Potqtoes qnd Men

The great electrical engineer, Steinmetz, was asked how a young man might best achieve success, and he said: "Don't try to see how fast you can make your machine run, but try rather to see how perfectly and smoothly you can make it operate, and then the speed will take care of its.elf.,,

I was just a kid when I heard a school teacher tell a class a story that impressed me so much that I told and retold it for years. It occurs to me that it might find a lot of interested readers today. He said:

"You take a bushel basket and fill it nearly full of potatoes just as they come from the hill, big, little, great, and small. You shake that basket, and do you know what happens? The big potatoes shake to the top, the smallest potatoes shake to the bottom, and the others take rank close to top and bottom just according to their size. Mix them up again any way you want to, but every time you shake the bushel the same thing happens. Exactly. The big potatoes come to the top, the little ones go to the bottom, and the rest stop just according to their size.

"And men are the same way. You shake the bushel of humanity and the big men come to the top, the smallest men go to the bottom, and the others just take their places in between. Rearranging them won't change the thing in the least. Whenever you shake the bushel of humanity, that's what happens. Now and then some little potato will complain and say-'I never had a chance. I,m always down where I cannot show my ability. put me on top with those big potatoes and I'll show you what kind of a potato f am.'

So you reach to the bottom and pull him up and put him on top of all the potatoes in the bushel. Then shake it, and watch him go down until he hits bottom, just where he was before. fs there a moral to this story? Certainly. The moral is that a man or boy should go to work to build himself big, not on the outside, but on the inside. And when he d,evelops and grows, he will find a place nearer to the top of the bushel when it is shaken. With men, big means great, not taller or heavier, but stronger, and wiser, and more able."

If the teaching of that old gentleman impressed all his listeners like it did me, then he was a mighty teacher, for I consider it one of the very best lessons I ever listened to.

Al Frosf, Sr. Wriffen Up

Albert Frost, Sr., founder in 1911 of the Frost Hardrvood Lumber Co., San Diego, was pictured and rvritten up in a recent issue of San Diego Business as he supervised the unloading of choice lumber he purchased in Japan when it was transferred into the B Street Pier at San Diego recently. The senior Frost was in Japan this May and June to visit his daughter, Dr. Helen Tinsley, M.D., a member of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.

While there, Mr. Frost bought 100,000 board feet of Philippine mahogany, Japanese birch and oak and some plywood, and it made up the largest shipment of lumber ever sent from the Orient to San Diego. It was unloaded late in August from the President Taft.