Daria Doering

Spent the day cleaning out my father’s office. What got me inwardly weeping was having to recycle the simple tools of his trade. My dad was a technical stock market analyst, one of the originators of that whole field. The tools of his trade were chart paper of many different sizes and grid types, his T-squares with which he drew the charts, the rubber cement with which he glued stuff together, pencils, erasers and drafting tools.

He published a newsletter, originally every 10 days, then lengthening it to every three weeks, but then with the advent of the internet, he went the other way and began publishing daily. He loved to write, and freed from the labor of having to mail out his writing, he relished the ability to publish his thoughts daily.

But he also continued to mail his every-three-weeks letter to those who preferred to read a paper copy. The tools of that trade were envelopes – tons of envelopes, renewal notices in a different color for every month of the year, a huge Pitney-Bowes postage meter, all kinds of “first class,” “air mail” and many other ink stamps and post office paraphernalia.

He also started selling his charts, and developed a brisk business in two of them. One was a large, odd-sized 11×15 inch chart book, one page for each year, from 1885 to the present. Each page charted the Dow Jones Industrial, Transportation and Utilities Averages, Treasury bonds and volume. Each year we produced a new page that customers would buy to add to their book. These pages also briefly described the major financial events of the year, with text inserted alongside the graphs.

When I came onboard four years ago, I updated us to producing the charts using Excel for the graphs rather than hand-drawing, and Adobe In-Design for the layout, rather than literally cutting and pasting in typewritten sentences. I initially panicked when it fell upon me to write those sentences with the financial events of the year, and I searched the internet for year-in-review articles. However I found that I always remembered more of the events than I thought I would, and it became a fun and useful intellectual challenge to create this condensed list. Last year would certainly contain the crash in oil prices …

And then there were the books, hundreds of them. The ones he treasured most were early editions by his heroes, the developers of the Dow Theory, Robert Rhea, William Hamilton and E George Shaeffer. He had dozens of books on other favorite topics: gold and precious metals, the Fed (hatred of), methods for trading stocks, the history of Wall Street. Also many books by Louise Haye and Emmet Fox, emblematic of the spiritual journey of his later years.

Then there were the relics of the legal life of his business – the Articles of Incorporation of Dow Theory Letters, and years of corporate minutes, which he had bound into books.

Then I started reflecting on his different offices. When we moved from New York to California when I was five, he opened an office on 60th St. and El Cajon Blvd. I remember being there one day, which was unusual, and the plan was for me to help out. I was afraid my dad would want me to fold his newsletter into thirds to go into envelopes, which I didn’t think I could do, being all of maybe eight years old. Fortunately he did not expect this of me, and I think I spent the day drawing.

When we moved to La Jolla when I was 11, he got a second story office above a precious metals dealer, where he remained for many years. I don’t know what happened between him and the proprietor, but it must not have been good, as they never did business together, and I never heard him mention him!

Later he moved his office to a small house on Torrey Pines Rd., where both he and I lived for a short time after my parents were divorced. Next he moved the office to Prospect St., next to Morgan Stanley, where he had his accounts. Finally the rent became too high and he moved his office to its last location on Fay Ave. Interesting location since his third wife’s name was Faye.

Concurrent with all of this, and quite fortuitously, I have been reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a profound book by a Japanese woman who obsessively devoted her life, from the age of five, to tidying up – reducing the number of her possessions and organizing them impeccably, so that she could then enjoy the rest of her life in an atmosphere of beauty and tranquility.

Her message is to first vastly reduce the number of your possessions, keeping only those that spark a feeling of joy within you. Then you can easily organize them in a simple manner. Toward the end of the book, she goes on an unexpected tangent. She believes our possessions have spirits of their own, and thinks we should continually thank our clothes, handbags, and the other tools of our lives for their devoted service to us! This is such a beautiful way to look at life, and so completely describes the way I am feeling today. So here goes, starting with the people involved.

Thank you, Dad, for your devoted study of the stock market, and your study of all of life. My dad read for several hours each day – mostly magazines of all types – and I was always envious that he got to do that. But his reading allowed him to write not just about the stock market, but about everything that interested him – psychology, society, politics, the arts, popular culture, fashion, high-end auctions, sexuality – and his multifaceted writing was what kept people subscribing and reading him for decades, and from one generation to the next. I can hardly count the number of emails he received which stated, “I never met Richard, but I felt like he was one of my best friends …;

Thank you, Dad, for writing literally every day of your life, up until about a week before you died, when you went onto hospice and could no longer even move or speak.

Thank you, Dad’s secretaries and office managers, who organized his life so he could devote himself to his writing, who created instruction manuals for the many tasks involved in publishing his letters and charts, and later for posting his writings and charts to his website. Thank you for assembling all the supplies involved in publishing and shipping, which I am feeling so nostalgic in releasing to the universe (in the form of Goodwill!) today.

Thank you to our office – the three humble rooms, but with balconies and fresh air for each room, in which I have spent many a pleasant hour and day.

Thank you, desks – old and worn but solid wood – and the comfortable mesh office chairs that supported my dad and all the ladies who supported his efforts …

Thank you microwave, toaster oven, mini-refrigerator, water cooler, cupboard of teas, paper plates, eating utensils … all of which supported a comfortable daily life for those who had the pleasure of working at Dow Theory Letters for the humane stretch of six hours each day …

Thank you, lateral file cabinets, whole walls of them, matching putty-colored metal, which contained the lifeblood of a business, the records of subscribers, accounting, purchases, marketing, employment records, photographs, and a thousand other things.

Thank you, computers, monitors, printers, in-office servers, for your all-important work as the stewards of the intellectual content of almost 60 years of writing …

Thank you, equipment – the 24-pin dot matrix printer and Pitney Bowes postage machine that allowed office staff to print their own labels and send out their own renewal notices, a task that never ended … thank you adding machine and tape used to calculate the Advance-Decline ratio …

Thank you, binders, of office procedures, subscriber lists, renewal rates, and so much more.

Thank you, custom chart book binders, chart pages, custom shipping boxes, bubble wrap, cardboard mailing tubes for the pages; all the supplies involved in producing and shipping the chart books and chart pages.

Thank you, huge drawers of office supplies – pens, markers, paper clips, rubber bands, batteries, post-its, and countless other things.

Thank you, Goodwill, to which I have taken 18 boxes of documents so far, to be disposed of via your shredding service, also knowing I am helping people to be employed …

Thank you, new tenants to our suite. It worked out that exactly when we were ready to depart (actually a bit before, which has made things challenging) someone finally wanted to sublet our place. Serendipitously, this is a man who was in the stock market business for 25 years, but then he lost a son to addiction, and decided to change course. He went back to school, got a Ph.D. in psychology, and now runs addiction recovery groups. His practice has been growing so that he is ready to relocate from his one-room office on the fifth floor to our three-room suite on the fourth floor.

Perhaps most importantly, thank you for the honor and privilege of running my father’s business for his final four years. I was challenged a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and learned a whole lot. It was all so intense that it seems like a blur.

And lastly thank you to myself, for being willing to jump into something I knew little about, make it my life, support my father, and do the best I could with it. I brought on other writers who complemented my father’s outlook to create a Dow Theory team. The business is still going, and is a tribute to a bold and inquisitive man who wrote honestly and from his heart, whose candid observations on the stock market, the arts and his own life and spiritual journey enriched the lives of thousands of people around the globe for almost 60 years.