Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/17



HE autobiography of Governor Pennypacker was written in the last years of his life, during what that incessant worker called his summer vacations. In 1912 he became a member of the Pennsylvania Railroad Commission by appointment of Governor Tener, and in 1915 chairman of the Pennsylvania Public Service Commission. He requested Governor Brumbaugh, in 1915, not to reappoint him to the chairmanship of that body, but remained a member of it until his death on September 2, 1916.

Public duties and other activities and responsibilities necessarily confined the writing of the autobiography to brief periods in the summers of some four or five years. Late in the summer of 1915 his right arm was broken and, while still carried in a shng, was again injured in a railroad train. He was never able to use the arm during the year of life that remained, but immediately after the injury, at the age of seventy-two years, with the courage and resolution which always characterized him, he set out to write with his left hand. The concluding sentence of his account in Chapter XIII of his visit to the battlefields of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville was the last portion of the autobiography written with the right hand. The remainder of Chapter XIII, the pages of comment and review in Chapter XIV, the sketches of Walt Whitman and Elihu Root in Chapter XV and the introductory paragraph of Chapter XVI were written with the left hand.

Governor Pennypacker never had opportunity to revise the manuscript. He had intended to add two chapters of a philosophical nature giving the outcome of his study, experience and reflection, one chapter about the law, the other on Rh