THE FORTUNE BUILDERS

Another Real Lace, this one dealing with the moguls who made their fortunes in Chicago. Darby, longtime financial columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, looks into the world of Chicago money, in the process giving us capsule biographies of some of those scions of wealth--Armour, Wrigley, Field, Pritzker, Sears, MacArthur (the insurance baron, not the general), Swift, McCormick, and others. The stories are dazzling, glamourous, and sometimes awe-inspiring. MacArthur, for instance, started his billion-dollar business by taking over Banker's Life and Casualty with a personal check for $2,500 to cover its insolvency. And John Harold Johnson (accorded a fortune of $160 million by Forbes) began the trek to wealth on $500 borrowed from his mother to start Ebony magazine. What comes across in the reading is the seeming volatility of money and power in Chicago, as compared, say, to Boston or New York For example, Marshall Field V is the only representative of old Chicago money on the 1985 Forbes list of America's richest people. A good read.