The Gospel of Orlando K. Fitzsimmons

 This is the tale of Orlando K. Fitzsimmons, pitcher, proto-Ponzi, and prolific utterer of fragrant idiocy. Possessing a healthy ego and limitless chutzpah, his life traced a story that is absurd above all else. 

Orlando Kellogg Fitzsimmons was born January 5, 1866 in Reading, Michigan, the last of Jane and Andrew Fitzsimmons' three children. He was named after Orlando H. Kellogg, who ran a general store together with his father.

His parents divorced sometime between 1866 and 1869. Orlando acquired a stepmother when his father married Elizabeth Dixon in 1869. 

His baseball career began as a shortstop in 1883 with the Park nine of Pleasant Lake, Indiana. He continued playing with the club in 1884 but signed in August with a team from Lexington, Kentucky. 

Angola Steuben Republican, 1884-8-13, p.5

He played with the Parks of Pleasant Lake again in 1885, and near the end of the season pitched in some practice games for the National League's Detroit Wolverines. He signed with Detroit in 1886 but didn't pan out. Detroit spent their pre-season in Georgia, and Fitzsimmons pitched twice against Southern Association teams. On March 19 he beat Macon 21-0 before a crowd of 1500, but his next start on March 23 did not go quite so smoothly as Savannah defeated him 13-5. Detroit released him, and by March 28 he had signed with the Augusta Browns of the Southern Association. Pitching for Augusta, he beat Pittsburg of the American Association 2-1 in a pre-season game, March 30.

He pitched fairly well with Augusta in the regular season, winning three games and losing four with an ERA of 2.00 and fifty strikeouts in seven games. His 7.1 strikeouts/nine innings were the fourth highest in the league but he wasn't given the chance to qualify; Augusta released him in late May. He quickly signed with the St. Paul Freezers of the Northwestern League. 

The St. Paul Pioneer Press was excited at his advent, saying: "He is unquestionably an A - No. 1 pitcher. He has great curves, and a most wonderful drop ball. His command of the ball is also good, while he is daily recovering the speed he lost early in the season, when pitching for Detroit." 

One of his games for St. Paul would continue to be recounted in newspapers for another thirty years. On June 18, pitching against Duluth pitcher Mark Baldwin, who would go on to earn 154 MLB wins and the nickname "Fido," Fitzsimmons struck out twelve batters and Baldwin struck out eighteen for a remarkable 30 combined strikeouts. It wasn't exactly a pitcher's duel, though: Duluth collected sixteen hits off Fitzsimmons, beating him 13-4. (Note that in the box score only one run of the seventeen scored in the game is considered to be earned.)

Saint Paul Globe, 1886-6-19, p.1

Hugh Daily

Fitzsimmons overstayed his welcome in St. Paul and was released on September 13. (In his stead they signed Hugh "One Arm" Daily, a surly thirty-eight-year-old Irishman who struck out 483 batters in the Union Association in 1884.) As a parting gift, manager John Barnes fined Fitzsimmons $50 for losing 7-6 to Milwaukee on the frigid Sunday of September 12. The Duluth Jayhawks signed him on the rebound and he stayed with them until the end of their pennant-winning season.

Saint Paul Globe, 1886-10-10, p.5

Fitzsimmons pitched for five different teams in 1887. He spent most of the year in the Western League, going 9-5 for the Leavenworth Soldiers, 5-4 for the St. Joseph Reds, and 5-1 for Denver. He finished the year back in the Northwestern League and pitched miserably: On September 14 he pitched for the Milwaukee Cream Citys but had no control and was hit hard; he left the game after four innings. On September 17 he pitched for Duluth but was so wild he had to be taken out after seven innings. An ignominious end to his season. 

In 1888 he was briefly with Jackson of the Tri-State League but was back in his hometown, Reading, by July, pitching for the town team. He lost 16-4 to the Angola Grays on July 13 in the one game I can find a score for. 

By the end of the season he had come full circle in his baseball career: again he was an infielder,  a second baseman this time; again he played for Pleasant Lake, Indiana. 

As far as I am aware he never played baseball again. Business henceforth would be his realm. He began it inauspiciously: in the winter of 1889-90 it was noted that he was "on the road selling fruit trees." 

