A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

Chapter 1
LOVING TO LEARN
My first memory is of standing with my parents on an outdoor landing at the
top of some worn and dirty wooden steps. It was a gloomy Chicago day in
December 1934, when I was two years and four months old. Even wearing
my only set of winter pants and a jacket with a hood, it was cold. Black and
leafless, the trees stood out above the snow-covered ground. From inside the
house a woman was telling my parents, “No, we don’t rent to people with
children.” Their faces fell and they turned away. Had I done something
wrong? Why was I a problem? This image from the depths of the Great
Depression has stayed with me always.
I next recall being taken at age two and a half to our beloved family
physician, Dr. Dailey. My alarmed parents explained that I had yet to speak a
single word. What was wrong? The doctor smiled and asked me to point to
the ball on his desk. I did so, and he asked me to pick up his pencil. After I
had done this and a few more tasks he said, “Don’t worry, he’ll talk when he’s
ready.” We left, my parents relieved and a little mystified.
After this, the campaign to get me to talk intensified. About the time of my
third birthday, my mother and two of her friends, Charlotte and Estelle, took
me along with them to Chicago’s then famous Montgomery Ward department
store. As we sat on a bench near an elevator, two women and a man got off.
Charlotte, keen to tempt me into speech, asked, “Where are the people
going?” I said clearly and distinctly, “The man is going to buy something and
the two women are going to the bathroom to do pee-pee.” Charlotte and
Estelle both blushed deeply at the mention of pee-pee. Far too young to have
learned conventional embarrassment, I noticed this but didn’t understand why
they reacted that way. I also was puzzled by the sensation I had caused with
my sudden change from silence to talkativeness.
From then on I spoke largely in complete sentences, delighting my parents
and their friends, who now plied me with questions and often received
surprising answers. My father set out to see what I could learn.
Born in Iowa in 1898, my father, Oakley Glenn Thorp, was the second of
three children, with his brother two years older and sister two years younger.
When he was six his family broke up. His father took him and his brother to
settle in the state of Washington. His mother and sister remained in Iowa. In
1915 my grandfather died from the flu, three years before the Great Flu
Pandemic of 1918–19, which killed between twenty and forty million people
worldwide. The two boys lived with an uncle until 1917. Then my father, at
age eighteen, went to France to join World War I as part of the great
American Expeditionary Force. He fought with the infantry in the trenches,
rose from private to sergeant, and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver
Star, and two Purple Hearts for heroism in places like Château-Thierry,
Belleau Wood, and the Battles of the Marne. As a very small boy I remember
sitting in his lap on a humid afternoon examining the shrapnel scars on his
chest and the minor mutilation of some of his fingers.
Following his discharge from the army after the war, my father enrolled at
Oklahoma A&M. He completed a year and a half before he had to leave for
lack of funds, but his hunger and respect for education endured and he
instilled them in me, along with his unspoken hope that I would achieve more.
Sensing this and hoping it would bring us closer, I welcomed his efforts to
teach me.
As soon as I began to talk, he introduced me to numbers. I found it easy to
count first to a hundred, then to a thousand. Next I learned how to increase
any number by adding one to get the next number, which meant I could count
forever if I only knew the names of the numbers. I soon learned how to count
to a million. Adults seemed to think this was a very big number so I sat down
to do it one morning. I knew I could eventually get there but I had no idea
how long it was going to take. To get started, I chose a Sears catalog the size
of a big-city telephone book because it seemed to have the most things to
count. The pages were filled with pictures of merchandise labeled with the
letters A, B, C…, which I recall appeared as black letters in white circles. 

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp