He knows and will admit that he works hard
and has all his life worked hard. ``Things keep
turning my way because I'm on the job,'' as he
whimsically expressed it one day; but that is
about all, so it seems to him.
And he sincerely believes that his life has in
itself been without interest; that it has been an
essentially commonplace life with nothing of the
interesting or the eventful to tell. He is frankly
surprised that there has ever been the desire to
write about him. He really has no idea of how
fascinating are the things he has done. His entire
life has been of positive interest from the variety
of things accomplished and the unexpectedness
with which he has accomplished them.
Never, for example, was there such an organizer.
In fact, organization and leadership have
always been as the breath of life to him. As a
youth he organized debating societies and, before
the war, a local military company. While on
garrison duty in the Civil War he organized
what is believed to have been the first free school
for colored children in the South. One day
Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell
happened to remember that he organized,
when he was a lawyer in that city, what became
the first Y.
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