As a new hire as a student engineer of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company I traveled to Pittsburgh for the job. I had borrowed more money from Daddy to tide me over until my first payday. I hoped to save some money from each check until I had enough to soon buy myself some new duds. Those I owned had served me since my high school days. I became especially aware of the thinness of the seat of the pants of my only suit when one day I saw the shape of my hand through the trousers seat. In a second observation I discovered that one could tell the color of my shorts when I wore the pants. I realized that I didn’t have long to save the money.

I was on the engineers’ minimum wage list at ninety cents an hour, almost double anything I had made at any previous job I’d had, but Daddy had paid for my food and lodging. Now with room and board bills to pay saving became more difficult. Besides that, my laundry bill really grew. In those days Pittsburgh, the steel capital of the world, had many sources of grime. Everybody burned coal. The first job each morning was to wipe up the black filth off of my desk; even so my shirtsleeves were a deep gray by quitting time. Several months passed before I had the wherewithal to afford to replace my old suit. Daddy had taught me to avoid debt.

When the big day came that I had the money I headed down town with a fellow boarder, Archie Todd as I remember. We went to a store that he knew, to look for a suit. Archie was an old hand at this sort of thing. We didn’t go to a cheap place. The clerk showed me several suits, among them a double breasted model, blue and all wool but the buttons. I tried it on for fit and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked better than usual. I was a bit skeptical about the double breasted feature but Archie assured me that the style was in and not likely to go away. I hoped that he was right about that because I intended to wear it for a long time. With a tie and a couple of shirts I was broke until next payday. I was happy with my purchase. I now had a decent outfit that remained so for a long time. I never wore it out. I gave it to the Encore Theater as a period costume long after it was out of style.

But for all my pride and satisfaction with my first suit paid for with my own money, on reflection it was another outfit that I was most proud to wear. As a member of Boy Scouts of America I went to Scout meetings in my regular clothes for my first year or two. The uniform was simple, kaki shorts and shirt, neckerchief and to round it out an official hat. The shirt provided a place to display my troop number, my badge of rank and appropriate patches. It may have been a second hand outfit for all I recall but it didn’t matter. I was one of the real Boy Scouts, as anyone could see.