This article ran on the front page of the baiduhai on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 1987, a day after “Black Monday,” when the stock market suffered its biggest loss ever.
On the other end of phone lines vibrating with numbers and sob stories were spouses, buddies and brokers. Behind the grim faces, invisible calculators tallied the losses — the mutual funds, the penny stocks, the profit-sharing plans, retirement.
In one day, the stock market took a dive that only a Chicago sports fan could appreciate, and, suddenly, in one day, some investors — those who sold in sunnier times — became instant geniuses and the rest became — take your pick — instant suckers, stoic optimists or Black Monday black humorists.
”Sure, I took a bloody beating today, but I did not sell. I held on,” said one investor, a business consultant with a large stake in the market. ”I believe this is crowd behavior. This is stampede. Selling out today was like stepping in front of a freight train.
”Yes, there are guys who are ready to jump out the window.”
Standing outside the Deerfield train station, Bill Hurlbutt, a fashion jewelry executive, commented: ”There will be a lot of Porsches and yachts for sale, especially in this area.”
But despite the false rumors — one had a trader committing suicide — and jokes about investors taking their own plunge, mostly there was a measured acceptance that what had come before was too good to be true and that the bad, at least, was tolerable.
”It was inevitable,” said Hurlbutt, 59, a Libertyville resident with some stock investments, expressing a common sentiment.
James Cloonan, president of the American Association of Individual Investors, said his Chicago-based organization received more calls Monday from reporters than from member investors.
He said many of his association’s 108,000 members are long-term investors who generally have profited as the market soared to record levels. Monday’s decline may have wiped out as much as a year of profits, he said, but many investors are still ahead overall.
What did seem to alarm investors, however, was the speed with which the market declined and the seeming inexplicability of the fall, Cloonan said.
At Scudder, Stevens & Clark, a Boston investment firm that handles an investment program for the American Association of Retired Persons, there was a heavier than usual volume of telephone calls from association members.
However, Lisa Cohn, one of about 80 service representatives answering the phones at Scudder Stevens, said most of the callers she spoke to were ”fairly calm.” She said many who had money in growth-oriented mutual stock funds directed their investment be transferred into money market funds.
At the makeshift newspaper stand at Union Station, commuters lined up in larger numbers than usual to buy papers with late market figures. Final market tables were delayed because computers could not keep up with the volume of trading.
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The trading floors were frenzied, but the commuter cars were sober and calm. Losses, some investors rationalized, were only on paper. There were even a few smiles as the day’s events were pondered on the way home.
”I was happy to see it myself,” said Lewis Boyd, 52, a data-processing consultant from Grayslake, ”because I’m a buyer and I buy low. You don’t take a bath till you sell.”
”I got out about two weeks ago, and I’m glad,” said Trevor O’Connell, 30, Northbrook, a commercial artist. ”I can’t believe I did something right for a change.”
Others recounted a day at the office dominated by long faces and uneasy jokes.
Veronica Adams, 24, an executive secretary for Blue Cross-Blue Shield, was watching her boss and other investors from her office as they watched the losses mount.
”They were exclaiming ‘Oh my God!’ ” said Adams, of Fox Lake. ”They were almost crying.
”They weren’t concentrating much on their work.”
Her friend, Carole Duha, 26, a chemical engineer from Antioch, said some of her colleagues were similarly distracted. ”People said to buy stock in glass replacement so when they start jumping through the windows, you make your money back,” Duha said.
She added, seriously: ”If we had money invested, we would buy more stock — because it’s cheap.”
And, with all the gravity of a professional gambler, there were more than a few who saw the possibility for gain in the day’s cataclysmic loss.
In the Ritz-Carlton’s Greenhouse, two men — serious investors — sipped wine as they discussed how they would profit from the losses of others.
”I have to confess a little greed,” said one, a businessman from Los Angeles. ”It would be wrong to say I’m not really interested in this thing. IBM at 103 looks pretty good.
”I’ll be back in the market before the week’s out as a buyer,” he said. ”I won’t sell anything; I’ll buy.”
The other, who works for a Fortune 500 company in Clearwater, Fla., said he had lost close to $200,000 ”on paper.” But, he added, ”I’ll invest some more money in the market in the next week or two.”
Doug Pawlowski, meanwhile, was worried about his parents.
The 22-year-old bank employee from Homewood hadn’t really given the stock plunge much thought early in the day. ”So I was laughing,” he said. ”But then about 3 o’clock, I realized that my parents have some real money invested in there. So I called them up and talked to them about it.
”They’re investing for their retirement. My mom asked me what would happen if the stocks lost all of their value. I guess I’m the family expert now. They were just a little worried.”
Anne Keegan, Rob Karwath, Jan Crawford, John Schmeltzer, Maurice Possley, James Warren and Andrew Martin contributed to this report.
LOOKING BACK ON BLACK MONDAY