This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If you want to know where to invest your money in order to get the best return, you might look to a successful man like Emanuel P. Adler of Davenport for advice. Back in the 1880s, in Ottumwa, Iowa, E. P.'s father invested a dollar a week in his son. Dividends followed.
That dollar went to pay an Ottumwa printer to teach the young E. P. how to set type. In 1893, E. P. went to work for the Ottumwa Courier. He quickly rose through the newsroom ranks and into the business office. When the Lee Syndicate, who owned the Courier, bought the Davenport Daily Times in 1899, Adler was sent to Davenport as its business manager. By 1901 he was its publisher. The Times rose from the weakest paper in town to the strongest.
E. P. then turned to community service. In 1924 he helped establish the Davenport Art Gallery, the first in Iowa. In 1925 he became one of the founding directors of the University of Iowa’s School of Religion, the first of its kind. He became director of Friendly House in 1925, and director of St. Luke's Hospital in 1926.
When the Great Depression hit, it was E. P. Adler who stepped into the lobby of Davenport Union Bank where a line of customers were waiting to take their money out, and pledged his own fortune to stop the run and save the bank.
In 1932, it was E. P. Adler who, with some help in cutting red tape from his friend, Herbert Hoover, reorganized the failing American Savings Bank into the Davenport Bank and Trust, and brought in a young bank examiner, V. O. Figge, to run it. Adler himself served as president with no pay until 1941.
E. P. Adler, in turn, invested in his own son, Philip, who continued the father's community service after E. P. died in 1949, making possible the restoration of what is now the Adler Theater, named for both men.
Where to invest your money to get the best return? That dollar a week E. P.'s father paid the printer to teach his son has paid returns not even the most stampeding bull market could hope to match.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
