When I saw this it contrasted with what was implied to be by my father which was more like "If you fail you should just go hide in a hole and kill yourself."
He did not say this to me ever but I saw this in his eyes because he was very competitive and valedictorian of this Senior High School Class.
So, there was no way I would ever win with him. I would never be good enough unless I left the ground and Ascended into Heaven.
I think that when he bought a Harley Davidson 74 horsepower Motorcycle which would have been in 1930 when he was 14 and took his younger brother (likely 12 years old for a ride) a German Shepard dog ran out in front of them and caused them to crash. My father's leg was pinned underneath the thing and they wanted to take his leg off from the knee down because they didn't have anti-biotics then and people often died of Gangrene from injuries like this then in 1930. So, his father said you cannot take my son's leg off even though the doctors said my father could die from Gangrene. Instead they might have used Sulfa drugs and they gave him morphine for the pain which I believe he got addicted to in the hospital. So, he survived and didn't die and kept his leg and it worked fine all the time I knew him. But, I think he had withdrawal symptoms from Morphine after this and one of the ways he dealt with his withdrawals from Morphine was studying I think which is likely why he was valedictorian.
Also, I don't think people (even my father) understood then that he had become addicted to morphine in the hospital. Either that, or people didn't talk about things like this then at all for a variety of reasons. However, the way my father looked at it was that he had had a nervous breakdown and was out of school for 6 months to a year recovering. So, studying was one way my father who was incredibly intelligent coped with all this.
Then after he was a valedictorian his father wouldn't let him go to college and insisted he work in his Dad's electrical business as an electrician along with his older and eventually younger brother (after the three of them drove dump trucks building the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. They lived in Lake Forest Park in Seattle, Washington area then.
Oh, by the way my father traded his Harley 74 for a sewing machine for his mother which was a good idea after almost losing his leg on a gravel road. His brother jumped off and tumbled like the gymnast he was. IN fact, he was all set up for the Olympics on the Rings when my father and he and my father's first wife went to Tahiti and the Tuomoto Archipeligo and eventually Hawaii too by a Sailing Yacht from 1939 to 1941. When the war coming people knew it and he and his brother got back to the mainland before Pearl Harbor. However, his first wife was working for the newspaper on December 7th 1941 and she got on a large ship and sailed home after Pearl Harbor to Seattle.
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