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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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I have a young relative who was not quite old enough to go to the war when it broke out. He got himself into a Pratt, Whitney job, because he was so terribly patriotic that he was burning up, and also, of course, because he didn't regard himself as an intellectual type and his father was heading him for college, no matter what it took in the way of study. So he got very patriotic, and when he found he was too young for the armed forces, he went to work for Pratt and Whitney. His father was also one of these very patriotic people so the boy had him. The father couldn't say, “It isn't your duty to serve your country.”

The boy turned out to be one of these rare individuals. He didn't discover it for a long time himself, but he couldn't figure out why he moved so fast. He was pushed from one department to another and very soon got into the inter-tube boring work, where you bore the thread, cut the thread inside of a tube down which some screw arrangement is to go. You're looking into a deep, dark, long, narrow tube. Although he had no previous experience, he had the mechanical knack. He was an extraordinarily good mechanic. His work was very precise. He could do beautifully these jobs where you had to grind to within 1/100th of a milimeter. They just told him what to do, gave him the calipers and he could do it. It was no trouble.

I asked him how he could do it and he said, “I don't know. It's not hard. Just watch what you're doing.” He was





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