Episode Details

What I learned from reading Life of an American Workman by Walter Chrysler.

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[0:56]The 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.

[1:56] We never spent money on things we could get without spending. 

[3:10] This book was written about a year before he had a stroke and about two years before he died. The book is full of memories of parents and friends long dead. 

[3:29] The memories he chose to highlight made me think of this quote on books by Carl Sagan: What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on 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. 

[4:10] And I think that is what this book is. It is Walter Chrysler speaking directly to you and I over 80 years after he died. 

[5:18] On a few occasions his Dad would let him come to work with him [on the Union Pacific Railroad]. This is how Walt remembered that: The part of me that would be most tired would be my face. It was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy.  

[6:35]  He learned from his parents the need to be self sufficient. They built their own house. They raised their own food. They created their own jobs. If they wanted plumbing they made it themselves. 

[7:00] He is very passionate about mechanics and understanding machines. He has to create his own tools because he is too poor to buy them.  

[7:35] I went to work at 6 in the morning and was through at 10:30 at night. 

[9:02] I was a cocky youngster and full of confidence. 

[9:34]  He really valued work and learning and the sense of self confidence you get from doing something well. 

[10:01] A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine. I lacked the money with which to buy them. Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living, those tools I made were placed on display in a glass case on the observatory floor, 71 stories up in the tower of the Chrysler building. That is one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the entire book. Think about this: In one lifetime he goes from being so poor that he has to make his own tools—to having a skyscraper built for the company that he creates and that bears his name.  

[10:42] Jeff Bezos has a quote that says, "We don’t choose our passions, they choose us." 

[11:59] Walt couldn’t find the answers he needed in his small town so he wrote an abundance of letters to Scientific American: Whoever received the questions from subscribers must have thought that Walter P. Chrysler was a pen name for a dozen youths. At least half of whom were crazy. Yet many of my questions were answered. 

[12:13] A great story about Walt’s lifelong association with Mr. Neubert.  

[14:00] How Walt described himself at 22: I was cocky. I thought I was quite the kid. I had a sense of hurry. I had ambition and wanted to get ahead. 

[17:48] It seemed to me I could not make anyone understand. I was ambitious. I dared to tell her [his future wife] that I intended someday to be a master mechanic. I realized I had a lot of learn before I could really hope to have that dream fulfilled. That is why I wanted to go to a bigger place so I could get more experience.