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466 S.
Life has been ungenerous and unkind to the one who has not enjoyed the clean forest smell after a summer rain, or felt the soft crunchiness of a needle'Strewn mountain path under his feet, or heard the thunder roll down the mountain chasms, or drank deep from a cold mountain spring. Mountain pleasures are simple pleas' ures."
Astride a horse on the high Arizona trails, with the mountain ranges rising purple and blue against the sky, twenty'year'old Joe Williams found time to reflect and to think about his future. Behind him was his boyhood in Springfield, Missouri, where he had led a busy, happy childhood and attended the public schools. Then a semester at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he had intended to study law; but he hadn't liked it. A year and a half at Drury College in his home town of Springfield, where his studies had turned to economics and psychology, with the conviction growing that he would like to become a banker.
HIS experiences out west brought resolution. Those payrolls! — he handled the money with accuracy and care, and enjoyed it! Management of the company's property! — he thrilled to the responsibility! Where else then, except in banking, could he find a life work that would be a hobby; a hobby and a life work that would be a constant pleasure? He returned home determined not to resume his college studies — but to enter immediately the field of banking.
A natural thing would have been for him to get a job in one of the several banks of which his father
October, mi
was a director — but Joe didn't want it that way. Like his father, he was an independent character.
And perhaps this is as good a time as any to tell about Joe's remarkable family. His father, John W. Williams, was an infant when he was brought to Springfield from Tennessee in 1852, nine years before Abraham Lincoln became President. He grew up to be an easy-going, benign and successful hardware merchant, obsessed with the idea that he should retire at fifty. "No man," he said, "ever amounts to anything after fifty. All he does is ruin the business he built up in his best years." And "retire" at forty-nine the elder Williams did! — to spend the rest of his years looking after his investments in Springfield and managing the five farms he had acquired in that lovely Ozark region. In his lifetime he sired nine children, five boys and four girls. Little Joe was the fifth child, the "middle one."
Joe's mother's people came to Springfield from Tennessee, also. One of her ancestors, John P. Campbell, homesteaded a farm at Springfield in 1830 — the year of the first "Great Debate" in Washington, D. C. — when Senator Hayne of South Carolina was insisting that the U. S. Constitution was a mere compact formed by sovereign states, any of which might withdraw from the compact whenever it saw fit to do so. A state, Hayne maintained, could declare an act of Congress null and void. This was the doctrine of "nullification." Opposing him, Daniel Webster, in one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the English