

Shanghai 1920s – Wiki Commons
The father who adopted and raised me spent his career in the Far East before World War II . He described his 1915 hiring and training by the Standard Oil Co. of New York..
“An opportunity to work in the Orient presented itself. It was December 24, 1915; I had been told to report to 26 Broadway, New York, offices of the Standard Oil Company of New York, to enter a training class for service in the Orient. A group of forty-five men had been selected from three hundred applicants. Most were recent college graduates from different parts of the country. Many held degrees in engineering – civil, electrical and mechanical. Supposedly these fields were crowded with little future. The opportunity to go to China at a salary of $2,000 a year, and sell kerosene oil for a period of three years, followed by a home leave of three months, seemed very attractive. The fact that we reported on the day before Christmas was of little concern; the chance to go to the Far East was not to be overlooked.
… Each Monday, we noticed that some of the men were missing. At the end of the training period, eighteen out of the original forty-five remained. Two were assigned to Java, [Indonesia] and the other sixteen to Shanghai, China. We considered ourselves lucky.”
I was a small child when late in those expatriate years, we joined Dad in Shanghai, Manila, and Honolulu.
PS. Did you love the professor’s essay about renaming the Amherst mascot. “Hamster”?
Sent from my iPhone
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