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Show My mother counted dots and won a contest, the prize of which was a piano. My father, very proud of this achievement, very willingly paid the palty sum of five hundred dollars needed to complete this transaction, and eventually the D. & R. G. spur to Marysvale dumped off a piano box wrapped around a substantial Kimball piano, and I became a pianist. "How would you like to be a nurse?" Mama asked one sultry day in July. The thought of being a nurse had never entered my head, but it was the depression after World War I. Even though Papa was one of three men listed at the postoffice as eligible to pay income tax, I had been informed that my last year of high school was out because of straitened circumstances. "All right, I guess, " I answered, and within a month, in three weeks, in fact, I was a student nurse at the L.D.S. Hospital. The boon was that it was free, even a money-making proposition when you considered the five dollars per month breakage f e e - provided I broke no thermometers or other sophisticated equipment. Being a square peg, straitened circumstances have forced me into many a round hole. This effective shoe horn eased me into a job as cartographer at the U. S. Department of Agriculture, making mosaic maps of the earth's terrain. This followed a month of being sandwich maker and seller of cokes on the vain promise that it was only a stepping stone to defense work. In like manner I became a draftsman, a typist a compositor of technical reports, a secretary. Being a person of the feminine gender did the rest: daughter, sister, wife, mother and general parasite. These characterizations |