#130 Walter Chrysler

**David Senra** (0:00)
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 afresh that they were right, those neighbors who would cast a nod 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.
What awakened 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 barefoot 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 the soup meat. Until I was six or seven, 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, hard-working 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 two 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 two years before he died.
And the book is full of memories of parents and family members long dead. And it's those memories along with other things he chose to highlight and remember towards the end of his life that made me think of this quote by Carl Sagan that I always think about. And Carl said, What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on it which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person. Maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other. Citizens of distant epochs, books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. And I think that's what this book is. It's Walter Chrysler speaking directly to you and I over 80 years after he died. And he's telling us the most important parts of his life as he remembers them. So let's not waste any more time. Let's jump into it. We're going to go right back to his early life and his great admiration for his father, who was an engineer on the railroad and somebody that heavily influenced the path that Walter chose for himself. So he says, Henry Chrysler was known from end to end of the Union Pacific. That's the railroad he worked on. Certainly he was the best locomotive engineer of the division. Obviously he talks about, I used to walk, as I was walking to school, he'd be walking to work in the morning. And so he would go into, his father would go to work at 730 in the morning. He says, I used to watch him then and still be thinking of him when I got to school at 8 o'clock. Often when he left the house, I walked beside him, lugging his dinner pail. What he carried rested on his hip, a great big six shooter. He was no swashbuckler, just a railroad man who had been a soldier. So when his father was a young boy, he served as a drummer boy in the Civil War. On a few occasions, his dad would actually let him come to work with him and watch his father work and he'd spend the whole day there. And this is how Walter remembered that. He says, the part of me most tired would be my face. And it was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy. This is Walt telling us a little bit more about the time and the place that he grew up in. It was a tough place to grow up in and you had to be tough to survive. So he says, despite the taming influences of chores and money making, I confess I raised my small share of hell. Maybe there is as much fighting among boys today. I can only say that I do not think so. In the school yard, we had four or five fist fights in the fifteen minutes of recess. A kid who had a yellow streak would lead a dog's life. If you could take your beatings fighting back with all you had, you did not have to take so many beatings. We really had a rough, a tough environment.