I love strong women. I observe them, I admire them, I relish them, I learn from them, and I have done so all my life. I would like to start by telling you about Bobette, who was my main strong woman. How we met is an interesting story in itself. But I will have to go back a long ways to explain how that came about. I'll get to it, but please be patient while I tell you about the background that led to it.

    When I was graduated from a Chicago high school I wanted to attend a Normal College, which was where school teachers were trained in those days. My ambition was to become a high school teacher of history like Mr. Schlichting who taught a course in World History. He was a serious man who assigned the students to copy out pages from the textbook. I'm not sure how much we learned about history from doing that, but it was good practice for penmanship and meant that at the end of the semester we each had a handwritten manuscript of the whole book. The only time I ever saw him smile was when I told him I had learned that the Chinese symbol for war, an inverted V over two lines (  ) stood for two women under one roof; and he said, "Sidney, you are too precocious." I guess I was pretty gullible at the time. I believed it when someone else me told that counting to ten in Chinese was a sing-song "onesy, nopey, henny, penny, dopey, chicka, boo, chicka, body, yunky." I memorized it, and years later a Chinese secretary in my office really laughed when she heard that.
    History interested me and the Schlichting method seemed an easy one to follow. It was certainly better than working in my family's fruit store where I had been helping out since I was nine years old. Also, my father frequently told me, "Don't go into "the garbage business." Those were the days of the Great Depression. The business was so unsuccessful that instead of going to Normal College, I had to go to work and contribute something to the family's income. 
    Although it was hard to find a job, through a friend of a friend I was hired by a company that put together promotional materials. I sat at a large table with seven other more mature workers where our task was to assemble a miniature cardbord telescope. It was easy to do and I rapidly became adept at it. After winding up the second day on this job, Sam, the floor foreman called me out onto the fire-escape to give me some friendly advice. He said "Sidney, you're doing a good job, but you are making too many telescopes at a time." I said, "What do you mean?" "Well, you're going too fast. The other people have been doing this for a long time and can't keep up with you, you see, you're a rate breaker." I felt frightened when he said that. The next day I called the company cashier to say I wasn't coming back and asked her to send me my check for two days work.