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house free and clear. We were quietly proud of ourselves.

We had a funny experience in selling the car. It was the Nash
sedan, which we had bought a year before. When I tried to sell it, despite
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was virtually no interest in buying a Nash. One evening I received a
call from a fellow staying at a hotel in Oakland who was answering my
newspaper ad about the car. He wanted to see the car and test-drive it,
which seemed reasonable. However, several cases had been reported in
the newspaper in recent weeks where a presumed buyer went for a ride
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with the car. Before driving the car over to Oakland, I phoned a friend
and he readily agreed to go with me. In Oakland we found that the buyer
had a friend, so my friend sat with his associate in the back seat and I sat
in the front seat as we did the test-drive with the car. When we returned
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The next day the buyer and his friend met me at lunchtime in
San Francisco at a branch of a bank. He wanted to give me a check, but I
insisted that if his check was good, the bank would honor it. He obtained
the $1,925 in cash at the bank and then wanted to look at the car once
more “in the daylight.” I thought this might lead to my being robbed of
both money and the car in the lot where the car was parked. I thrust the
$1,925 in currency to the teller in the bank and told him I would be back
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turned to the bank, where I opened an account and deposited the money
immediately so I would have nothing on me. The buyer and his friend
were waiting for me outside but I ducked out into the noontime crowd
and was gone. We had used the car for a year at no capital cost!
Before accepting the Aramco job, I talked with my sister Lau-
rine. A neighbor of hers was an executive in Standard Oil Company of
California. She arranged for me to visit him on a Saturday afternoon at
his home. I knew nothing about Aramco or the oil business and I asked

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