EASY STREET, I am convinced, is somewhere out there, just waiting to be found. My problem is that my route to it seems to have been plotted on a badly out-of-date Esso roadmap and is full of detours - financial potholes that have, on occasion, left me a fiscal wreck.

The biggest and certainly most enduring of these potholes is the stock market, an institution that in concepts arcane ranks right up there with the Big Bang theory of the universe, the thermodynamics of nuclear fusion and why cats always seem to land on four feet. Here even angels fear to tread, lest they step into something icky.

Every fourth day or so, I read that some financial wizard or other has been caught at it and landed in the slammer for what's called "insider trading" and making millions in the process. I've never made so much as $1.86 out of "insider trading," probably because I just couldn't get a handle on how it was all supposed to work.

(I am, by the by, not totally stupid. I can handle the Lorenz-FitzGerald Equation of pre-Einstein physics and I'm a dab hand at digital TV electronics, even if my wife says I am bloody useless at getting the toilet paper roll the right way round on the wall dispenser. So there.)

At any rate, I had a shot at this "insider trading" thing once, although I didn't know it at the time. It was during my early days as a reporter covering the missile and space doings at Cape Canaveral, in the late 1950s, and it dawned on me - one of 273 false dawns in my life, in fact - that there was money to be made in this rocket racket.

Rocketry, in those days, was a rather esoteric business - so much so, I reckoned, that not a lot of folk had cottoned onto the possibilities. Someone had to build these things, I was on the inside of the business, so to speak, so it should be a simple process of finding out which company was building what bit and piece of all these missiles, and buy into what should have been a dead-cert market.

So armed with 500 bucks I had squirreled away in anticipation of a long-overdue divorce, and comforted by a paperback book on "How to Buy and Sell Stocks" - or at least by the three chapters I had managed to read - I set about charting my course to Easy Street. (In later years, the words "fool" and "his money" and "soon parted" would spring all too readily to mind to describe this venture, but whatever...).

With the market pages of the Orlando Sentinel-Star spread in front of me, I went searching for a company worthy of my financial acumen. General Dynamics (which built Atlas ICBMs) and Martin Company (Titans) and IBM (guidance systems and Lord knows what else) were all too pricey - the best I could get for my $500 was maybe five shares or so.

But I hit upon something called Transitron Electronics, which made transistors for missiles. Thanks to microchips, transistors have long since gone the way of the buggy whip, hand-crank telephones and the dashboard plastic Jesus, but in those days they were electronic marvels - so I promptly bought 100 shares, at 5 bucks a throw, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sure enough, the share price went up. By this time, I had gotten to Chapter 5 in the paperback on "How to Sell Short," so for the next few weeks I was wheeling and dealing with good old Transitron, buying long and selling short, and suddenly I was $3,000 ahead of the game. Easy Street loomed in my fevered vision.

And as mirages are wont to do, it vanished. One day I perused the NYSE listings and found - nothing. Well, no Transitron, anyway.

A few days later, I learned why. One of the news magazines - it may have been Time - had a little blurb in its Science section to the effect that "the failure of the last five Atlas ICBM test flights down the Atlantic Missile Range has been traced to a tiny transistor made by..."

Transitron fell to about 75 cents a share. It eventually disappeared from the Big Board altogether and I began divorced life sharing a can of pet food with my Siamese cat Timmy until the next paycheck arrived.

Lesson learned? Don't be silly. A few years later, I was sitting in the Saigon office of the UPI news agency where I worked, when I picked up a three-week-old copy of the International Herald Tribune, turned idly to the financial page and - lo and behold - there, in the stock listings, was Transitron, now selling at $20.

So I promptly bought 100 shares. That was $2,000 which, sometime during the ensuing 18 months or so, followed my first wad into that financial limbo that is the destination of most "get rich quick" schemes. As I lay in a hospital bed recovering from some injuries, I suddenly suffered a fit of masochism and turned to the financial pages of the nearest newspaper - to find Transitron had vanished once again, this time never to return.

So much for "insider trading," if that is indeed what this was. But, alas, it was not quite the end to my own adventures in financial fairyland and the investment philosophy that I had perfected, probably best described as "buy high, sell low."

Early in my life in London, the Rolls-Royce company was in a spot of financial bother and its shares were at low ebb. Figuring this was an ideal time to get into a stock that was bound to recover, I wandered into the Bank of Scotland and instructed the manager there, Mr. Ogilvy, to buy 500 shares of RR for me, at something like $240 total.

"Mr. Webb," he pleaded, "I urge you not to do this." I, of course, did, and got to the UPI office a bit later, just in time to help write the story about how Rolls-Royce, that venerable institution of the British Empire, had just minutes before gone bankrupt.

Mr. Ogilvy, of course, had some "insider information," and he was trying his best to warn me without violating this country's financial laws. I may never locate Easy Street, but I'm quite certain I could find my way unerringly to Skid Row.

Thought for the Week: Life was all so different before everything changed.

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