A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston and walked timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University President's outer office. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard, & probably didn't even deserve to be in Cambridge .
'We'd like to see the president,' the man said softly.
'He'll be busy all day,' the secretary snapped.
'We'll wait,' the lady replied.
For hours the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away.
They didn't, and the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted.
'Maybe if you see them for a few minutes, they'll leave,' she said to him!
He sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, and he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern faced and with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, 'We had a son who attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus.'
The president wasn't touched. He was shocked.
'Madam,' he said, gruffly, 'we can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery.'
'Oh, no,' the lady explained quickly. 'We don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.'
The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, then exclaimed, 'A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical buildings here at Harvard.'
For a moment the lady was silent. The president was pleased. Maybe he could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, 'Is that all it cost to start a university? Why don't we just start our own? '
Her husband nodded. The president's face wilted in confusion and bewilderment.
Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the university that bears their name, Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.
You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who they think can do nothing for them.
--- A TRUE STORY by Malcolm Forbes
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7 comments:
Oh, let me be first.
Snopes says bullhsit, false.
Leland Stanford was one of the most prominent men of his time, having served as Governor of California and in the US Senate, so no way he would have been dismissed by the snooty President of Harvard.
But, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
You beat me to it, Son of Strom. I live in CA. There's also no way that Stanford showed up in a "homespun" suit and his wife in a faded gingham dress. What a load of crapola.
There might have been some issue re endowing a building at Harvard and either being rejected or something. For some reason that strikes a note, but I can't be bothered to look it up. I do believe there was something with Harvard that caused them to come back to CA and start up Stanford.
But they were hardly the unassuming, dressed as honest poor folk, that this sheer utter barking nonsense says. Stanford owned several large mansions in CA.
Gimme a break. I doubt that Malcolm Forbes had anything to do with this.
And finally:
"You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who they think can do nothing for them."
Ya mean like how all conservatives treat minorities, women and poor people today? Like how Trump encourages his bigoted white supremacist base to hate Mexicans, blacks, women & all Muslims???
Yeah, I can "easily judge" Trump's character and the character of his voters. Yep. Definitely.
Except for the son's death and the fact that Leland Stanford founded Stanford, the story is complete bullshit.
It's debunked at Stanford itself:
https://library.stanford.edu/spc/faq#snubbed
I don't get the point of this "True" story. Why tell a bald faced lie about something like this?
Oh, yeah, conservatives. If their mouths are moving or they're forwarding some email, it's either bunk or a bald-faced lie.
"You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who they think can do nothing for them."
Conservatives fail that test on a daily basis.
@Hooray4US
I don't get the point of this "True" story. Why tell a bald faced lie about something like this?
It allows Right Wingers to say unkind things about Harvard. That's one of those schools that turns out "elites," you know. (Psst! Like Obama...)
"You can easily judge a person's character by how they treat those who they think can do nothing for them."
Aaaaand there went my irony meter. Stop doing this to me, RWD, they're fucking expensive.
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