A Wall Street revelation

Jack Hyland grew up with a rich spiritual legacy, but he devoted his professional life to earning big bucks.

Jack Hyland grew up with a rich spiritual legacy, but he devoted his professional life to earning big bucks. “I was a crass materialist,” allows Hyland, an investment banker with McFarland, Dewey & Co. who also spent two decades doing deals at Morgan Stanley. Eight years ago, however, Hyland felt a tug from his past and began writing a biography of his grandfather, Bill Stidger, a Methodist preacher who won souls using modern public relations and marketing techniques. With an illuminated, revolving cross on the roof of his San Francisco church and a national radio show called Getting the Most Out of Life, Stidger, who died in 1949, was a forerunner -- in style, if not theology -- of TV evangelists like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell. Hyland’s book, Evangelism’s First Modern Media Star: The Life of Reverend Bill Stidger, was published last month by Cooper Square Press. Though Stidger sounds like an investment banker’s kind of preacher, Hyland concedes that many of his Wall Street friends don’t completely understand why he devoted so much time to chronicling the life of a clergyman: “Their eyes sort of glaze over.” Perhaps they’ll enjoy his next effort: a mystery novel plotted around high finance and the inner workings of the Vatican.

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