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It seemed like 90% of them had gone through tragedy of some sort in the intervening 12 years. The diary was very discontinuous in those days and I thought of what a story it would tell of my own life if it had been kept as this journal has been kept now for about four months. There would be material for a thousand stories and a few novels to boot. And even in those days, I had yen to write but never did anything about it but talk to myself on paper occasionally. I had great ambitions and today as I review my career so far I can see some of them have been realized to some extent. I have made a success of my engineering I feel. I have made a fair success of life itself compared to some of the rest. But I am not where i hoped to be by any means. Much remains to be done and it [[underlined]] can [[/underlined]] be done if I buckle down to the job of doing it. In those test days in 1926, I thought I was "old" - life half lived. Today, I think sometimes I'm "old". And yet, I'm not. Barring unforeseeable things, I still have plenty of time to accomplish all I want to do, and am better equipped than ever before to do it successfully; it's just a matter of putting forth the effort. In twelve more years, I'll be 48 and look back on 1938 as a time when I was still a mere kid. And I am only a kid yet comparatively speaking. Twelve years after that, I'll be 60 and still a half dozen years younger than the Colonel is now. And he certainly isn't marked yet by senility. He seems capable of enjoying life about as much as I do right now. What a heart rending time I had trying to get by Anderson and into the Control Division. Covered fully in the diary for a wonder, it has material for a story in it, I think.