| My father was, I am sure, intended by
nature to be a cheerful kindly man. Until be was thirty-four years old he worked
as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town
of Bidwell, Ohio. He had a horse of his own, and on Saturday evenings drove into
town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmhands. In town he
drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head's saloon—crowded on
Saturday evening with visiting farmhands. Songs were sung and glasses thumped on
the bar. At ten o'clock father drove home along a lonely country road, made his
horse comfortable for the night, and himself went to bed, quite happy in his
position in life. He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the
world. It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother, then a country school teacher, and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened to the two people. They became ambitious. The American idea of getting up in the world took possession of them. It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a school teacher, she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of how Garfield, Lincoln, and other Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness, and as I lay beside her—in the days of her lying-in—she may have dreamed that I would someday rule men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as farmhand, sell his horse, and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray eyes. For herself she wanted nothing. For father and me she was incurably ambitious. |