Chapter 1: Early Years

The population of Reedsburg, Wisconsin, in 1894 was something under two thousand persons. Whatever the exact number, it was increased by one on the early morning of July 17, for that is when and where I was born.

Southern Wisconsin was of course settled much later than was the Eastern seaboard, the first white family coming to the Reedsburg district from Green County, Ohio, in 1845. A Winnebago village was then located at the future site of Reedsburg, and indeed some Indian lodges remained until about 1915. My father was a druggist, and one of my earliest memories is of the blanket-wrapped Indians coming into my father's store to buy some gaudy trinket, or to sell him a ginseng root.

The local population was largely German, many settlers of that background having come to the locality in the 1850s and 1860s, characteristically arriving there, as did my forebears, as the third and often final stage of a journey which had originated in Europe and which had paused first in Pennsylvania and then in Ohio. A good deal of the business in my father's drug store was conducted in German.

It is difficult to recapture the sights, sounds, and smells of a Midwestern rural village of that period. It is still more difficult for the present-day reader, unless really elderly, to imagine the nature of life at that time. The sidewalks were wooden, and there were then in Reedsburg no paved streets. We were untroubled by automobile traffic; over the two years just previous to my birth, J. Frank and Charles Duryea, back east in Springfield, Massachusetts, had been working on the design of the first gasoline-powered vehicle.

Neither town water nor household electricity was available at the time of my birth, although some houses were wired soon thereafter. Twenty telephones for business purposes (all on one line) were installed in 1887, but it was not until I was four years old that a general telephone company was organized for householders' service.

That same year sewer drains were installed. A grade school of two rooms was built the year I was born, and a small community library was established just about the time I learned to read; the "Carnegie" library did not come until much later. There was no house-to-house mail delivery, although the first train had arrived from Chicago as long previously as January 1, 1872. The local farmers concentrated on potatoes, buckwheat, and hops—Pabst Blue Ribbon beer was first brewed at Milwaukee when I was one year old. The social life of the village centered primarily around the churches and the numerous fraternal lodges. The cartoonist Claire Briggs, who was born in Reedsburg, immortalized the local atmosphere, as a small boy knew it, in his well-known series on ""The Ole Swimming Hole."

Indeed the world I was born into seems, from this distance, to have been a very simple and tranquil one. The front page of the weekly Reedsburg Free Press for Thursday, July 19, 1894 (there was no extra on the 17th!), was half-occupied with advertisements (Ladies Knit Vests, 5¢ each, good English currants, 3¢ per pound, Ladies Night Robes, 65¢ to 95¢). The other three columns set forth the deliberations of the Common Council regarding the costs of installing a water works and an electric-light plant, and reported a local burglary (''the thieves escaped, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted"), and a county Republican meeting. There was a small story of the seemingly miraculous recovery of a woman from consumption, her life saved by "Dr. King's New Discovery," but the status of this entry is made somewhat dubious by its final words: "Free trial bottles at I. Weaver's Drug Store." Clearly this was a patent medicine, sold by my father.

It may not be surprising that this rural paper ran no state, national, or international news, but The New York Times, on the front page of July 17, 1894 (the issue was twelve pages long and cost three cents), also carried no headlines. Three of the seven columns have a somewhat current flavor, for they covered the resignation of the city police commissioner. Another full column dealt with the necessity to protect the price of sugar. A column and a half was devoted to an accident in Chicago. Dated from Rondout, New York, was the stirring front-page news that a number of members of the Gould family ''came down the Ulster and Delaware from Roxbury this morning and took a Hudson River train for Tarrytown." There was not a single piece of international news on the entire front page.

It has become trite to speak of the almost dizzying rate at which life has recently been changing. Indeed, it must be soberly true that the Biblical span of three score years and ten has at no other time in history covered such profound changes as those experienced during my lifetime since 1894. I can just picture the bemused incredulity of my Grandmother Weaver, standing by the cookstove that was the sole source of heat for one end of her small house —on which stove, incidentally, was always standing a hospitable pot of coffee. And speaking of sources of heat, I recall the "register" in the floor of my bedroom.

It was connected to no furnace, but was simply a hole through the floor that allowed some heat to leak up into my upstairs room from the room beneath in which was located a stove. Going to bed on a winter night involved a hurried minute of shivering undressing and of contact with the cold bed—followed by the smothering but welcome weight of blankets and ''comforters."

