Tell Me, Ouija ...

Market Tipster Frederick N. Goldsmith shook Wall Streeters two months ago by saying that his generally accurate tips came from a code in Bringing Up Father revealed by a spirit. In a Manhattan court hearing last week he took most of it back. The New York attorney general was trying to put Goldsmith out of business as a tipster. However, Goldsmith, veteran of 48 years of financial soothsaying, did admit that he had tried to get some spirit help, but had had no luck.

"My sister is a medium," he said. "I positively know we are able to communicate with our friends on the other side through what we call her telephone ear." But when the sister asked the friends to help Fred "make some money," the spirits replied: "We think Fred knows more about the stock market than we do."

Actually, Goldsmith testified, the market tip letter that earned him as much as $39,000 a year was based on stock market charts. He had said that the tips were based on Maggie & Jiggs only because "I was worried and confused and in a hurry to get out." And even if Maggie & Jiggs did suggest a tip, he insisted that he always checked it against his charts. That was why he had always been right on long-range predictions, though sometimes wrong on short-range ones. Said he: "Stocks always do what they ought to do, but they never do it when they ought to."

Goldsmith's customers eagerly defended him in court; one testified that he had made $150,000 on Goldsmith tips. A customers' man from E. W. Clucas & Co., a brokerage house, said that Goldsmith's market letter was the "best of them all." Would he have thought so if he had known the tips came from the comics, he was asked? The customers' man brushed that off as other witnesses had. It was not important. Said he: "I'm only interested in making a profit."

The only one, apparently, who had not made a profit was Goldsmith. He ruefully admitted that he had not followed his own advice--and had lost on the market.

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