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could
trigger the conclusion you must work hard to get ahead. Whatever
the explanation of the work ethic, I had it. And I harnessed it to
push forward in a career of journalism that perfectly fit my
talents.

    Almost as soon as I could write at
all, I started turning that skill into story telling. I remember
writing Christmas plays in the fourth grade about Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer and then following with a historical epic
centered on a Colonial era Yankee peddler hero named Will. We
actually performed these scripts in my fourth grade class, and I
got a big kick from the attention. So it was an interest in writing
that drew me toward journalism in the beginning, but it was the
work ethic that helped me achieve it.

    Looking at the genes, I now know
that my ancestry included hard workers. Poor white trash doesn't
leave much of a paper trail, but I still have found records of
some. They all trod similar paths toward the future, traveling west
into central Missouri in the 1830s from Virginia and Kentucky. My
mother's primary line, the Wrights, are traceable back to Scotland.
Meanwhile, my Taylors begin as far as I know with a man named
Joseph Taylor born in 1811 to unknowns in Madison County, Kentucky.
Before Joseph there is simply a void. But I do know he farmed land
in Missouri and worked his grandson mercilessly, according to a
diary kept by the boy, Cicero Hampton Taylor, who grew up to become
my great grandfather. Cicero lived to the age of ninety-six and did
not die until I was in my teens. I regret that I never took the
trouble to talk with him about his life when I had the opportunity.
No one ever starts caring about genealogy until all the good
sources are dead. But at least another relative shared Cicero's
diary with me as well as some observations on the son that became a
grandpa I would never know, Elsus Bower Taylor. He died of natural
causes in 1944, three years before my birth.

    Folks called Elsus "Nub" because of
a dreadful accident he suffered as a child when he burned off a
hand after falling into a fireplace. But the handicap didn't stop
him from becoming well known in central Missouri for his skills at
breaking mules. He also earned a reputation as a hard-drinking
scoundrel. My dad used to joke about their practice of moving every
year to a new farm space and talked about times when they were so
poor he couldn't have shoes. The Great Depression hit them hard,
and my father, Dale Kempster Taylor, escaped by lying about his age
to join Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. He
returned to the farm in the late 1930s determined to make something
more of himself. He met my mom, who came from more stable farming
stock, and they moved to the nearest big city of St. Louis about
the time World War II began.

    A CCC-related hernia kept my dad
out of the service until near the end of the war when he
volunteered and accepted an assignment guarding prisoners in
Washington State. For some reason only Dale could fathom, he
decided to leave the exciting Pacific Northwest after the war and
return to grungy old St. Louis to seek his fortune and provide me a
place of birth in 1947. Armed only with a grade school education
and ambition, he found a job pumping gas and eventually turned that
into a prosperous life, first owning a gas station and then
launching what would become the city's largest lawnmower sales and
service business.

    So it would seem that Dale's
offspring might be expected to have "worker" stamped on their
genes. That predilection received reinforcement when I learned to
accept twelve-hour workdays as the norm just from watching him
never come home. I was destined to become intricately acquainted
with those twelve-hour days in just a few years ahead, but back
then, like any other kid, I saw my old man as a hero and concluded
that twelve-hour days must be the hero's schedule. Since I, of
course, wanted to be a hero, too, I jumped into that lawnmower work
alongside him as soon as I could, joining