I purchased 100 shares of AT&T in 1962.[...]
As of Friday, 3/3/2006 the value of the shares (of the remaining
> companies, ACR, T, BLS, CMCSA, LU. Q, VZ & VOD) was $118,188.12.
You forgot NCR and AV, by the way.
If you bought your shares on January 2, 1962, you paid about $13,300 for them. In 2006 dollars, that corresponds to about $87,300 -- a decent 35% return for you, even after the ravages of inflation, but only about 1.27% on an annualized basis. (In the more conventional way of presenting return on investment, which does not consider inflation, that's a better-than-respectable 9.5%.)
Today, very few people reinvest dividends in stocks they hold directly (although they very frequently reinvest mutual-fund distributions), although most of Mother's dwindling offspring still offer such plans. With a stock like AT&T which was a strong dividend-paying stock for many years, it was obiously a big win for investors like Ernie.
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every snipped-for-privacy@csail.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own Opinions not those | search for greater freedom. of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)