Transcript
Introduction
By the time, I became conscious of my dependence on her, my mother's large dark eyes were set in a big powerful woman of the frontier. I was the third of four children, she bore in Kansas railroad towns in the 1870s, before the prairies had been tamed. She ate buffalo meat to nourish her sons. Sometimes now, I see her eyes looking at me miraculously, out of the face of one of my grandchildren. Sometimes in a mirror, I catch a fleeting trace of her in my own eyes. At such times, I hope a fresh that they were right, those neighbors who would cast a node at me and say, Walt takes after his Ma. Work? Of course. A boy had to work in a household where my mother was the ruler. She worked all the time herself and had prodigious energy. Would awaken me every day was the clanging of iron lids on her cookstove before the sun was up.
For years, kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in the winter. Often, I had to scamper bare foot across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. I shared a bed with my big brother Ed. Before breakfast, Ed had cows to milk and I had other work to do. Sometimes, I was sent early to get to the soup meat. Until I was 6 or 7, the few hundred people who lived in Ellis almost never got beef. We all ate buffalo meat. The rump was what my mother wanted. She would put a great hunk of this meat into a big black pot in which she made her soup. I have never tasted any other soup quite so good. A certain soft scraping sound that I hear faintly sometimes in a barber shop is like an echo of a harsh and loud scrape that I used to hear in our kitchen when I was a boy. Our kitchen was the only barber shop, my father knew. My mother was the one, who always cut his hair and shaved him. We never spent money for anything that we could get without spending.
You can bet my father's skin was tough. It had to be to withstand that Kansas sun and wind and blizzard. But if his skin was like bristly leather, his heart was gentle. We two boys, his sons were a pair of fighting, chore-dodging cubs, unruly and frequently in need of taming, yet he never laid a hand on us in anger. He would reason with us and get obedience. But his mighty arms and calloused hands were never used against us. In many of the visions of him that recur to me, there is a paintbrush in his hand or a hammer or a saw. Always, he was trying to make life better for his family. My father and mother were a great pair of people, hardworking partners, devoted to the job of bringing up a family.
That was an excerpt from the autobiography of Walter Chrysler, the book is called Life of an American Workman. This is the book that I've been waiting for, for over 2 months, as part of this ongoing series on the early automobile industry pioneers. Those words were written about a year before he had a stroke and about 2 years before he died. And the book is full of memories of parents and family members long dead.