Colleagues, Wall Street friends and readers remember Abelson

Barron’s has collected a series of remembrances about Alan Abelson, its former editor and longtime columnist who died last week at the age of 87.

Here is one from Rhonda Brammer, a former Barron’s contributing editor:

The Barron’s magazine I joined in the early 1980s, back in the days of ticker tape and martini lunches, was an astonishing place—chockablock with talent: fast, graceful, savvy writers like Jim Grant, Peter Brimelow, and Kate Welling. And at the helm was the inimitable Alan Abelson, the man whose column, Up & Down Wall Street, had single-handedly transformed staid financial journalism into rare verbal art. Biting and brilliant, his columns mixed borscht-belt humor and Shakespearean allusions with zingers from Twain, Mencken, and Wilde—though Alan’s own one-liners often trumped them all.

Me? I was a kid from Idaho, then just a couple of years out of Columbia J-School. I wasn’t a very graceful writer, and I sure as heck wasn’t fast.

Still, I was summoned.

Alan had read a cover story I’d written for a small magazine called Financial World that questioned the accounting of a highflying outfit, Baldwin-United. He’d decided he wanted to hire me on the basis of that one story. When I appeared in his office for my interview, I tried to explain that he was likely making a mistake—that the story had taken me forever to write. He seemed perversely delighted, insisting that skeptical stories took time and that he’d give me time.

Which he did. Over the next 2½ decades, I was able to write about financial shenanigans of all stripes—everything from the “aggressive” accounting of a Big Board company (whose shares lost a third of their value on the first trading day after the story) to a network of stock manipulators (who drew the ire of regulators and closed up shop) to an unscrupulous health-care outfit whose fraudulent machinations imperiled the lives of its patients (and whose stock virtually disappeared).

Alan was fearless, emboldened by an astonishing intelligence, uncanny market savvy, and extraordinarily good judgment. Pure and simple, he was a genius at what he did. And when companies howled, he was there for his writers—a veritable pit bull.

Alan’s ingrained skepticism, of course, was only part of the story. He also had a great eye for undervalued companies, a keen interest in unearthing undiscovered gems for his loyal readers. He delighted in perusing the new Standard & Poor’s sheets before they were filed away in binders. He encouraged us to do our own research, to pick up the phone and talk with companies to find story ideas. His enthusiasm, I confess, was infectious—a big reason, no doubt, I later began a column called Sizing Up Small-Caps.

Read more here.