How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!ĭon’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation from California to Wilkes-Barre! The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.Ĭonsider the millwork in San Leandro. The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink! Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background. Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. What do you see? Not much meets the eye-there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because-well, because I am seemingly so simple. In fact, if you can understand me-no, that's too much to ask of anyone-if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. For, as a wise man observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders." This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. And, next, I am a mystery-more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Writing is both my vocation and my avocation that's all I do. I am a lead pencil-the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
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