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I
THE SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
When he was an inmate of the
Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphans'
Home at Knightstown, Indiana
JUST about my earliest recollection is of seeing my mother and father swimming together in Eagle Creek, near Indianapolis, Indiana, where I was born. Mother had beautiful auburn hair, and she would wear it in two long braids which floated upon the water as she swam. Father was one-fourth Cherokee, and love of the out-of-doors was born in him, and in me, too. I never could stand being shut up indoors for very long at a time. Probably that's the reason I've led such a roving life.
Dad, who was a Civil War veteran, died when I was seven, leaving mother, my three brothers, Bert, Roy, and Maurice, and myself. Maurice and I were put in the Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphans' Home at Knightstown, Indiana. I didn't want to go, at first. My two eldest brothers went to work in the saw and furniture factories in Indianapolis, and I wanted to earn my living, too. I did, for a while, selling newspapers at the corner of Washington and Meridian streets, but mother wanted me to have an education, and placed me in the home, which was much like any military academy.
Like any kids, Maurice and I soon adapted ourselves to our s ur r oundings, and were perfectly happy. He left the school two years before I did. I stayed 32
Here Monte Blue wears the elaborate head-dress and robes of his ancestors,
the Cherokee Indians
THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD
When he worked as a stock clerk
for the Baker-Vawter Co., in
Benton Harbor, Michigan
there until I was sixteen, and then worked my way thru high school. I dont believe I had any definite ambitions at the time. For a while I thought I'd like to be a mechanical engineer, and I took a correspondence school course, but that sort of thing doesn't do a growing boy much good. There are so many questions you want to ask, and when your teacher is a thousand miles away or so, it gets rather discouraging writing and waiting for replies. At least I found it so.
When I finished high school I thought for a while of going on to Purdue University. But I was also anxious to get to earning some money, and as I wasn't fitting myself for any certain profession, I gave up the idea of going to college and started to work in earnest.
My father had been a railroad man, so it was natural that I turned to that sort of work, became a fireman on the New York Central R. R., but my career as one was brief, and ended in a thrill. One winter night, near Ludlow Falls, Ohio, the engine I was firing went head-on into another one, in a wreck which would have made a spectacular movie. It took four hours to dig me out of the debris, and an entire year in the hospital to patch me together again. The life of a railroad man has its points, but they aren't all good ones. My
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