Our meals consisted largely of bread, meat, potatoes, milk, homemade pickles and conserves, pies and cakes. Ice cream was a rarity, since it required bringing home a chunk of ice in a cart, packing the home freezer with a mixture of crushed ice and rock salt, and turning the stiff crank for some twenty minutes—but licking the dasher made all this worthwhile. Our food was entirely seasonal. Salads were items on feminine menus, but were disdained by menfolk. Bread cost five cents a loaf and milk four cents a quart. When I was sent to the butchershop there never was any charge for a soup bone, and liver and sweetbreads were free for the asking.

My father's drug store had, during the summer months, a soda fountain, and not only the ice cream but all the chocolate, vanilla, and fruit syrups were made on the premises. From October until late spring this fountain was covered over with a display counter on which, at Christmastime, was box after box of hideously overdecorated "dresser sets' of combs, brushes, mirrors, nail files, buffers, and the like, all in big cases, with satin-lined compartments. These were—ridiculously, pathetically, but rather touchingly— a standard local way for the farmers to express devotion to their wives at Christmastime.

The facilities for entertainment in those pre-TV, preradio, pre-movie, and indeed pre-phonograph days were simple indeed. In the summer there might be a Chautauqua meeting or a circus, and the annual Sunday-school picnic at nearby Devil's Lake was a highlight of the year. There was an "Opera House"

at which there were occasional "readings" and concerts. In the home there was likely to be one "family" magazine, a tiny library of well-worn books, a stereopticon viewer with slides of the Chicago World's Fair, and just possibly a small and rather primitive "Magic Lantern." One of the simple but attractive pleasures was the observance of May Day. One made fancy little colored paper baskets and hung them on friends' door knobs, especially favorite girl friends. Each basket was filled with violets, cowslips, or—in the case of a special favorite—the fragrant arbutus which was not common in our neighborhood, but which could be sought out.

One of my great-grandparents came from England and one from Holland, but all the rest, as far as I know, came from Strassburg when it was in German territory. My paternal great-grandfather, named Josiah Weber, was born aboard ship on the journey to America in 1791. His father, David Weber, had been a weaver of cloth. The name of his son, my great-grandfather, was automatically changed from Josiah Weber to Jesse Weaver when a lawyer in Wayne County, Ohio, where they had a farm, translated his German birth certificate. These were simple, solid folk, the devotion of my forebears to their Lutheran faith being reflected in the numerous Biblical names such as David, Josiah, Jacob, Moses, Abraham, and—the name of my father —Isaiah. My maternal grandfather, John Stupfell, one of the dearest and finest persons I have ever known, spent his life as a clerk in a country drygoods store. He was a devout and dedicated Christian, teaching Sunday school and being one of the small group of the faithful who always went to Wednesday-night prayer meeting. Both my maternal and my paternal grandparents lived in a small village named Sharon, about fifty miles southeast of Reedsburg.

It is strange that some persons, relatively near and dear, can die, and then rather soon fade out of one's everyday thoughts, whereas others die but never seem to disappear.

My maternal grandfather is definitely in this second category. Surely a week does not pass without my thinking of him with pleasure, deep affection, and often inspiration. He was fond of frequently repeating a whole series of wise or humorous remarks that came to be referred to in the family as "John's Sayings." To this day, if my wife asks me how I like some new dish that I consider only fairly good, the reply is bound to be, '"Well, as Grandpa would say, I wouldn't sit up nights to eat it."

I have the warmest recollections of the lazy vacation days spent at his home. In the front yard was the inevitable hammock in which I read many of the childhood classics; later in my university days I would retreat there for more serious reading—one summer it was the works of two Frenchmen: Le Hasard by the mathematician Emile Borel (1871-1956) and the scientific essays of Henri Poincare (1854-1912).

Across the street was the village blacksmith shop, with the cheery clink of hammer on forge and the acrid smell of the burning hoofs when the hot shoe was fitted. In the rear of the house was Grandpa's lush garden, an outdoor toilet surrounded by hollyhocks, and the redolent barn where the family horse was kept. On a hot summer afternoon one was allowed to take from the pantry shelf a small bottle of black-cherry extract, carefully pour out one spoonful, add sugar and cold water from the well—and there was the pause that refreshes, a la 1900.

I would like to believe that in the fortuitous mixing of the two genes for two generations I received a goodly share from my Grandfather Stupfell. Two things I am pretty sure that I did inherit from him—a gay and unworried inability to spell, and a love for teaching. At the time of their golden-wedding anniversary he wrote out by hand an account of his life. I have just reread it, and have chuckled on almost every page over words such as ''barbacue," "Vaginia," "'rigular," '"'toobs," "schollars.'"" When he was twenty-one years old, the authorities of a nearby district school asked Grandpa if he would teach in their school— and could he teach algebra (which he remarks '"'was a new thing for district schools at that time'). He would, and could, and did; and in his final estimate of the experience, he wrote, in words that warm my heart for him, "besides giving them satisfaction, I had a grand good time."

I am skeptical concerning the significance of the recollections I have of my childhood. Do I remember chiefly the bizarre or the unpleasant? Whole extensive segments of my early experiences have been completely forgotten; this is not a result of my present age, for these gaps in memory have existed for many years. Whereas my wife can recite the songs she learned in kindergarten, practically my sole memory of my grade-school education up to the age of ten consists of the smarting recollection of having been forced to stand in the corner of the room, facing the walls, because (I assume)

I had been very naughty.

My earliest memory is of the darkened hush of our home when scarlet fever caused it to be quarantined. I was thin and sickly as a child, and indeed not vigorous as a boy or a youth.

I caught everything that was going around, including diphtheria. Of almost an equally early vintage is my memory of being taken to the German Lutheran church and observing the pastor at communion service standing before the pulpit, raising the goblet, and proclaiming, "I drink for all of you!" My grandparents and great-grandparents were all of the Lutheran faith, being so devoted that every Sunday found them in church, even in the days when this meant a horse-and-buggy ride of many miles. Early in my life, however, we shifted over to the Presbyterian church—I think this may have been because the Lutheran services were at least partly in German, a language my mother never learned.

My mother was small, frail, and a person so utterly lovely in her sweet and unselfish character that she was adored by all her friends, not to mention her family. The hours of a country drug store were long, and I saw relatively little of my father during Reedsburg days, although I do recall his taking me often, a sleepy and thoroughly bored small boy, to sit through the tedium of the then characteristic Wednesday-evening prayer meeting. These were, to me then and surely to me now in retrospect, queer and pathetically small meetings at which every one sat silent until some person was moved to rise and offer either a prayer or a "'testimonial."" Otherwise one just sat there in solemn and embarrassed silence: at least I was always embarrassed.

Occasionally I would be allowed to go to my father's drug store. Each late spring a traveling vendor set up shop in one of the front-window spaces and manufactured and sold '"'cotton candy" to the great delight of all the youngsters. The lower walls of the store were lined with tiers of small drawers.

I remember the location and contents of only two, one of which contained sparkling strings of rock candy and the other redolent sticks, packed in aromatic bay leaves, of Spanish licorice.

Other forms of advertising not having been yet developed, companies would, from time to time, provide my father with a supply of handbills and free samples. One of my first adventures at earning money involved the house-to-house distribution of these samples at the rate of two cents per ten items. This earning was important to me, for although my parents were both generous and kind, my brother and I never received any allowance until our university days. Furthermore it was not part of the rather strict system of our family to ask for either money or presents. You merely hinted and hoped.

Fourth of July is also associated in my mind with my father's store. That day, in those times, was awaited with almost intolerable longing during the preceding two or three weeks when one saved his pennies, bought fireworks, and each day counted his accumulating hoard. On the day itself one lived a discontinuous sort of life. Up at dawn, there was a noisy period of shooting off firecrackers and bursting torpedoes, this almost never lasting until breakfast.

I can this moment recall the acrid smell of the burnt powder and the musty odor of the punk we used as tinder: we all believed that this punk was made of camel dung.

Following the early morning spree there were hours of hot waiting, of almost intolerable suspense, until darkness finally settled down and the red fire, flower pots, pinwheels, Roman candles, and sky rockets could be fired off. My father's store was directly across Main Street from the one other competing drug store. About nine o'clock on the night of the Fourth, the devotees of each establishment began to shoot the larger Roman candles and rockets, not into the sky, but horizontally across the street at the rival store. Worse than that, eight-, ten-, and twelve-inch cannon crackers were lighted and thrown. We were a quiet little rural community, but we had our moments.

