Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/73



they cannot learn. Everett Colby was headed straight for this fate when a man got hold of him—J. A. Browning, a teacher who teaches. He took a small class of boys who had busy fathers and loving mothers: Harold and Stanley McCormick, Percy and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Everett Colby. Everett Colby was in the worst condition. The boy could only play. “He played hard,” says Mr. Browning, “but it was sport, not work. He couldn’t read till he was fifteen; he couldn’t fix his attention. I got into his mind through his hands. He liked to play with tools. I let him. It was play till once I set him to making a bookcase for his mother. He finished that, and it was good, and it was work.”

Young Colby was prepared for Brown, where he went to college with young John D. He still “played hard.” He was a splendid young male when he entered; he went in for all the sports: tennis, golf, baseball; and, making the team, was captain in his senior year of the best football eleven Brown ever put into the field. But he worked, too, and he was graduated with his class, ’97. In the next year, after the death of his father, he made a tour around the world; then he studied law and played polo; then he married and settled down in Llewellyn Park, Orange,