BY WARREN BOROSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

The obituaries don’t mention how smart Muriel Siebert was. She could look at a page of numbers…and immediately spot something that was wrong.

Or how charming. I gave her a CD of some of my favorite music, and she glowed with pleasure when she recognized songs by Jerome Kern.

Or how ingenious. She went out to lunch with some jerk, who kept making anti-Semitic remarks.

Back in her office, she sent him a poem she had just written:

Roses are reddish

Violets are blueish

You may not know it

But I’m Jewish.

Or how sympathatic to society’s victims.

As New York’s Banking Commissioner, she learned about:

* a 17-year-old student forced to declare bankruptcy because of overwhelming credit-card debt.

* A young woman weeping because she had only 50 cents on her, not enough to get home from work. She didn't know how to cash her first salary check, which she had been holding for 10 days.

* And then there was the young man enraged because some crook--"FICA"--was stealing money from his salary check. (FICA, of course, is the Social Security system.)

So she did something about it.

A financial curriculum she launched, via the Muriel F. Siebert Foundation, is now being offered in more than 100 New York high schools, as well as in New Jersey. To graduate, high school students will have to take a half-year of economic and financial classes. Some 500 New Jersey teachers have been trained to lead the classes. Other school systems around the country are also studying the program.

Mickie, as everyone calls her, received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Jersey Coalition for Financial Education.

***

I once asked her why she had run for office as a Republican. (She lost to Daniel Moynihan.) She looked pained and didn’t answer. But that wss the era when the Republican Party boasted such people as Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, and Nelson Rockefeller, and among its supporters was Jackie Robinson.

She came to New Jersey to speak before a forum put on by Rutgers Cooperative Extension and the newspaper I then worked for, so I became acquainted with her. I kept challenging her to a game of tennis—she was an avid player—but she always turned me down. She must have heard what a good player I was.

***

The following appeared in Newjerseynewsroom.com in December of 2009:

The daughter of a dentist, Siebert was born in 1932 in Cleveland and began attending Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve), but had to drop out in1949 because her father became ill and the family finances were shaky. (She still doesn't have a college degree, but she has 18 honorary doctorates.)

In 1967, to start her own brokerage firm, she asked ten different men to sponsor her. Nine turned her down. But she persevered, and today remains the only woman to head a firm on the New York Stock Exchange. Her firm was also the first discount broker. And she was the first woman appointed superintendent of banks in New York. And she belongs to virtually every gilt-edged organization in the New York area.

***

Her office is in the so-called Lipstick building on 54th Street and the East Side. When she rented the place, she was told: no pets. Not even a goldfish.

Now, Siebert happened to be very much attached to a pet Chihuahua she owned.

And when it came to the closing, she refused to sign the lease. "No leash, no lease," she said memorably. She got her way.

She carried the dog, Monster, in and out of the building. And it was confined to her office--it didn't wander at large.

After a year, the building's manager came to her and asked how she liked her offices. Did she want more room? She was quite satisfied, she said. She herself asked: Had anyone complained about Monster? Nope.

Same thing happened the second year. Any complaints about the dog? Nope.

But during the third year, there was something new. The manager said that other tenants now wanted to bring pets to their offices....

Alas, Monster became seriously ill--she was 17--and Siebert had to put her to sleep. Siebert went two months without a pet. "I was heart-broken," she says. So she sent out a distress call to pet stores and breeders around the country. The building manager might not permit a new dog. So, did anyone have a dog that looked like Monster? She found a lookalike in Florida. Monster 2. And she didn't tell the manager that her dog was now an impostor.

Anyway, guess who was renting the two floors above Siebert's floor. None other than the master swindler himself, the unspeakable Bernie Madoff. And when his fraud came to light, an angry crowd gathered outside the building. The building itself was filled with roving FBI agents and SEC agents. An atmosphere of fear permeated the offices.

To ensure Siebert's safety, the manager made sure that she was accompanied whenever she left her office. And he saw to it that a cab picked her up in the morning and took her home at night.

After several weeks had gone by, the manager came to visit Siebert in order to convey his abject apologies for everything she had been forced to endure--the FBI agents, the SEC agents, the tightened security.

Siebert just smiled. And she finally broke the news.

"Meet Monster 2."