Mrs. Rosalind Alcott; Became a Millionaire

Rosalind W. Alcott, a secretary who became a millionaire banker on Wall Street and a prominent philanthropist in Los Angeles, has died. She was 105.

Mrs. Alcott died Friday in her Los Angeles home after a brief illness.

In her retirement years, she funded scholarships and fellowships at UCLA, Caltech and Yeshiva University of New York. The bulk of her estate is bequeathed to scholarships and student loans at the three institutions.

Mrs. Alcott began her career in her teens as an $8-a-week Manhattan secretary at the Wall Street Journal. Because of “anti-feminine prejudice,” she told The Times on her 100th birthday, she cultivated a low voice and signed letters with her initials so that business contacts would assume she was a man.

She later joined a banking house, also as a secretary. But she rose to full partner in the 1920s and became one of the first women with so high a rank on Wall Street.

Even when her salary was limited, Mrs. Alcott began buying stock, and she continued to do so on a regular basis.

A month before the stock market crash on Oct. 29, 1929, the canny Mrs. Alcott sold her entire stock portfolio--an act that protected her hard-earned wealth.

“I honestly don’t remember why, but I sold everything I had in the market,” she said. “Something made me do it.”

Mrs. Alcott attributed her longevity to avoiding salt, sugar and red meat, walking an hour a day and retiring to California in 1940, which ended the colds she regularly suffered in New York. By life-long habit, she went to bed at 8 p.m. and rose at 4 a.m.

“I have always felt there was an advantage in getting up early,” she said at 100. “It makes the day seem longer. And you do more in the morning than you would later in the day.”

Mrs. Alcott outlived two husbands and had no children.

Memorial contributions can be made to UCLA, Caltech, or Yeshiva University of New York.