Wall Street has seldom seen a nimbler broken-field runner than 47-year-old Charles Allen Jr. A New York City boy who quit school at 15 to be a Stock Exchange messenger, Allen learned the Street's ways so well that he parlayed his pocket change into $15 million. With his younger brothers Herbert and Harold, he built the potent investment banking firm of Allen & Co. (TIME, Aug. 2,1948). They bought up and reorganized the Rockefellers' famed Colorado Fuel & Iron Corp., Germany's war-forfeited American Bosch Corp., captured many another plum with their sharp-eyed knack for spotting "special situations."
Last spring the...