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Growing Worry. Anxieties are growing among investors who are old enough to remember the 1929 crash and the Depression. A 49-year-old Akron trucking executive has lost only $1,000 on a $20,000 investment in four blue chips—U.S. Steel, Ohio Edison, Goodyear and Standard Oil (Ohio). "But I had a fear of the market from the start," he says. "So do most people who saw their families struggle through the Depression. Now I feel like digging a hole in the backyard and burying the dough."
There is little such fear on the part of younger people. They are members of the confident generation, which has known only good times. Many investors are heeding brokers' advice to hold on and ride out the difficult period. "Hell, I've got no choice," says an Akron rubber-company executive who early this year sold all his previous holdings and put the proceeds into Nuclear Corporation of America at 5 and Aero-Flow Dynamics at 14. Last week Nuclear sold as low as 41 and Aero-Flow dipped under 12. Says the executive: "I can't sell. I can't afford the loss." Besides, he adds, "The market is bound to start up—maybe this week. I would go back into the market right now if I only had some money."
A few investors missed the market slide. An Atlanta woman sold her stocks in May and put the $23,000 proceeds into underdeveloped land. "I won't have to worry about it every day," she says. Thomas H. Chmielewski, 29, a business planner at General Electric in Manhattan, has minimized his losses by buying in the Japanese stock market as well as on Wall Street. Last spring he put $6,000 into Nomura Securities Co., an investment banking house, and $4,000 into Ikegai Iron Works, a machine-tool company. Ikegai has risen slightly; Nomura declined, but nowhere near as much as the U.S. securities that Chmielewski holds.