the client for purchases, but would actually use this money to pay off prior purchases made for other customers. False accounting covered up all these phony transactions. This scheme ended when the firm finally ran out of cash to cover all of its losses in the declining market and couldn't borrow any more. These illegal activities cost the small firm's customers some $2.5 million ($34,200,000 in 2018 dollars).

Now, Rowe, at twenty‐four, and only three years out of college, had experienced three jobs with very different companies. Two of the three had actually gone out of business. Again, he learned important lessons. Despite these unfortunate experiences, he remained fascinated by the world of finance and became even more convinced that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He did realize that he still needed to do far more research on the finances and the business dynamics behind the next company that he was going to work for.

When he joined the firm of Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe early in 1923 as a bond salesman, he took note of these prior lessons. It was a small, extremely conservative bond house, the exact opposite of Smith, Lockhart. The partners were wealthy. They had no need to take risks to make more money, or to stay long hours at the office. Conservation was their goal, not expansion.

High‐quality bonds are much less volatile than stocks because they trade relative to interest rates, not on emotion. Overall interest rates generally move slowly up or down. In an economic expansion, interest rates rise and bonds trade lower. If, for example, a $100 face‐value bond pays $3, it is said to yield 3 percent. If interest rates went up to 4 percent, the price of the same bond would drop to $75 to keep pace with the interest rate change. At $75, it would yield the new market rate of 4 percent while still paying $3. The reverse typically happens in a recession. When capital is not needed to finance expansion, interest rates decline and bond prices rise, reflecting the lower interest rate.

The actual return to the wealthy investors of Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe was usually just the interest on the bond. The clients generally bought their bonds at their original face value and held them to maturity. There was no difference in price between the original face value of the bond and the price at which it was redeemed, even though there might be considerable price fluctuations in between. The clients only expected regular interest payments. They did not want excitement or risk of their capital.

Though the income from trading quality bonds at the time was less than trading in stocks, the job was financially secure, and Rowe was still in the financial services industry. More importantly, he was introduced to another new world, the business of bond financing and bond trading. It is not widely known, but the bond market is, and was then, much larger than the stock market. Trading can also be quite profitable because most bond transactions are done on a markup basis. Bonds that are sold to customers are either already owned by the firm and are sold from their inventory, or bought in the market by the firm and resold. As with trading over‐the‐counter stocks, the customer has only a vague idea what the current market is for the bonds he or she is buying, or what his or her broker might have paid for them.

Rowe likely knew little about bonds prior to being hired by Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe, other than from his reading of financial publications. It is doubtful that he had learned much about them at Smith, Lockhart. In fact, bonds would have seemed to offer little interest to a young man fascinated by the stock market and growing businesses. He probably took the job because it was the only way he could stay in the financial world. His résumé did not yet have enough depth and there was no one who could credibly recommend him. As it turned out, a thorough knowledge of bonds and their associated credit ratings was to become important to his career: Analyzing corporate financials and balance sheets of a company is essential in determining the worthiness of its bonds. The same analysis is critical to understanding the underlying financial health of a corporation and its long‐term viability.

The job for which Rowe was hired was the selling of bonds. High‐quality bonds, though, had none of the issues he so disliked in selling equities at Smith, Lockhart. That type of bond provided the income that the customer wanted, and the firm simply made money on the markup of the sales price to the customer over cost to the firm. Because the firm did very little trading, there was no conflict of interest between the customer and the firm. Rowe's principal responsibility was to determine that the bond was of a suitable quality (initially this would have been with the help of the firm's partners and staff), to interact with the client in making sure the bond's maturity schedule fit with his or her goals, and that there was proper diversification in his or her portfolio.

Rowe found that he was adept at conveying the benefits of such a product, particularly in one‐on‐one situations or in small groups. Though he did well and learned a lot about bonds, Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe proved to be even more ultraconservative than he had initially thought and perhaps a bit boring. “The partners were men of wealth and integrity,” he stated in September 7, 1951, bulletin “The Firm's Goal and How We Plan to Attain It,” “but they lacked ambition and offered little opportunity.” With bonds being their total focus, there was not much chance to rub shoulders with people involved in the far more exciting equity market. The bull market in stocks that began in 1921 was continuing to move upward. Many of Rowe's friends who were stockbrokers were undoubtedly doing far better financially than he was. He increasingly began to feel that the slow pace at Jenkins, Whedbee & Poe was quite constraining.

By 1925, he was casting about once more for a change – not because the company was going out of business or because he was being let go. Now he wanted to expand his horizons, take on more challenges, and learn more about the broader financial business. He had gained a good reputation with a respected firm and that made him much more marketable. As he would describe in his bulletin “The Firm's Goal and How We Plan to Attain It,” he “had an opportunity to study the various investment houses in the city and selected Mackubin, Goodrich, and Company as the one that possessed most of the things I wanted in an employer.”

He wanted a firm where the owners were not all wealthy, but were interested in expansion. He wanted a solid financial base with a diversified product line and a good reputation in the business community. He wanted to work for an individual he could respect and who could be his mentor.