I started college at the University of Kansas, but by that time my father had died and my mother had remarried. My father was in the shoe business and he was killed in an auto accident. He had gone to Saint Louis for a purchasing meeting one winter, and on the way back his car skidded and ran into a bus. He was killed instantly.

So at that time I had neither my mother nor my father. I wasn’t overly fond of my new stepfather. My father had left me insurance that amounted to about $100.00 a month, and there was enough for about five years of living expenses. That was a lot of money in those days.

So I finished my freshman year at Kansas and went out to Colorado where I got a job at a summer resort. At that resort I had about 30 different jobs ranging from taking care of the horses to waiting on tables to putting gravel on the roads to meeting the train.


I Spend Summer Working as a Ranch Hand

On weekends we were short on horses, so I would go down to the valley. We were in a place called Monarch Lake, Colorado, which was at the end of the south branch of the Colorado River. Sometime around world war two a dam was built there the so the place is probably underwater now. I’ve never had a chance to go back and check it but it is on my list of things to do if I ever get around to it.

The ranch was about three miles down the valley. It was owned by a Mr. Knight from St. Louis, Who was also one of the sponsors of the Lindbergh flight. He had a lot of money but he was never there. He had a manager who lived on the property with his wife and kids. I liked the little kids.

Mr. Knight had several thousand acres of grassland with lots of cattle and some forces. In the summertime they would graze on the range high in the mountains. Every spring the cattle were sent high into the mountains where there were no fences. In the fall, when it started to snow, they would drift down again.

We would leave at dawn on a horse and collect any cattle we saw. We brought them down to a central point and sorted out which cows belonged to which branch.

That’s where I learned that cowboys were pretty bright. To me the cattle all looked alike; they all had read bodies and white faces. But the cowboys could tell the calves that were babies when they went up the mountain in the spring. When they came down in the fall, they were quite a bit bigger. They could also generally tell which calf belonged to which cow. At roundup time I never saw a dispute.

The roundup went on through September and October. By November the snows were getting heavy and there were fewer and fewer cattle.

Then the work day and was to get the cattle back to your own ranch and brand the ones that were yours, cut the horns off, and castrate any of them you wanted to be steers.

Of course, they found the cattle through the winter and by that time it was getting mighty cold.
The summer resort closed after Labor Day. I didn’t get paid for that but I got room and board and experience.

I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Washington DC who wanted me to come and live with them. That December I move from Colorado back to Washington and started back into college.

In Washington I had a choice of George Washington, or Georgetown, or Maryland University. I picked Maryland University and finished college there. But I had missed a semester because I was working in Colorado. So between my junior and senior years I went with two fellows and the mother of one of them to summer school at the University of Colorado. In those days that was considered a country club summer school.

But Mrs. Johnson Came from Denver and Mr. Johnson was a lobbyist for Packard Motor Company in Washington DC, so of course, they had a Packard.

In those days you could get an insurance policy that would take care of all of the maintenance. So I had enough money to finish college and Maryland and I graduated with my class in 1937.

Times were bad but I had a good record at Maryland. I was in the honorary accounting society and I started an effort to invite companies to the University of Maryland and recruit. This wasn’t done in these days.

In the spring of my senior year I went on a trip to Boston to apply to Harvard business school, which I did. I had a friend there. I got back on Sunday night and I was very tired and very hung over on a Sunday night.

Despite Being Hung Over During the Interview,
I Clinch a Job with AT&T

The next morning at 10:00 AM I was the only one asleep in the fraternity house. The house mother answered it and came up and told me that the head of the business department for the telephone company were there and they wanted to interview me!

So I went up and spoke with the two gentlemen and they offered me a job with the phone company in Washington DC. In the end I decided to take that job rather than go to Harvard business school. I blame that decision on being hung over. If I hadn’t been hung over I would have been out playing tennis and they would have never found me for the interview.