Smocks

Customers of J. P. Benkard & Co., Manhattan stockbrokers entering the offices of the firm one morning last week, stared in amazement at a clerk who was putting up the opening prices, for this individual was clad like no other clerk in the history of Wall Street. He had on a pale smock with a rolling collar and an open neck--a garment of the type that is popularly supposed to be the uniform of artists in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Its color was light blue. In the office, a score of clerks were visible through a glass door, bending over desks and adding machines, all accoutred in blue denim smocks; behind a door marked "Private" bustled J. P. Benkard himself in a blue denim smock; and out on the runners' bench "Gunboat" Smith, onetime prizefighter, now Mr. Benkard's head runner, simpered in a blue denim smock.

"Not only do the smocks protect the men's clothing," said Mr. Benkard, "but they give an air of neatness to the offices which cannot be obtained, save through uniform dress. It is not an imposition on the clerks, as all of them will tell you. They like it."

Every year, on the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Benkard & Co. present a Shakespearean recital, coached by Edward Fales Coward, onetime dramatic critic for the New York World, now connected with the firm. Broker Benkard is himself an authority on Shakespeare.