The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.

For my part, I rather distrust men or concerns that rise up with the speed of rockets. Sudden rises are sometimes followed by equally sudden falls. I have most faith in the individual or enterprise that advances step by step. A mushroom can spring up in a day; an oak takes 50 years or more to reach maturity. Mushrooms don't last; oaks do. The real cause for an enormous number of business failures is premature over-expansion, attempting to gallop before learning to creep. Sudden successes often invite sudden reverses.

A price has to be paid for success. Almost invariably those who have reached the summits worked harder and longer, studied and planned more assiduously, practiced more self- denial, overcame more difficulties than those of us who have not risen so far.

Whenever calamity howlers shake their heads and impress upon you that this, that, and the next dire catastrophe is to befall this nation or the nations of the world-such as, for example, that exhaustion of the world's oil supply will bring all transportation and machinery to a standstill through lack of lubrication, or that exhaustion of the earth's stores of coal will make life unlivable in these cold climates-just smile and reply that the worst troubles of all are those that never happen [and] that you prefer not to cross shaky bridges until you come to them.

The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrow and double our joys.

Upon our children-how they are taught-rests the fate-or fortune-of tomorrow's world.

What would you call America's most priceless asset? Surely not its limitless natural resources, not its matchless national wealth, not its unequalled store of gold, not its giant factories, not its surpassing railroads, not its unprecedented volume of cheap power. Is not its most priceless asset the character of its people, their indomitable self-confidence, their transcendent vision, their sleepless initiative and, perhaps above all, their inherent, irrepressible optimism?