Peg-legged, pleasure-loving Edward Rowland Robinson Green died at the Lake Placid Club last June at 67, his wealth estimated between $40,000,000 and $100,000,000. He was the son of Hetty Green, once the world's richest woman—the penny-pinching "Witch of Wall Street" who used to shuttle between Brooklyn and Hoboken to avoid establishing residence and paying taxes while she was making millions in the stockmarket. Hetty conducted her affairs from any desk she chose in Manhattan's old Chemical National Bank, often ate a lunch of sliced Spanish onions while sitting on the bank's floor at noon. When she died in 1916 at 81 she had increased tenfold, to $67,000,000, the fortune founded by her New England whaling and ship-owning ancestors.
Sole heirs to Hetty's residuary estate (grown to nearly $100,000,000 before it was divided 50-50 in 1926) were Son Ned and Daughter Hetty (Mrs. Harriet Sylvia Ann Howland Green Wilks). She kept Ned from marrying while she was alive and approved only of Daughter Hetty's marriage at 38 to John Jacob Astor's 63-year-old great-grandson, Matthew Astor Wilks, in 1909.
Fond as Hetty was of Son Ned, she was too stingy to call in a doctor when he was injured in a childhood coasting accident and one leg eventually had to be amputated. Ned was schooled at Fordham College and in real-estate law in Manhattan and Chicago before Hetty sent him to Texas at 24 to see what he could do with himself.
Green's Flats. It was an early spring day in 1893 when Ned Green arrived in the sleepy Texas town of Terrell, the owner of a wretched little railroad his mother had foreclosed on. He announced he would turn two streaks of rust into "one of the best railroads in the Southwest." First thing he did after depositing $500,000 in Terrell's bank was to buy uniforms for a baseball team and start a brass band.
Ned Green did everything he said he would. He made his Texas Midland a model railroad boasting the first electrically-lighted coaches in the State. Any promising enterprise attracted his backing: cattle and farm lands, business buildings, oil wells, mines. And in nearly every venture he was successful. His hobbies were innumerable: racing automobiles, photography, boll-weevil eradication, stamps (his collection was the world's largest), astronomy.
Colonel Green* became a life member of the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias, but the upright Masons refused him membership. "Green's Flats," his bachelor quarters above Terrell's old Harris Opera House, were one of the town's gay places. Once the Town Marshal had to tell the Colonel to get rid of the women staying there. Barked the Marshal: "I don't care if you are the son of the richest woman in the world, you can't do such a thing in this town." The Colonel gulped, did as he was told.