Benjamin Strong, Jr made few speeches and did not appear in public to wax theoretically on the ways of economics and high finance. He was J. P. Morgan’s workhorse, and he built his reputation and his fortune on the back of the House of Morgan.

Adeline Torrey Schenck married a railroader and small-farmer named Benjamin Strong, and together they had four sons and a daughter. Her forceful personality befitted Adeline, the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian writer, theologian and minister, and her four sons continued the tradition of prominence in their respective fields. The oldest was a Princeton graduate who earned a PhD from Columbia University and became a professor of neurology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her second son became the vice president of the American Radiator Company and partner in the engineering firm of Meyer, Strong and Jones. Her youngest boy went on to a highly successful career in medicine and psychiatry after earning degrees from Princeton and the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Adeline’s third son Benjamin, Jr, was left no choice but to forego college because of a lack of financial stability in the family at the time of his high school graduation. Yet, he went on to become the governor of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve and one of the most powerful and influential men in the Unites States.

In 1891, at the age of 18, Benjamin Strong, Jr left the family home in Montclair, New York, to seek his fortune in finance. After being quickly fired from his first job for of all things, poor penmanship, he entered the financial firm of Jessup, Patton & Co., which became John Patton & Co., and then Cuyler, Morgan & Co. He started as a clerk, and by 1900 Strong was representing international investors in real estate and securities ventures. Basically, he was a stock and real estate speculator.

He left Cuyler, Morgan, & Co. at 26, to join the Atlantic Trust Company, which in 1903, became the Metropolitan Trust Company. He married Margaret LeBoutillier, started a family, and soon settled in the prominent New York City suburb of Englewood, New Jersey.