An Over-Zealous Boy

During the first few years of my life we lived in various places which time my father was a dispatcher for the Southern Pacific Railroad, including Hawthorne and Verdi, Nevada, where the sand storms covered the windows with dust, and the Indians would rub the dust off and peek in and frighten my mother to death.

Later we were transferred to Palo Alto and then San Jose. Little did I know then, when the SP depot was little better than a box car, that in some future time I would return there to go to school (Stanford University). It was in this station that they had an over-zealous boy working in the office, always pestering the agents for something to do.

To keep him 'out of their hair' one day they sent him all over town looking for a left-handed monkey wrench, and the next day they gave him a purple typewriter ribbon, which they said was 'dirty' and had to be washed. Needless to say, the sink and the boy were a purple mess, and that was the end of his being over-ambitious...