Norman Bruce Ream was born in southwestern Pennsylvania in 1844,
the son of a farmer. He exhibited a commercial sense early on when
he nursed a lame duck back to health and sold it for a profit. But
the Civil War interrupted his mercantile ambitions. Wounded twice
and promoted to lieutenant, he came home a hero. He went west after
the war and became a merchant, first in Illinois and then Iowa. His
businesses failed. Undeterred, he headed for Chicago and the Union
Stock Yards. He worked as a commission merchant, but then traded
his mud-caked boots for French kid boots and became a trader at the
Board of Trade. His analytical mind was made for the grain and
provision pits. Money poured in especially after helping in one of
P.D. Armour's pork corners; Ream had quickly become one of the
city's best plungers. By the mid-1880s, he was married and the
father of several children - and also a millionaire. He lived on
Chicago's Prairie Avenue alongside the likes of George M. Pullman
and Marshall Field. He began investing in real estate, urban
transit companies, and railroad stock. Another millionaire
neighbor, John W.Doane, interested him in consolidating and
financing industrial enterprises. At the end of the 1890s, Mr. Ream
had been involved in the creation of such companies as Glucose
Sugar Refining, National Biscuit, and Federal Steel. Finance
capitalism, however, was based primarily on Wall Street. So, by the
turn of the century, Mr. Ream was traveling to New York City,
impressing financiers like J. Pierpont Morgan. He would help Morgan
put together the United States Steel Corporation and International
Harvester Company, and serve on the board of directors of many
enterprises. He would also be at Morgan's side during the banking
panic of 1907. After the move, Ream and his family lived in a
luxury apartment in New York City and a mansion in Connecticut. But
life became turbulent in his remaining years. Public sentiment
soured towards Wall Street and the wealthy (to include Norman B.
Ream). This, along with social indiscretions from some of his
children, kept the Ream name in the press well after his death in
1915. Then, gradually, his life was forgotten.
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