From 1890 to 1892 the newspapers declared not his name but it was not an uneventful time for him: in 1892 he married Mary Green of Dexter, Michigan, a lady close to eight years his junior. 

He popped up again in Owosso, Michigan, in 1893. He was hired as an agent of the American Express Company. As of June 30 1893 he had handled about 400 crates of strawberries, whatever the significance of that is. 

On June 8th 1894 it was reported that he was a member of the fledgling Silver Dandruff Cure Company which the Owosso Times heartily endorsed. 

Warranted to cure all skin diseases? I bet.

Whatever its merits or lack of them, the Silver Dandruff Cure Co. does not seem to have survived past 1895. 

Fitzsimmons' newspaper trail runs cold for a half decade after that until December 6, 1900, when the Victoria Daily Times reported that he had arrived in Victoria, British Columbia on the steamer Charmer from Vancouver.

I have no idea why he was in Victoria.

He volunteered to coach Victoria's baseball team in 1901, and the team was very happy to have an old pro like him at the helm. The Victoria Daily Times described him at various times during the season as "energetic and capable," and "experienced and level-headed."

The team had one future pro: Thomas Holness, who would win two games and lose nine for the Victoria/Spokane team of the Northwestern League in 1905. 

No further trace of Orlando can be found until November 1902, when advertisements of his began to appear in the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record. 

This is where the bizarre part of his story begins. Brace yourselves, folks, for a lot of nonsense. 

The advertisements promised that the reader could earn 8% to 10% profit a month by depositing a mere $1.00 per week with Orlando K. Fitzsimmons. 

His headlines blared the plan's virtues: "RAPID MONEY," "INDEPENDENT MONEY," "MONEY COMES EASY," etc.

"Don't be timid," Orlando said. "Fear destroys opportunities and undermines success." But there was no need to fear, anyways: the plan was "absolutely safe and sure." 

"Don't be afraid," Orlando said, "for there is no hidden monster; only first truth." "I would not mislead you for the state of California. I have no incentive for misleading you." 

"Be like Napoleon" and do "not tremble before that old bugaboo, 'IMPOSSIBLE.'" 

'kay. 

The Los Angeles Herald got in on the act with an interview of him published on December 21, blithely presenting his twaddle as news and calling his Tontine Investment Company of California "up-to-date and apparently reliable." 

From the interview:
Q: "What is the nature of your business?"
A: "It is hard to explain clearly in a very few words, but, were I to attempt it, I would say that we keep money constantly moving in such a way that one dollar will cancel many dollars' worth of obligations in a short space of time."

Constantly moving money around apparently delivered 100% profit, for Fitzsimmons went on to explain that patrons receive $160 for every $80 they put in. He explained that all this was merely the law of evolution at work, the law of evolution comprising two forces, growth and change, which when working in harmonious unison apparently bred money like rabbits. 

It didn't take too long for him to get called out. The Los Angeles Times published an article on February 17, 1903, summing up his pamphlet "How to Make Money Quickly, Honestly, and Legitimately" as a get-rich-quick scam for suckers. Fitzsimmons was now promising to bestow 15% to 25% profit upon his patrons each and every month. 

All by moving money around. The Times quoted the pamphlet's explanation: 

"Now, we return the 'profit' to our patrons under a perfect coöperative system, whereby, under certain fixed laws, we move or circulate among our members the money received in such a way that $1 produces many dollars' worth of 'profit' in a very short time." 

"Clear as mud," the Times replied, "and equally attractive to the normal intellect." 

Fitzsimmons quickly fired back with advertisements in the Post-Record challenging those "ignoramuses who like to pose before the general public as thinkers" to a debate, but nothing ever came of it. 

All was relatively quiet on the Fitzsimmons front until June 14, when the Los Angeles Times exposed the "BRAZEN BLASPHEMY OF 'RICH-QUICKSTER.'"    

The Times was referring to the May issue of Fitzsimmons' new mouthpiece, the Federation Herald, published by the Rev. E.H. Brooks, later described by the Times as "clerical floater and persistent beggar." A picture of Christ graced the cover; within were pages upon pages extolling the greatness of Fitzsimmons' Cumulative Credit Company. It was "a door of hope to the struggling millions," delivering the downtrodden and disheartened out of destitution and into prosperity not by cutthroat capitalist competition, not by the adoration of those "two mighty kings... Selfishness and Greed," but by the Golden Rule. 

