Alvin W. Krech

Alvin W. Krech possessed a variety of accomplishments. He was a collector of excellent judgment, entertaining in talk and recitation, a genial companion in recreation, indoors or out. He might conceivably, if fate had so decreed, have been an ornament to the stage or a musician of distinction. His participation in the Century Twelfth Night celebrations contributed to the success of the occasion. No one who mingled in the picturesque groups which crowded the Clubhouse on Twelfth Night of 1916 will have forgotten the dapper man of fashion of the period 1830, with the scrupulously curled whiskers under his chin, the blue skirt coat buttoned close to a wasp-like waist, and the lavender trousers into which his legs appeared to have been moulded. Krech might have stepped from the pages of Thackeray or Dickens.

The other side of Krech’s personality was that of a progressively constructive financier, the organizer and head of a New York trust company which rose rapidly into the top group of such institutions. Beginning in the grain trade of his northwestern home, he came to New York to take an active part in the railway reorganizations of the nineties, serving as secretary to the committee which effected the famous reconstruction of the Union Pacific and as manager in half a dozen other railway enterprises. The impress which he personally made is summarized by the remark of a long-time professional associate, that there was no one in Wall Street just like Krech, whose views and conversation even on the intricacies of finance could not be dull.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1929 Century Association Yearbook