Our furniture had been
mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to furnish a little house
on Santa Fe Avenue; and later we moved to a cottage on lower West
Colfax Avenue, in which Negroes have since lived.
I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in a real estate office--as
office boy--and carried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before
the office opened, and did janitor work at night when it closed. After
a month of that, I got a better place, as office boy, with a mining
company, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, my younger brother
found work in a law office and I "swapped jobs" with him--because I
wished to study law!
It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who still practises in Denver;
and his example as an incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the
best and strongest influences of my life.
I had that one ambition--to be a lawyer. Associated with it I seem to
have had an unusual curiosity about politics. And where I got either
the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. My father's mother was
a Greenleaf,[1] and related to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence,"
but my father himself had nothing of the legal mind.
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