Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/426

 JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 403 the wisdom of seizing opportunity with both hands the mo- ment it appears and holding fast with a bnlldog grip. Bom in Eichford, Tioga county, New York, July 8, 1839, the life which opened before him bore nothing of promise above that of his playmates. His parents were in quite moderate cir- cumstances. In several generations his ancestry had evinced no marked tendency toward fortune-building, and whatever of royal blood flowed in his veins was, for the time being, for- gotten. His father, William Avery Rockefeller, was a country trader who displayed an exceptionally keen ability in his trafficking. His mother, Eliza Davison Rockefeller, was a woman of devout piety and a strict disciplinarian. From the one he inherited his remarkable business acumen; from the other, his unfaltering aUegiance to the church. His youth appears to have been uneventful up to his six- teenth year. His parents had removed to Strongsville, a little hamlet a few miles south of Cleveland, Ohio, when young Rockefeller was eleven years of age. There he resumed his intermittent schooling, most of his instruction having been at the hands of his mother, and continued his educational en- deavors at Parma, a neighboring village to which they later removed, until he had almost completed the then limited high school course. Abandoning this he went to Cleveland and en- tered a commercial college but attended it only a few months. Just why he suddenly felt it imperative to obtain employ- ment at this early age does not appear. In his Random Reminiscences he does not explain. At all events he left the college and tramped about the dty for days seeking a place to work and at last found employment with Hewitt & Tuttle, produce commission merchants. This was on Septem- ber 26, 1855, and Mr. Rockefeller has made the date an rasti- tution in his life, celebrating it annually. Strange as it may seem in the light of his later career, young Rockefeller ac- cepted this place without any agreement or even discussion relative to remuneration. For the first three months he was paid a lump sum of $50. The next year he drew $25 a month. The next year the bookkeeper, who had been getting $2,000 a