This is the second portion of the letter written by grandpa Ced while he was in Alaska with Dan and Dick.
For government purposes I was compiling the other day a list of the various jobs in which I have worked, and following a conversation I had one evening with Dick, in which I related the episode of being offered a job as a private Secretary of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., in which narrative he seemed to be interested, it occurred to me it might be one means of completing this page by recording this succession of jobs for your perusal.
I don’t recall what year I first started into work as an office boy for the Bankers Life Insurance Company on my first job at four dollars a week but I do know that in May 1903 I was working there at 31 Nassau St., New York City. Here with the assistance of the boss’s stenographer I started to learn shorthand. As I look back on it now it was a mistake not to go to a good school where they knew how to teach because eventually I had to do just that and had to unlearn what I had learned wrong. At the end of May 1903 I took a job across the street with a much larger company, the Mutual Life Insurance Company. The next year I took the job as stenographer in the purchasing Department of the American Smelting and Refining Company, controlled by the seven Guggenheim brothers, one of whom died the other day and left his fortune to four Follies beauties. It is rather noteworthy that during this time I placed many orders for machinery and mining equipment for the Kennecott Mines and the Copper River and Northwestern Railway and other Alaskan properties. On October 30 I left Smelting to take a job with the estate of C. P. Huntington. It was while there I bid on a set of Sheraton furniture for my boss in competition with Mrs. Vanderbilt. I was fired from there with a month’s salary in advance and a week later landed a job with St. Nicholas magazine. During the six years I was with the Century Company, I was married and two little boys arrived to make our hearts glad and worry their mother by riding kiddie cars down Darling Avenue hill. On February 19, 1917, I left to take a better job with the Celluloid Company, and Ced and Elizabeth put in an appearance. This was during the great world war. I was exempted from the draft because of my family but I did join a home defense league and drilled with a club to protect the building from possible rioters. My boss left Celluloid Company and went to a bigger job with the National Aniline and Chemical Company, and persuaded me to come with him. In 1920 Dick was born and we moved to Trumbull, soon after which I left National and in the fall of 1923 joined the Bridgeport Brass Company. In March 1928 I left to start my own company, from which time to the present you know what happened without my relating it here.
The last part of this letter will appear tomorrow.
I’ll finish out the week with another two-part letter from Grandpa to his Alaskan sons
Judy Guion
"Greatest Generation" Life Lessons 