July brings another specially poignant memory, associated with my birthday. I do not recall ever having had a party to which children were invited, but there was always an evening family picnic on that day. My father for several years provided, as the climax to the evening, a tissue-paper balloon. I remember these as large, but I suspect they were actually not more than three or four feet in diameter when inflated. At the bottom was a light wooden ring with wires across it, suspending in the center of the ring a small wad that one soaked with kerosene. Then, with all the family holding out the tissue of the balloon so as to avoid a premature calamity, the kerosene was lighted and the hot rising air filled out the tissue balloon and it was ready to ascend. Released, it slowly and beautifully drifted off into the evening dusk, a bright symbol that a year was floating away. No member of the family ever said, ""This is beautiful or symbolic": but I knew it was. It was my birthday. That lovely spot of light going off for an adventure in the sky was my balloon.

I always watched until it had completely disappeared, and then I knew that a whole long year would have to pass before this would happen again. I was deeply moved by this recurrent ceremony, solemn and at the same time joyous, and I still recall it as one of the lovely—actually one of the few truly lovely—experiences of my childhood.

For me, childhood was not a happy time.

I had few companions, and no really close friend. My brother, the only other child of the family, was five years older than I. That span of years is an unbridgeable gap when one young, and my brother and I, while not at all enemies, simply were not friends in the sense of being playmates. Indeed I did not get to know my brother until late in my university days, and then discovered to my joy that he was a wonderful person. But as a child he was fat, boisterous, and had such a bad temper that I simply avoided him—not always successfully, to be sure, for I still carry high on my forehead a faint scar caused by a cut from a splint wastepaper basket that he kicked at me!

I had one boy companion of my own age, but the truth is that I considered him pretty stupid and uninteresting. He's dead now, and won't mind my saying this, and in retrospect I am sure I was correct. He was forever wanting to play with me, but I preferred to be alone. Two doors from us was a girl of about my age, with whom I played occasionally. I think she was not considered by my family as a wholly suitable companion, but she was sweet and kind to me at a period when this meant a great deal; and across the years, I thank her. Also nearby was the daughter of another family of German origin. I used to go to see her late on Saturday mornings, but primarily, I must confess, because her mother often made cream puffs on that day.

I was shy, introspective, not vigorous, and unskilled in the active games of childhood. I had big ears and a big nose, and fully realized that I was not physically attractive. I was uncomfortable a great deal of the time, in a world within which I really didn't know how to behave.

I was often lonesome, and most of my memories of playing are of playing alone.

I have clear recollections of a number of isolated retreats where I used to go. There was a small elm in front of our house which was a poor climbing tree, but I could manage it; and the fact that it had room for only one person was a real asset. I wanted to get up off the ground where all the confusing adult things were happening, and construct a small protected world of my own where I could be quiet and undisturbed.

There was a dirt bank not far from our house, and I worked alone many secret hours there, making a shallow cave. Best of all was the storeroom of our home. There were open rafters above this room, and I could climb up and have a private place there all by myself. I am aware of the fact that a modern analyst would at once recognize the womblike character of all these restricted places, and whatever the implication, he would doubtless be right.

Even in those days a drug store carried a wide variety of items, and at Christmastime my father's store was filled with toys. For this he made a buying trip to Chicago each fall, and it was a family tradition that on his return he would bring a present to my brother and me. On one occasion it was the first pair of roller skates we had ever seen, and I remember this particularly vividly because my rather tubby brother first tried his skates on our small front porch, fell heavily on his substantial behind, and crashed right through the flooring.

My present from one of these Chicago trips was a one-dollar Ajax electric motor and a dry cell to run it.

I was overjoyed. Within a week I had built from spools and suchlike all the little rotating devices which the tiny torque of the motor could manage. Then I began to penetrate its mysteries. First I took off the little bronze spring brushes to clean them. Then I took off the winding of the field coil and carefully replaced it. Finally, as a great triumph, I took off the more complicated armature windings, put them back on and—miracle—the motor would still run! I decided then and there that I wanted to spend my life building motors. I had no idea what you called persons who did this. I suspect that the word "'science" was exceedingly little used in that village at that time, but some adult, sensing my enthusiasm, remarked that I would probably grow up to be an engineer.

I at once completely adopted that word and idea, and through my grade school and high school years there never was the slightest doubt what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an engineer.

