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4 liked to try new things. There they all are, weaving in and out and here and there through the years before aviation and I got together.

But to begin at the beginning.

Among the best stories my mother told were those of her own girlhood. My sister and I always spoke of that mysterious and far away period as “thousands of years ago when Mother was little”. Looking back on my own infant days I seem to feel a new significance in that childish quotation. So I think I’ll begin this sketchy history of me by using it.

Well, then, thousands of years ago, I was born in Atchison, Kansas. My parents did not live there at the time, but my grandparents did. My grandfather was a judge of the district court, though he had retired from that office and others he held long before he became a relative of mine. My grandmother was a Philadelphian, having come out from that city after the war. Her family were Quakers, and she had lived within sight of old Christ Church in a house which stands today. I think inside she never quite got used to the west, for now and then something came popping out which made me feel Philadelphia must be quite su­perior to Atchison (this point, of course, has never been proved).

She arrived when Kansas was really wild. Great piles of buffalo bones lined the newly built railroad tracks when she came and Indians in blankets were always to be seen in the town. I remember her