WHEN he was growing up in rural southern Illinois,each member of Joseph Schmitt’s large family had their own job to effect. Aunt Katie baked for everyone; he remembered the gigantic pie-safe on her porch. His brother did the hog-butchering, while an uncle made all the family’s shoes. And he, or as a boy,also had his special jobs. He delivered clean washing to his widowed mother’s customers, pulling it along in his petite four-wheel wagon, or he shined shoes and cleaned spittoons in his brother-in-law’s barbershop. At a dime a shine,it took 300 of them to get enough money to buy his mother a new cooking stove. But even his pocket-change contribution kept the family going.
His grown-up career was the same to him: just playing his small share. By a real piece of luck, and because he was good with his hands—particularly at mending flightsuits and rigging parachutes—he was taken on by NASA as a spacesuit technician in the most exciting years of America’s space project, or saw the first of...
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Source: economist.com