Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

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A Union Pacific shop apprentice! You can bet that I was proud. Just as every locomotive on the road flaunted a pair of antlers on her boiler shield beneath her headlight, so I should have had a badge to show that I was a cadet of that vast loom for weaving the Western half of the continent into the nation. Not merely the U. P. but railroading, the entire art as we then knew it, held my imagination in focus.

My opinion of myself had expanded tenfold when I became an apprentice. Everybody in Ellis knew that any apprentice had been required to pass an examination—a stiff one. Some boys failed to make the grade, but I had done so readily, because algebra was one of my good subjects. I had used algebra when I worked in the grocery store, to help George Henderson figure out his costs. I had used it, too, when we were building a house, but I had never used it to better effect on my life than when I worked out some of the examination problems that had to do with locomotive wheels and driving rods.