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At his stand outside Manhattan's famed old Trinity Church, Shoeshiner Sam Angarenti cast a glum eye on the Wall Street brokers, clerks and messengers who were hurrying to work in the drizzling rain. Yanking his fuzzy wool cap down tighter over his ears, Sam cursed the weather and bad business. "Nobody wants to get a shine any more," he growled, "but I guess they're making money over there."
"Over there" was the grey, stone-walled New York Stock Exchange. Inside, on the crowded trading floor, there was no gloom, only pent-up excitement. The huge cavern buzzed with talk of General Motors' new five-year contract with the C.I.O.'s United Auto Workers (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The pact had been announced the day before, after the market closed, and traders now wondered how this testimonial to continued prosperity would affect the market.
At 10 a.m., at the opening gong, the traders began milling around the 18 stock trading posts. The biggest crowd jammed around Post No. 4, where two specialists handle the buying & selling of G.M. stock. Up rose a babble of cries. "I'll take 2,500 shares," offered one eager buyer. So many cried to buy "at the market" that the specialists, flipping through the sell orders on their books, had to huddle with a governor of the Exchange to set a fair opening price.
While the specialists worked furiously, traders' watched the magnified ticker tape flickering across the screens at the four corners of the great room to catch the flash on the price. Not till ten minutes later, a long time by Wall Street's split-second standards, did the tape flash, the first sale—and bring a roar of approval from the floor. The sale: a 25,000-share bloc worth $2,243,750 was sold for 89¾, up 2¼ points from the previous close and within an eyelash of G.M.'s all-time high in 1929 of 91¾.
Happy Days. Under the spell of the good news, the market surged up: the Dow-Jones industrial average reached 222.57, a new peak, the highest since September 1930. (At the start of this week, with slow trading because of the Memorial Day holiday, the market was quiet.)
By rising on such good news—and holding steady on bad—the scraggly, unsteady calf that had been born two years ago (TIME, June 14, 1948) had grown into the biggest, heftiest bull that Wall Street had seen since the wild and rampaging days of 1929.
More than once the bull had seemed about to die of fright at the scary look of the world. But like the great U.S. industrial boom, which had been prematurely buried time & again, he had refused to play dead.
On a rich diet* of blue chip stocks, vitamin-enriched by whopping corporate profits and dividends, he had developed plenty of muscles and a confident look in his eye.