(6 of 9)
In seven years he has been to 43 of the 58 World Bank member nations on bank business (plus such side trips as a visit to Sheik Sir Sulman of Bahrein), though he is a poor traveler. He gets seasick, and his queasy stomach makes him pick at his food. "I've had diarrhea in 40 nations," he says with a wry grin. On every trip, Black, who likes two, and only two, drinks before dinner, takes along a case containing three bottles of his favorite bourbon (Old Forester), a second case with his cigars, a third with his coffee percolator. Though he is treated royally, Black rarely gets out of his hotel room abroad, usually spends his time huddled with hopeful loan-seekers. Says he: "I don't believe that anybody in the world has really traveled as much as I have and seen so little."
Outtraded. For an international traveler, Eugene Robert Black got a slow start. For the first 40 years of his life, except for a short hitch in the Navy, he barely budged from the Eastern U.S. seaboard. Born May 1, 1898 in Atlanta, he was the eldest of three children of Eugene Robert Black Sr., lawyer, banker, and a governor of the Federal Reserve Board, and Gussie Grady, daughter of famed Henry W. Grady, founder and firebrand first editor of the Atlanta Constitution.
Young Gene grew up in a sprawling brick house on Peachtree Street, went to the Peacock preparatory school and was ready for college at 15. But already his father had given him a lesson in finance. When Gene got a new bicycle, his father asked him if he felt like trading it for a piece of property. Young Gene bit at the deal, only to discover that the "property" was a nearly valueless inside lot, with no entrance or exit except across other people's land. Eventually, Black Jr. turned the lot into a profit by retrading it for a supply of eggs, which he sold. But he remembered the lesson, has since studied every deal with a microscope.
Bonds & Banks. At the University of Georgia, Black made Phi Beta Kappa ('17) with ease, soon after graduation went off to World War 1 as a Navy ensign on the cruiser Chattanooga. Back from the war, he worked as a cub reporter on the financial page of Grandfather Grady's Constitution, got married to Dolly Blalock (she died in 1928, a few years after the birth of their second child), later went to work at Harris, Forbes & Co., a Manhattan brokerage house. He soon showed that he was a good salesman, spent the next 14 years traveling the South selling bonds. One of his specialties was selling foreign bond issues. Some of them later defaulted, says Black, because they were poorly planned and the use of the money rarely supervised. The memory has not lessened Black's caution in seeing how his loans are planned and spent.
By 1933 Black was a vice president of Harris, Forbes, and had been married again to a pretty Georgia girl named Susette Heath, daughter of a Coca-Cola vice president. When Manhattan's Chase National Bank absorbed Harris, Forbes in 1931, he moved steadily up the financial ladder, was vice president in charge of the bank's $2 billion investment portfolio when he moved to the World Bank.