Chapter 1 - Youth and Yale

Frank Newlands was born in 1848. He was poor most of his childhood. His mother doted on Frank, one of four children, and schooled him in manners and style. Under her tutelage, Frank grew into a highly polished young man. He appreciated learning, enjoyed the arts, and knew how to sit a horse.

For all his polish, Newlands’ early life was repeatedly disrupted and precarious. Newlands was born in Natchez, Mississippi, but moved soon to Quincy, Illinois, then the second-biggest city in the state. His father James was a gifted surgeon, himself the son of a gifted surgeon, both graduates of the esteemed Edinburgh School of Medicine. But James was also a hopeless alcoholic, whose binge drinking eventually killed him. His widowed mother Jessie, a Scot like his father, took him to Quincy, where she remarried to Ebenezer Moore, Quincy’s mayor and banker. For five years, Newlands lived in a large house with a library and a grand piano. Then, in 1857, a worldwide financial panic hit, sending shockwaves through the region. Devastated by the sudden decline in traffic, the Illinois Central Railroad folded. So did many of the Quincy bankers who had financed Illinois’ railroad expansion. Moore lost everything.

Luckily for Moore and his family, a powerful friend from Quincy stepped in to help. Orville Browning, the city’s most influential Republican politician and soon-to-be United States Senator, found Moore a Treasury Department job in Washington. The young Newlands moved once again, this time to the nation’s bustling capital, where Jessie employed a tutor to prepare Frank for Yale.

In 1863, at the precocious age of 16, Newlands entered Yale. He was an indifferent student, a prize-winning orator, and a first-class friend to his classmates. While financial difficulties compelled him to withdraw during his junior year, Yale was to make all the difference in Newlands’ career. Aided once again by Browning, Newlands secured a day-time postal job. At night he attended Columbian Law School, now George Washington University, from which he graduated in 1869.

Within a year, Newlands was gone for San Francisco. His years in New Haven set him on his new path. Newlands borrowed money from wealthy classmates and collected fulsome letters of reference. He landed his first job in a law firm of a Yale alumnus. Before long, Francis Newlands—son of a departed drunk, stepson of a banker gone bust—was on his way to a fortune.[1]