Translations:Chapter One Trey/45/en

My mom, Mary Maxwell, grew up in the embrace of a family culture set by her grandfather J. W. Maxwell, a banker who doted on my mom and was a model for a life of constant self-improvement. As a boy in Nebraska, J.W. quit school and talked himself into a job digging out the basement of a house owned by a local banker in return for money and room and board. When J.W. put down his shovel two months later, the man offered him a job at his bank. He was fifteen. After a few years learning the banking business, he moved to Washington state to carve out a new life. The 1893 depression wiped out his fledgling bank, and the coastal town he bet would boom instead went bust. He eventually took a steady job as a federal bank examiner, work that had him away from his family for months on end traveling on horseback, wagon, and train around the West measuring the health of small banks. Eventually he succeeded in starting his own bank. By the time he died in 1951 at age eighty-six, my great-grandfather was chairman of a major bank in Seattle and an active civic leader. He had also served as a mayor, a state legislator, a school board member, and a director of the Federal Reserve.