In these days of toy pistols and guns, perhaps we underestimate the importance of toys. Of all the toys I ever had, I remember especially three: this Ajax motor, a gyroscope bought at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition at St. Louis in 1904, and a marvelous little device that drew complicated and beautiful curves, given me by my brother one year for Christmas.

My family, German in its basic traditions, was devoted to music. My father had a really good tenor voice, and loved to sing, in quartets or alone at home with my brother as accompanist. When I was very young—it must have been at least as early as age six—a small violin was purchased for me and I started taking lessons from a formidable female whose martinet ways and the musty smell of whose sealed-up house and stiff Victorian costumes I can still vividly recall. I disliked her and feared her, and when we moved to Madison I abandoned the violin and shifted to the cello.

In university days I dropped that instrument, concluding that it was an unjustified bit of selfishness—I liked doing it, but my playing was not good enough to be generally acceptable. A lifelong decision that indirectly reminds me of this curiosity I have had about the magnitude of the range of "goodness" possible to various objects or procedures. For example there are some things (I would offer cheese, whisky, movies, and peanut butter as excellent instances) of which I consider that all examples are good. Some, to be sure, are better than others, and the best can be superb; but none is unacceptably bad.

On the other hand there are interesting objects or procedures which range over a spectacular spectrum of goodness, ranging all the way from unspeakably bad to almost indescribably good. They maximize, as a mathematician would say, the ratio of the goodness of the best examples to the badness of the worst. In this category I would, for instance, place martinis. I had one once in a hotel in Delhi which was without question the worst drink I have ever tasted. But as made by our gifted next-door neighbor in Connecticut, dry martinis can be as far out in the ultraviolet of excellence as the Delhi one was deep in the infrared. These parenthetic remarks are stimulated by the mention, just above, of violin playing. I think this the ultimate illustration of a procedure with the maximum range from worst to best. I am unable to think of anything more heavenly at its best and more punishing and terrible at its worst.

My father was an ambitious and a restless man, and after years of long hours in his drug store in Reedsburg, he decided to shift to a larger scene. Accordingly in 1904, when I was ten, the family moved to Madison, the capital city of the state of Wisconsin. This move was made simultaneously with a trip to the International Exhibition at St. Louis. Up to that time a summer visit to my grandparents had been the limit of my travel, and the World's Fair of 1904 was an exciting adventure indeed.

Not long after we moved to Wisconsin's capital city my mother, never vigorous, became very ill. She was taken to a hospital in Chicago, I assume with the desperate hope of an operation. From what little I know of the sad business, I conclude that she probably had cancer of the stomach. I recall the tense fear of the moment when my father told me that things were worse—that he and I would have to go to Chicago. We knelt together on the floor to say a prayer, and started sadly off. Within a few days my mother was dead.

She was buried in Sharon, the home of my grandparents, and the circumstances and atmosphere of the funeral are still fresh in my mind, more as a vulgar and inexcusable affair than as a sad affair.

I then held instinctively what I now hold as a deep conviction, that so-called Christian burial is often a savage and cruel procedure. Fortunately, I was allowed to absent myself from the awful ceremony, and for an hour or more sat up in one of the apple trees in the rear of my grandfather's yard, thinking about how lovely and dear my mother had been. There is little of my grade-school and high-school years that is of enough general interest to be worth recording. I continued to be socially inept, having a fierce envy of those who always seemed to know just what to do and what to say. The transition from a relatively small and familiar grade school to a large and strange high school was a difficult one for me. On the day of graduation from eighth grade I went at once to my father's store, found an isolated place at the back, and cried bitterly, both because of what I was facing and because of what I was leaving behind. No later school transition was even approximately as moving to me.

I did, however, have the great good fortune to make two true friends. Two doors from our house was the gay, elegant, and talented Brant family, with four sons. One of these, Selwyn, was my age. He had manners, dash, and grace; he was brilliant and witty. For reasons I did not understand but was thankful for, he accepted me. We played together at all sorts of imaginative games. We solemnly decided that we would collaborate on the world's best book on arms and armor. We worked together on a little neighborhood sheet called

'""Wit and Humor" for which I furnished the drawings. We were close companions all through grade school and high school. There was a lapse in our relationship during college days (when I was a grind and he a swell), and then we drifted apart for many years. But now, after all these years, he is again my great and dear friend.

