Waterbury evening Democrat., 1908-11-12
MORSE'S BOLD DEEDS
Viking Ancestry Displayed In "Ioe
 Kings" Maneuvers.
MAN OF IMpERious WILL.

tWsiWete INV GH0taHo HoVuetVteueeo
 Recall Some of He Daring buslnsss
 Deals and Call Him . stoieai strats- slst of the Highest Order.
 "yiklngs bold, riding and raIding the northern seas. scatter icebergs around through the picture and place in rough frame of square blocks of fec"
 In these words did an intimate ac- quaintance of Charles wyman Morse, flee king nnancier and convict, re- gently begin story to Boston corre- spondent of the New York Herald when asked to relate some of his rec oIlections of Morse's remarkable ca reer. He sketched Morse, who has been sentenced to fifteen years i'm prisonment for violation of the fed eral banking laws, as former business associates and employees have patch ed together various impressions of him.
 Those New England intimateS who know Morse best call him a bold strategist. stoic; dangerous, but not entirely an unrelenting foe. They say he regards the numerous activities of life in the same dispassionate manner which makes him an interesting ad- versary at poker, chess and bridge whist.
 Morse's character was shaped in the decade from his twenty-second to his thirty second year. With the business training then acquired he got into the Wall street game, and he played this game very much as he found it played. except that he stamped his maneuvers with his own personality, which Is dominated by his ancestry.
 The remote ancestors of c. w. Morse were Norsemen who settled in England, and from them descended many generations of seafarers. His grandfather and his father were tow boat captains. Everybody knows the indomitable will of sailing master. The skipper treads the deck master of all he surveys; his word Is law. Numerous generations of such strong willed masters of the seas caused in Charley" Morse, as they call him down east, an imperious will.
 If one looks over Morse's business enterprises, in which he has necessari- ly shared cooperation with others, one finds he always insisted upon being master of everything he was in. In all Of these relations with his fellow men he has been despotic.
 Morse is generally loyal to his friends, although many of them desert him. In Maine lived merchant, now dead, who forged Endorsements to some notes. He came near prison bars, but Charles W. Morse in order to savo him and to save the mans family from suffering paid the notes. This recip- lent of his benefaction afterward shared in Morse's golden fee stock deals, but became ungrateful and talk ed detrimentally against the flee king.a Morse might have indulged in pungent repartee by relating the story of the forged notes in Maine, but he held the secret to himself.
 It is along the Maine coast, and espe- cially in the city of Bath, about twelve miles up the Kennebec river, that Morse as 8 boy proved himself extraor- dinary in business. His people were money getters, but were not unusually successful He learned business from his father, also c. W. Morse, but his lesson had not gone far before he was teaching his father. His grandfather had been the pioneer towboat man on the Kennebec, and towboats played q major part in the making of the finan- cier.
 As boy Charles Wyman Morse dis played his first enterprise by selling newspapers, candy and other beguil- ing merchandise aboard the only ex- cursion steamboat then plying on the river. It was a business in which he was the only purveyor, but he soon recognized bolder business plan. In blustery weather. at the mouth of the river, navigation with rowboats was disagreeable, and so, like a true de scendant of the NUrsemen, the daring boy rowed through bad weather doing errands for sea captains and selling to them merchandise which was worth more because of the hardship in get ting it from shore He went through the Bath high school and finally to college.
 His father had organized the Knick- erbocker Towing company and en- joyed profitable monopoly of taking the sailing vessels up and down the river. The father also did some trad ing in timber, lumber and ice Morse never took very much to his fathers towboat business, so far as the actual plotting of boats was concerned, but when the towboat company was form ed he became q bookkeeper for the concern. For this Morse got $500 year. It is said he did very little bookkeeping. however, because he dis covered young man with fondness for such work and who accepted $300 for doing it. Morse thereby achieved his first real finance when he col lected $500 year without doing the work for it. All the while he was not unmindful of the industries about him.
 Since the United States became nation there have been built at Bath nearly 5000 vessels. The elder Morse