WALTER P. CHRYSLER TELLS OWN STORY Fight—A family that helped tame the prair ies in the 70’a when Indiana were still a real danger. Reading j to right, Walter J Chrysler’s J| Mother, Father || and Mother’s || sister. j m wmm • ’ A railroader’s home I in Ellis, Kansas, •, . where the auto man M lived as a boy. 1 .. Walter P. Chrysler, above, at age 2. Left, \ “a tough kid.” Below, at about 20. ■i Pictures by courtesy of the Satur day Evening Post ALTER P. CHRYSLER, the auto 1 T mobile manufacturer, was a small town boy in the truest sense of the word, the marble champion of Ellis, Kansas, who became a champion in one of Ameri ca’s great industries. Mr. Chrysler calls his story, “The Life of an American Workman,” in the first of a series of articles beginning in the cur rent issue of the Saturday Evening Post. He paints a vivid and homely picture of the childhood of an ordinary boy in the pioneer days of the West. It is the en vironment of millions of Americans who established the first rough com munities of the Great Plains States, the generation from which rose many of today’s outstanding industrialists. 9 Walter was the third of four children. Both his parents were of German descent. His father, Canadian-born, was brought to Kansas while an infant. His mother was “a lovely Missouri born girl with a peach-bloom com plexion” who became a big, power ful woman of the frontier. That was in the 70’s before the prairie had been tamed. Then the hoofs of buffalo and antelope crushed the short grass around the scattered houses that com posed the town of Ellis. Indians were still a real danger—‘‘a scalp raising fear,” Mr. Chrysler relates. He was a year old at the time of the Custer Massacre, (61 years ago Friday, June 25), three and a half years old when a band of Northern Cheyennes, led by Chief Dull Knife, slaughtered white peo ple in Decatur and Rawlins coun ties in the fall of 1878. No wonder Mr. Cfcrysier says, '■You had to be a tough kid.” "For that matter,” he continues, "if you were soft, all the othei kids would beat the daylights out of you.” At the age of five, he re calls being sent to the store or the other side of town for coa' oil. Another boy ran toward him crying, "Indians are coming!’ >---