The other friend was of a different but equally fine sort. Richard N. Hunt was the son of our beloved family minister. Dick was studious, solid, dependable, loyal. No more social than I was, we made all sorts of things in his basement (he had good tools, which I lacked), and went on pre-breakfast birding trips on our bicycles. My friendship with Dick, begun during high school, has ripened and deepened with every year that has passed. He has had a very distinguished career as a mining geologist, and is the closest nonfamily friend I have ever had. Do not get the impression that I was always morose and troubled. I hugely enjoyed then, as I still do, the surge of the seasons—the wonderful first warm days of spring when freshets in the gutters made it possible to race small drifting "'boats," the lazy summer evenings all lit up with fireflies, the crisp cold of winter. I am convinced the planet has warmed up since then, for I remember a solid week in Madison when it never got above minus ten, and walks to school in Great Falls, Montana (where we lived for a brief period while I was in high school), across a stretch of open prairie with the thermometer at forty below.

I loved reading, and ran a regular monthly bill at the public library for keeping books overtime. There is nothing quite like the anguished sweetness, the almost exquisite agony, of nearing the end of a wonderful childhood book. I devoured all the classic fairy stories, preparing the way for my adult love of The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, and of course Alice in Wonderland.

As I have said, I had at least two real friends, but I was never a part of an active social circle. I did not dance or go to parties. In high school I observed from an embarrassed distance the popular ones who always had the quick and easy remark, whose two-inch-high collars met just so in the latest style. As I look back over the years and remember what has happened to many of them I realize how misplaced was my admiration and envy. But I must in all honesty say that I was neither very comfortable nor very happy during those years.

I have no doubt that I was a difficult and irritating child. My relation with my father, which was seldom a very relaxed one, was poisoned by periods in which I would retreat into silence, sulking because I thought I had been misjudged, punishing my father for behavior on his part that I considered ill-advised or unfair. I do not think any of these experiences especially unusual, for I strongly suspect that childhood is often, and perhaps even characteristically, a troubled and unhappy time.

There is moreover no slightest element of self-pity involved in my saying all this, and I should make clear why I am emphasizing the restricted character of my youngest years.

I state all this so that I can the more strongly contrast the rest of the story. Even during many of my college days I was restless, unsatisfied, and often lonely. But just about then the tide turned. I began to be engaged in efforts that were really rewarding. I tried things that I could do well. I began to acquire confidence and to be at ease. I began to be really happy. By the time I was fifty I had actually reached the point of no longer being awed by waiters!

From college days on—for the whole of the half century since then—the curve of life has, for me, gone steadily upward. As I hope will be evident from all I say about the years following college, life has become progressively richer, gayer, and happier with every succeeding year.

I want no one to feel sorry about my childhood. As a preparation, it was well worth going through.

My grade-school teachers in Madison were excellent, and when I entered seventh grade I promptly fell in love with my teacher, Miss Kavanaugh. She was a strict disciplinarian, but when we deserved it she rewarded us with all sorts of special experiences. We learned, and recited in unison with great gusto, "Spartacus to the Gladiators," and whole passages of The Lady of the Lake. Every one in the class respected and liked her, and I adored her. Indeed my reports home were so glowing that my lonesome widowed father decided to visit the seventh grade at Washington School to see how much I had exaggerated. He must have concluded that for once I was right, for midway in my high-school years he married her. By this time my father had sold his store, and was experimenting in buying and selling Western land; and in the fall of 1910, just after the marriage, we moved, for a strange Western interlude lasting only a little more than a year, to Great Falls, Montana. We then returned to Madison.

The Western episode floats in my memory almost as unreal as a dream. There were wonderful fishing days in mountain streams, and equally wonderful fall hunting of prairie chicken in endless fields of wheat stubble. I had a remarkable male Latin teacher who taught us how to scan Vergil so that, reading aloud, we realized that we were not merely learning a foreign language but were learning to know a great poet. I summoned up my courage to take part in a "declamation contest" and won it with a talk (not quite extemporaneous: we were given ten minutes to prepare) on Robert Marion La Follette. Later, at the state contest at Bozeman, I was soundly beaten by a chap, some ten years older, who had had very practical oratorical training as a side-show barker with a circus.