The company's logo

Practical details sullied not the publication's pages: "Space here will not allow an explanation of the details, but the main point is that we dethrone money as master and make it man's servant. It is faithful, willing and obedient when properly used, for is it not a creature of man's creation? Our mission to the material plane is what Christ's was to the spiritual." 

The Times noted that "Believers in omnipotence may well wonder why lightning does not strike the propagators of the Federation Herald."

The Los Angeles Post-Record, no doubt uninfluenced by the fact that Fitzsimmons was a steady advertiser in its pages, devoted its entire sixth page on June 20 to parodying the Times and uncritically quoting Fitzsimmons. 

E.g.: "THE TIMES HAS NOT INVESTIGATED THIS CURSED INSTITUTION FURTHER THAN TO READ ITS LITERATURE IN A DESULTORY MANNER, BUT EVERY UNTHINKING, PARROT-LIKE MAN SHOULD KNOW THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO WHAT THIS CONCERN IS DOING AND WHAT HAS BEEN DONE FOR MANY YEARS.    

    "WHEN A NEW IDEA LOOKS AS THOUGH IT MIGHT BE SUCCESSFUL, IT IS TIME TO SQUELCH IT, FOR MOST PEOPLE DO NOT WANT ANYTHING NEW."

Etc. 

The Post-Record's response to the Times was infantile. The Times' article was based upon prior articles establishing that Fitzsimmons' company was a scam. The Times called Fitzsimmons blasphemous not merely because he was promising to apply the golden rule to business and comparing his work to Christ's, but because the business he was pretending was Christ-like was a fraud. By taking the Times' article out of context and then drowning it in reams of Fitzsimmons' eloquent emptiness, it exercised no impartiality. It was simply an attack on the Times and a defense of their advertiser. 

The Times published a reply on June 24 further skewering Saint Orlando Fitzsimmons' (their phrase) pretensions to unworldly righteousness which flavored his "$2 for $1" siren-call. The article makes plenty of good points, though its headline "CLAIMS TO BE THE MESSIAH" is pretty misleading - what Fitzsimmons said was that his material mission was akin to Christ's spiritual mission. Isn't that ridiculous enough without having to distort it? 

The Post-Record did not take this lying down, and devoted a second full page to Fitzsimmons' defense. Its centerpiece is this lovely depiction of the Times as a great ugly mud-slinging lover of big business futilely endeavoring to destroying such unworldly institutions as the Cumulative Credit Company and the Point Loma Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society.

The main thrust of the Post-Record's arguing was that Fitzsimmons' enterprise was like the New York Life Insurance Company, only better. Or rather, the Post-Record printed Fitzsimmons' bizarre and long-winded arguments to that effect. 

The newspapers' cat-fight petered out after that, thank God, not before I lost a lot of brain cells. 

By September 9 the Federation Herald was defunct. It went out with a bang, according to the Times, composing in its last issue a new "Credo" that began "I believe in Orlando K. Fitzsimmons." 

The early months of 1904 brought the Cumulative Credit Company nothing but woe. In January the company became the subject of an investigation by a grand jury. Some interesting facts were brought out. Since the company's start it had issued 46,000 weekly certificates - not taking into account certificates that had matured or lapsed, that represented $46,000 a week, a quarter of which was set aside for the company's expenses. Though that figure was an exaggeration, it helped explain the company's opulence, which was described by the Times thusly: 

"That it is a real good business - for the company - has been apparent for some time. The offices on Broadway are extensive, well appointed, and in a measure luxurious, and the cost of keeping the broad span of window space in such a polished condition that the suckers may see themselves as they pass cannot be a trifle."

A disconcerting clause was discovered in the certificates themselves. The certificates promised to pay to their bearers at their maturation $2 for every $1 they had invested provided - here's the catch -  "Provided that there shall be sufficient money in said Mutual Benefit Credit Fund available for that purpose to pay said amount." If there wasn't enough, that would just be too bad. And it was very likely there would not be enough. As Judge Wellborn of the United States Circuit Court would explain in March, about 30% of the $80 from each certificate was set aside for the company's use, leaving just $56 to pay the $160 promised. The shortfall could only be made up by the hooking of two more suckers; and they in turn could only be paid by hooking four more suckers, etc. In other words, Fitzsimmons was Ponzi while Ponzi was still in Italy, though he operated on a smaller scale than Ponzi would. 

