You know George Bailey, right? Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. The small-town banker who gives away his honeymoon money to save his neighbors from financial ruin. The guy who runs a building and loan association and is basically the most decent person alive.
George Bailey gives away his honeymoon money to save his neighbors. Walter Davis skipped town before anyone found out the money was gone.
Walter Clyde Davis showed up in Colorado Springs in 1905. He was twenty-four. He carried business cards calling himself a lawyer from Greensburg, Indiana. He also had two letters of recommendation from judges. But those letters recommended him as a stenographer. Not a lawyer.
Six years into Colorado Springs, Walter Davis quit being a stenographer and became a moneylender. By 1912 he was calling himself “The Loan Man” in the city directory. He still listed himself as an attorney, too. He was not an attorney.
The 1920s were weird. People went from keeping their savings under the mattress to buying Liberty Bonds to throwing money at building and loan associations promising 7 percent interest. It happened fast. And if you lived in Colorado Springs, the whole town was riding this wave of easy money and big promises.
Chapter 4 of Shortfall is where everything falls apart. Not just for Walter Davis, but for every building and loan in Colorado Springs. And honestly, for the whole country.
Walter Davis was shrewd. Echols makes that clear from the start of this chapter. He set up a holding company called Fleming and Company, named after his handyman, to shuffle foreclosed properties around and keep bad debts off his books. He acquired thirty houses and commercial buildings in the Springs, fifteen houses and an apartment building in Pueblo, and more in Denver. All built on other people’s misery through foreclosures.
Everyone back in Colorado Springs imagined Walter Davis living it up on some tropical island with a woman on his arm and a drink in his hand. The newspapers speculated he was in the South Seas. Or Greece, like the fugitive energy mogul Samuel Insull. Surely the “master criminal” was enjoying his stolen fortune somewhere exotic.
Walter Davis killed himself in a New York police station. And somehow, that still wasn’t the end of the story for the people he hurt.
The epilogue of Shortfall is short. Just a few pages. But it might be the most honest part of the whole book.
So that’s Shortfall. A book about a family scandal that turned into something much bigger.
Let me give you my honest take.