Joseph Norman Dolley

[2] The "Topeka Daily Capital" of Jan. 3, 1909, reported: "Joe Dolley hadn't been in Kansas long enough to get the seaweed out of his hair before he was in politics….

In 1904 he was elected to the state senate from the twenty-first district, composed of the counties of Wabaunsee, Riley and Geary.

The Saturday Evening Post of December 2, 1911 (Volume 184, Number 23) quoted him: "Why, I had been in the banking business here in Kansas a good many years before I became bank commissioner," he explained when I asked him about the genesis of the Blue Sky Law.

"Every now and then I would hear of one of these swindles – that somebody had lost his money through buying stock in a fake mine, or in a Central America plantation that was nine parts imagination, or in some wonderful investment company that was going to pay forty per cent dividends.

After I was appointed bank commissioner I heard more reports and complaints of fake stock swindles than ever.

If you go back fifteen years you will see that all the state banks in Kansas then held less than fourteen million dollars of the people's deposits.

Dolley had complained about the "enormous amount of money the Kansas people are being swindled out of by these fakers and 'blue-sky' merchants.'

Dolley died, according to an obituary in the New York Times of that date, from injuries sustained when he was hit by a car while crossing the street.

[9] Lawrence R. Gelber, the "GelberLaw Glossary", containing detailed citations to historical origins (to 1890s) of securities term "blue sky", located at http://www.GelberLaw.net