Investigation by grand jury did not go well for the company. On February 22 the Assistant United States Attorney General declared the company a fraud, and barred it from using the mail. No letters addressed to it nor to its president (Fitzsimmons) or secretary (M.E. Johnson) would be delivered. It could neither give nor receive money with postal money orders.

Predictably, the great Orlando declared himself and his associates to be martyrs, and complained that the rights of the company's patrons were being trampled under foot. 

But he was not deterred; no amount of oppression at the hands of a government in the pocket of Big Insurance could quell his salvific fire. In a circular mailed out to his followers, presumably before March 1 when the order to stop his mail became official, he included a poem of his own composition entitled "Too Fast" which went like this:

The poem reminds me of the songs Toad sings in The Wind in the Willows. Its shameless egotism is reminiscent of "The Song of Toad" while its ending refrain echoes "When the Toad Came Home." 

But Fitzsimmons did not confine his defiance to doggerel. 

The Cumulative Credit Company expanded into Iowa, opening an office in Cedar Rapids; the Cedar Rapids Gazette published an article on June 16th, 1904, deriding it as a get-rich-quick scheme, and panning the book Fitzsimmons had recently published. After quoting the book extensively they concluded: "it is inane stuff, to say the least." That book, a slim thirty-eight page volume entitled Financial Ideas Worth $5000 to You - If You Can Comprehend Them! can actually still be read on archive.org, not that I recommend it - it's just an extensive advertisement. Any morbid curiosity you might have about it can be sated at: https://archive.org/details/financialideaswo00fitzrich/mode/2up

The company also opened up offices in San Francisco later in the year that occupied "half a dozen rooms in one of the best office buildings in San Francisco. The rooms are fitted up like a bank. [Fitzsimmons] has a large staff of stenographers and clerks.... His business shows every sign of prosperity notwithstanding the painstaking efforts of Uncle Sam to drive him out. He has the most astonishing flow of language. He has got hold of the jargon of insurance and actuarial science and will reel it off to you by the hour. It is an awful death if you can't escape in time." (Stockton Evening Mail, 1904-12-10, p.4)

But the beginning of the end was nigh. He was arrested January 7, 1905, in San Francisco. He gave his name as Adolph, and was let free on a bond of either $2,000 or $5,000.

His arrest was due to his refusal to stay away from the mail; he had worked around his postal proscription by having his mail sent to him under miscellaneous Chinese names at his office in the Callaghan building of San Francisco. 

Inappositely, at almost the same time he was arrested a new book of his entitled Financial Ideas was published. On one of the leading pages these words were emblazoned in large type: "We need not worry about the sun's cooling off, nor the depopulation of the earth, neither need we fear the time when the Cumulative Credit system will commence to retrograde, for that is only when its blessings have covered the entire earth, and there are no more people to reach."

On page nineteen he drew a verbal "likeness" of himself:

 "Here is the staunch business man. Through the broad shoulders and fully-developed chest can be seen great physical endurance, while the keen, bright eyes, the clear-cut features and strong, heavy jaw indicate executive ability and the indomitable will power that has characterized his life.

 "But these qualities, valuable as they are to the head of a great enterprise, are not sufficient to carry to successful issue the stupendous plans conceived by him. To these must be added those of the philosopher and teacher - the man who can conceive a great idea, and present it intelligently to the masses."

You can't make this stuff up. 

Meanwhile, in reality, in May he was granted a divorce from his wife, Mary, for her desertion of him. By the terms of the divorce she received $3,000, $100 a month, and their daughter Virginia. 

At the same time, M.E. Johnson, Fitzsimmons' former partner, filed a suit against him for nonpayment; in 1904 Fitzsimmons had bought Johnson's stock in the company but had yet to pay either $6,500, according to Fitzsimmons' statement, or $17,500, the LA Times' statement. Whatever the figure was, Fitzsimmons said he didn't have enough money to repay Johnson.

I don't know how that suit turned out, but Fitzsimmons spent a few months in Chicago and published a new booklet called "What Has Been Done and Why." He returned to California on September 16 for his trial. The court had a difficult time picking out a jury, but Fitzsimmons was eventually convicted on eight counts of using the United States mails for a lottery. 

