#130 Walter Chrysler

What I learned from reading Life of an American Workman by Walter Chrysler. ---- [0:56]The kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in the winter. Often I had to scamper barefoot across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. [1:56] We never spent money on things we could get without spending.  [3:10] This book was written about a year before he had a stroke and about two years before he died. The book is full of memories of parents and friends long dead.  [3:29] The memories he chose to highlight made me think of this quote on books by Carl Sagan: What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.  [4:10] And I think that is what this book is. It is Walter Chrysler speaking directly to you and I over 80 years after he died.  [5:18] On a few occasions his Dad would let him come to work with him [on the Union Pacific Railroad]. This is how Walt remembered that: The part of me that would be most tired would be my face. It was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy.   [6:35]  He learned from his parents the need to be self sufficient. They built their own house. They raised their own food. They created their own jobs. If they wanted plumbing they made it themselves.  [7:00] He is very passionate about mechanics and understanding machines. He has to create his own tools because he is too poor to buy them.   [7:35] I went to work at 6 in the morning and was through at 10:30 at night.  [9:02] I was a cocky youngste