Howard Marcus, Interviews with Jews in Utah, Accn 998

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uuwdLU L'li::ILLU;:, .<.ud interview tpe 1 p. 7 HM Very profitable. Can't. Oh, I could spend a good hour trying to describe that. JAmes White after whom the jewish community center was named was an attorney and a good friend andhe had made considerable amount of money investing in bankrupt railroad bonds. He had no son. He had two daughters. He did not have a son. He came to me once and he said, Yo u know I'd like to teach you something about investing in what he called special situations. And if yo ur motehr would put up some mone y so that you have som capital to work with, I think I can teach you something and-- I talked to my motehr and he talked to mymother and --I did this. I got out of the advertising business and I did this and f-eieft~~- I've been imnvestments ever since. And recently more--in the more recent yea rs, have been in real estate. Securities. were very good for a while but they have not been good investment media for the last decade. To date. what's going to happen ~e=E= fromtoday on, I don't know. They will undoubetdl y come back into their home. So the last decade, real estate as=R= has been the field where thebiggest profits have been made. L How do you invest in bankrupt railroad stocks .. HM You buy the bonds and theygo through feefgftiB~ig reorganization in the federal courts and then the old bonds whic let's say firstmortgages on a railroad, you know youmn figure out what the actual real value behind them. A thousand Hollar bond b might be selling for $250 and you can look at them and with the shrewd analysis, and y ou depend on other people to do this, you say there is absolutel y not less than $500 worth of value behind these bonds. They 're seliliing for $250 even though they were promised to pay a thousand. You'll never ge t a thousad out of them but y uo can't get less than $500 and you can buy them for $250. That in essence is how it was done. Iae= I didn't do too well, but I did learn a lot. I made a little. L what wre some of the fields yo've gone into and done well ... HM REal estate. L Tell me about something ... HM No, rather not. It's rather personal and very involved. But it has treated me well to date. The nly thing that I would say is--which I think I told you before. The Capitol Theatre was in my family for 49 yea rs and it was finally taken by condemnation and the timing happened to work out well for me Throgh a trust, I had a 50% interest in it. And it was taken over. and remodeled at an enormous cost by the --well, with funds from the bicentennial commission for the arts and money raised by salt lake county