I’m a business history buff but I didn’t know that CIT, the commercial lender that was bailed out by lenders over the weekend, had its origins in St. Louis. A reader named Tom emailed me with that tidbit, and CIT’s website confirms that the company was founded in St. Louis in 1908 by Henry Ittleson. His early clients included a young chemical company known as Monsanto. The website says that CIT “outgrew” its St. Louis headquarters and moved to New York in 1915, but a 1935 Time article adds some color:

Dynamic, cerebral Henry Ittleson, born in Berlin, brought up in Manhattan and Kansas, was a young executive of much promise in Colonel David May’s shoe & clothing store in St. Louis when he started his finance company in 1908. Colonel May and his partners put up the money. By 1915 a large part of Henry Ittleson’s finance business, chiefly in furniture and machines, was coming from the East. Accordingly, one Saturday noon he piled his filing cabinets into an express car, his employes into a Pullman and the following Monday morning opened shop in Manhattan.

Interestingly, the company was founded in the aftermath of a financial crisis, the Panic of 1907.