To return to my newly acquired stepmother, Cicely Ann Kavanaugh Weaver was for so much of my life my understanding parent that I almost completely forgot that she was my stepmother. When she wrote her will, late in her life, she had a real row with the lawyer, for the relationship between us had become so close that she refused to refer to me as her stepson. She was a most remarkable and dear person, fierce and irrational in her loyalties, painfully sensitive in her pride and her determination to exclude the world from her private affairs, and with an excellent and restless mind. In many ways she did more for me than my own mother could have done. I loved her dearly, and we were exceedingly devoted to each other.

I achieved with her a relationship that I never approximated in the case of my father. The last ten or fifteen years of his life could hardly have been very rewarding to him. He was restless without a regular occupation, too energetic to loaf, and indeed not well enough off financially to retire so young. He bought still another drug store, but soon sold it. To my deep disappointment and confusion, he became less interested in the church. Throughout my life he was always addressed as '"Father," spelled, I would suppose, with a capital letter. In happy contrast, my children and grandchildren call me everything from "Dad" to "Hi there." The only close tie I had with my father was the outdoors. He loved to hunt and fish, as I did also, and as my physically less active and artistic brother Paul did not; so we had on trout streams, in the autumn woods, and over the fall duck blinds, the happy hours together that I most prize to remember.

My father, although he had the characteristic German love of music and as a young man was first tenor in the principal Reedsburg quartet, was primarily interested in business. From early days he had been reconciled to my becoming an "engineer"; but he was determined that my brother become a banker, which he thought of as the highest rung in the business ladder. My poor brother had to take, in the university, all sorts of courses in economics, money and banking, accounting, and the like. All of these he loathed; his only interest, and clearly his outstanding talent, was in music. Indeed he spent over a year behind a window in a bank before he rebelled (what tense family meals we had during that period!) and went back to the university on his own to study harmony, counterpoint, piano, organ. After a few years of preliminary struggle he became head of the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then, for some ten years before his death in 1946 at the age of only fifty-seven, head of the School of Music at Cornell. He was a superb pianist and organist, and a successful trainer and leader of choral groups. Having all through childhood and boyhood been completely blocked off from him because he was my older brother, I became acquainted with him late in university days; and from then on we were close and devoted friends.

Although I had good teachers in Madison Central High School, none really compared with my Vergil teacher in Great Falls, or with one or two I was to have in the university. I did, however, have a specially good time in physics. The young teacher (later to become City Superintendent of Schools) let me help him in the laboratory and with setting up his lecture experiments. At that time I started the career—not yet terminated—of making radio sets. The typical Marconi first one—I suppose about 1909—was a coherer set, with which I could hear a signal from the two-inch spark coil that the physics teacher operated in the high-school physics laboratory, located in the same square block our house was in. I gradually advanced to a molybdenum or silicon crystal set (the hours of exploring its surface with the "cat whisker" to find the most sensitive spot!), and then as a great advance, a set with an electrolytic detector—a silver-and-platinum Wolliston wire just touching the surface of a drop of acid resting in a little carbon cup. This was eventually replaced by a vacuum tube detector run on a storage battery. Finally, as almost a miracle, came the first "loud-speaker," and over the years, as my small resources increased, I built larger and larger sets. By the time our son was born, in 1923, I had a multiple-tube superheterodyne with which, when I got up at 2 a.m. to warm his milk, I could sometimes—just barely—hear the West Coast stations. To finish off this topic, the last of this long series, an eight-channel sixteen-transistor all-wave set built only last year, from which, the first time it was ever turned on (in our present hilltop home in Connecticut), there emerged strange sounds that proved to come from a station in Algiers. From the spark coil across the block, through the Morse code from the Great Lakes steamers, to the world-wide short-wave signals on a portable solid-state multiple-channel set!

My minor adventures with physics illustrate the fact that high-school days were by no means uniformly dark ones. We had an attractive young teacher of English and speech who organized and directed student plays. My senior year the school put on The Merchant of Venice, and I played Bassanio—atrociously, I am sure, but with great satisfaction to me. The performance as a whole was good enough so that several years later the cast was reassembled for repeat performances that even involved a trip to two small neighboring towns. That was fun indeed.

As high school was drawing to a close the question of my university course became a pressing one.

I would of course register as an engineer, but by that time I had learned that there were varieties of engineering. My father took me to see a local civil engineer (a church friend) for advice. He asked, "Do you want to spend your life working for some big company, or would you like to look forward eventually to being your own boss?" The answer to that was obvious, so he said, '""Then you should train to be a civil engineer." That settled that.