Housewife's View

She bustles through the messy, male-contrived world of finance like a housewife cleaning her husband's den--tidying trends, sorting statistics, and issuing no-nonsense judgments as wholesome and tart as mince pie. With such forthright energy, the New York Post's Sylvia Porter has made herself the most widely quoted financial writer in the U.S. Her column, "Your Dollar," is studied by Wall Street brokers, Washington economists, Chicago bankers and budget-conscious families from coast to coast. Under the impact of the recession, "Your Dollar's" syndication has almost doubled in the past year, is now printed in 220 papers.

Clarity & Point. The secret of Sylvia Porter's success is that she writes of complex financial matters in terms that Everyman can understand, shuns the jargon of the financial specialist (which many a businessman--though loath to admit it--does not understand too well himself). She constantly redefines technical terms, turns complex concepts into housewifely images. "I write for a faceless image of myself," says she. "I figure if I'm interested in a subject, other people will be too."

As economist, Sylvia Porter is sound enough to command the respect of the business community; as historian, she has an instinct for the larger trends too often buried under reports of day-to-day news. She has a genius for translating a snarl of statistics into down-to-earth realities. Her favorite phrase: "What does it all mean?"

Last week she likened the Government's latest sale of bonds to a "gigantic sale of I.O.U.s," ticked off future bond issues planned for the next few months, and concluded: "It means that the greatest wave of cash borrowing by our Treasury since the Korean war and the greatest wave of borrowing ever in peacetime is about to sweep our land ... It means that the easy money era which was kicked off this past November will keep running through this period. All borrowers--including you --will be benefited by this."

In another column, she disparaged the fears of the fainthearted that the decline in automobile sales meant a shrinkage in the U.S. middle-income market. Plowing through Department of Commerce statistics that few businessmen consult, she showed that the proportion of middle-income families has risen from 37% in 1947 to 43% in 1957. "What does it all mean? It means that one of the greatest economic social revolutions of all time--the surging growth in America of a mass middle-income class--is still going on. It means that industry should be placing more, not less, stress on the middle-income market."

Fire & Charm. The daughter of a physician and a suffragette, Sylvia Field was born in Patchogue, N.Y., had her pretty head turned toward economics in 1929 when the stock market collapse wiped out her family's money. Then a 16-year-old freshman at Manhattan's Hunter College, she switched from English to economics to find out why, graduated magna cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Married to a young economist named Reed R. Porter, Sylvia landed a job with a Wall Street broker who packed her off to Bermuda with ten suitcases containing $175,000 in gold coin just before the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933. Sylvia sold the gold for pounds, purchased British bonds, brought them back to the U.S., turned them into dollars for a pretty profit. With this practical experience behind her, Sylvia in 1935 persuaded the Post to hire her as a financial reporter. Three years later the Post warily gave her a column under the byline S. F. Porter, and did not let her affirm her sex until 1942, when S. F. was changed to Sylvia.

Divorced from Porter in 1941, Sylvia is now married to G. Sumner Collins, promotion manager of the New York Journal-American. At 44, she is a handsome woman with flashing brown eyes, makes the most of her charm and social position in covering her financial beat. At a dinner party last July, she heard businessmen moaning about cutbacks in reinvestment plans and the chances of an ensuing dip in the economy, sat down the next afternoon in her grab-bag office at the Post and pounded out one of the first stories predicting the onset of the recession. Other columns come from her own frustrations. When her vacuum cleaner, television set and iron all broke down in a single day, she wrote a scathing column blaming planned obsolescence--and got 500 supporting letters from readers. A product of the '30s, she readily admits that she leans toward pump-priming Keynesian economics and the Democratic Party. "I don't see how anyone could have lived through the Depression and feel differently."

On weekends Sylvia and her husband shuttle up to an exurbanite home complete with swimming pool in upper Westchester County: "I don't put on a girdle until Monday." But every Monday Sylvia returns to an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue and to her office at the Post, where--puffing Philip Morris cigarettes and rattling off her sentences at a deadline-racing clip--she delights in making as many dollars and as much sense as she can out of the clutter of financial facts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.