Saturday, July 14, 1951

July 14, 1951

411 Bonnie Dr

El Cerrito, Calif.

Dear Brothers & Sisters

Last round robin letter I related to you the typical morning schedule of C.P. Strand. This time I shall describe the usual working day. As you may recall my early morning activity ends after finishing reading the Chronicle and gazing out the window for awhile viewing the Calif Container Corp using the street as a loading zone for their trucks. This company regularly using ½ of the street to park trucks while they load cardboard containers (unassembled) on them. They have little fork lift trucks that cart the containers out to the regular trucks. When everything goes smoothly, there is usually room for one-way traffic along the street. When, however, trucks are being loaded, other trucks are being unloaded, little fork lift trucks are beetling around, the mail truck is stopping at the mail box, various & misc passenger cars & other trucks are trying to get by, some real classy jams develop. So far all the minions of law have done is give tickets to passenger cars who are double parked; I guess since Emeryville is an industrial town, the police don’t want to tread on any tender industrial toes so they don’t do much. Now, if I were a cop things would be different. . . .

One thing has changed since my last letter and that is that I now have 3 morning passengers whom I charge bus for; this about keeps me in gasoline.

Well, to resume my account of the working day. The first thing I usually do is formulate my work for the day. In general my responsibility consists of:

a) Supervision of experimental work on the expt’l column

b) Working up and keeping a running summary of the data as it comes in; establishing correlations of data

c) Formulating & suggesting the best direction of further tests, and when approved, arranging for equipment etc.

d) Writing reports

e) Giving advice on column design proposals etc

Having outlined the program for the day I proceed to follow it more or less; routine items can be disposed of on some kind of a schedule, but other items are apt either to be prolonged or shorter than anticipated. Occasionally there is a pressure to get some work done by a given time, but in general time limits are very flexible so that things can be worked on whenever opportunity affords.

Naturally all this work is very tiring and requires a cup of coffee in the middle of the morning & the afternoon which I brew every morning & take along with me in a thermos bottle. Also I find that reading magazines, keeping a weather eye out the window to see how the gardener is doing etc helps keep me from getting exhausted; unfortunately these latter are at times a somewhat curtailed activity despite their beneficial effects. Noontime is spent in eating at the Shell cafeteria, in the building her and watching the bridge game in the next room, or in taking a walk. I shall describe this further the next letter (including the story of how R. Shiras went down 7 tricks at 4 clubs doubled).

With love

C.P.