his Assistant succeeded him as Manager. When the Receivership occurred in the Fall of 1907, the Receivers (my father, Charles A. Decker and John M. Dingee) agreed to a proposal made by my father that the liquidation of those hardwoods be turned over on a commission basis to a partnership composed of the Manager of the department and myself. So a partnership was formed by the name of Uptegrove & Polhemus. I was to furnish the capital,, and he the experience. I obtained the capital by loans from the father of one of my college roommates and from the same men who later financed my father's new start. So from November 1907 to January 1910 I was a hardwood lumber wholesaler.

In 1910 I fulfilled a dream that had been building up as the result of early holidays spent on the farms of "Cousin Ed" Mapes (my father's cousin) and of my Grandfather, both in Orange Co, N.Y., but perhaps more immediately because of the country home at New Canaan, Conn, which my father purchased in the Spring of 1907. My sister Florence was the chief instigator of this purchase. I only "seconded" the motion. After the purchase we remodeled the 100 year old house and made a very attractive but by no means elaborate home of it with 55 acres of hilly, wooded and rocky land. My father and I commuted daily to N.Y. (1 hr. 20 minutes on the train). I loved this country home and tried to think how I might take it over as a farm, and at least make expenses. It was a hopeless proposition, but while toying with the idea I learned from a former schoolmate about apple orcharding in the Northwest. To shorten the story, the result was that in 1910 I paid off the last of the loans made to me for the hardwood lumber business, closed it up, and departed for the West. I had interested a school friend, Ward I. Cornell and a college friend, Walter L. Mason In a life in the open, and apple growing in particular. We three combined as Uptegrove, Cornell and Mason, and in March 1910 moved bag and baggage to the Upper Hood River Valley of Oregon and began what for me was just short of 12 years of farming life. I shall always consider them the happiest and in many ways the most satisfying years of my life - not because of financial rewards, which were meager, if any, but because I felt that I had a hand in the growth and development of a new community out of virgin timber and on virgin soil. But that is another story in itself, and I must not divert too far.

On a Winter's week-end in 1914 I was invited to a dance at one of my ranch neighbors. He was holding a house party of five or six young ladies and chaperones from Portland. My only recollection of the group is of one of them. (I don't mean a chaperon!). I fact, even at the time, I seemed to be conscious