On reporting his conviction the Post-Record referred to him with chill sarcasm as "the man who conceived the brilliant scheme of bettering the condition of the poor by giving them $100 for $50." Apparently they had forgotten their rabid support of him a mere two and a half years prior; but perhaps it was not so obvious then that shuffling around money and talking up a storm does not make 50 equal 100. 

On October 9th Fitzsimmons was sentenced to six months in jail, accompanied by a $250 fine. His two business associates, John W. Neighbors and E.A. Arnett, were also convicted and were fined $250 each without jail time. 

They got disgustingly light sentences, really -  for context, F.B. Parker, the local manager of the Cumulative Credit Company in Washington, was sentenced to a year in jail and a $1000 fine in August, and even that was far from the maximum sentence  - but the trio appealed their sentences. Fitzsimmons was let free on a four-thousand-dollar bond. 

In early 1906 he published yet another book, this one called Metamorphose: Involving Regeneration of Individual and Race, and Also the Solution of the Great Problem of Poverty. 

The Fresno Morning Republican called it "an interesting sort of fraud. On its face, it appears to be a fantastic jumble of Socialism, mysticism and greenbackism, written in the turgid and meaningless style affected by devotees of freak cults.... There is also much blasphemous appeal to the sanctions of religion and impious misquoting of the words of Christ." 

In mid-1906 Fitzsimmons founded a new organization  called the World Betterment League with offices in Chicago and Buffalo. He hooked about 200 followers in Buffalo on the promise that $5 a month or more would get them from 50% to 120% profit, and left town before his flock got back a dime. 

He married the 27-year-old Amy L. Brown in 1906. 

His appeal was denied by the United States circuit court of appeals, October 7th, 1907, Judge Gilbert ruling that he had indeed used the mails for his lottery schemes. It's odd that apparently the only law that could be used against Fitzsimmons was a law against conducting lotteries by mail. Judge Gilbert said the Cumulative Credit Company was a lottery because there was a discrepancy between the money put in and the expected prize, explaining that:

"The subscriber to the scheme knows full well that no increment is to be earned by his money, but that all returns are to come from his own contributions and the contributions of others. The chance of getting back from these sources double the sum that he pays in, and getting it soon, is the prize which lures him to make the payments."

But that was a completely false description of what Fitzsimmons' patrons believed. Fitzsimmons did not advertise his certificates as lottery tickets but as guarantees to pay their owners $2 for every $1 they put in. The Cumulative Credit Company preyed upon "those of little means and less business acumen," according to the front page of the Los Angeles Evening Express of 1907-11-18. His patrons did not "know full well that no increment is to be earned by his money" - they were clueless and desperate, in need of the financial salvation Fitzsimmons promised them. Some continued to give money to Fitzsimmons even after the Cumulative Credit Company was put out of business in Los Angeles, apparently not being close readers of the newspapers. They were suckers, not gamblers prepared to lose.

On August 24th, 1905, the Los Angeles Times told the story of G.W. Packer, a sober, dedicated, middle-aged carpenter who was driven insane after he lost all his life savings investing in Cumulative Credit. He had hoped for some financial independence in his old age.

Fitzsimmons was a liar and a thief, a proto-Ponzi, not a lottery conductor. 

Laws are strange things. 

When Fitzsimmons heard his appeal had been denied he gave himself up to a United States marshal, paid his $250 fine, and headed to jail for a six-months' stay. He was released from jail on May 20, 1908. 

There is little of news of the great Orlando past 1908. He had a son, Fielder Dwight Fitzsimmons, born unto him in 1912 in Portland. 

In 1914 he was indicted, along with five other men, as the secretary of the National Mercantile company of Vancouver. The charge? Using the mails to promote a lottery. He was described as a resident of Vancouver at the time. 

The last mention of him in a newspaper alive is a article from May 1, 1931, in the Los Angeles Southwest Wave, describing a speech he gave to the Los Angeles Realty board in which he detailed how all the money moldering away in American savings accounts was bogging down the economy. Sounds Keynesian, actually. The newspaper described him as an "author and economic specialist."

In 1940 he copyrighted the phrase "Direct way to business betterment";  it seems like he was keeping busy in his old age. 

He died August 23rd, 1950, in Pala, California. He was 84, an inappropriately ripe old age for such a sinner. Who can ken the world's workings?