Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Walter Isaacson
- Language: English
- Genre: Biographies
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Adventurers
Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman
Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his
maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly
held opinions who was raised on a farm on the barren plains of central Canada.
He studied chiropractic techniques in Iowa, then returned to his hometown
near Moose Jaw, where he broke in horses and gave chiropractic adjustments in
exchange for food and lodging.
He was eventually able to buy his own farm, but he lost it during the
depression of the 1930s. For the next few years, he worked as a cowboy, rodeo
performer, and construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure.
He married and divorced, traveled as a hobo on freight trains, and was a
stowaway on an oceangoing ship.
The loss of his farm instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a
movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens
free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative
fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its rst leader in Canada
decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of
Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s
national council.
He also enlisted in a movement called Technocracy, which believed that
government should be run by technocrats rather than politicians. It was
temporarily outlawed in Canada because of its opposition to the country’s entry
into World War II. Haldeman deed the ban by taking out a newspaper ad
supporting the movement.
At one point he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, which is how he met
Winnifred Fletcher, whose adventurous streak was equal to his. As a sixteenyear-old, she got a job at the Moose Jaw Times Herald, but she dreamed of being
a dancer and actress. So she lit out by train to Chicago and then New York City.
Upon her return, she opened a dance school in Moose Jaw, which is where
Haldeman showed up for lessons. When he asked her to dinner, she replied, “I
don’t date my clients.” So he quit the class and asked her out again. A few
months later, he asked, “When will you marry me?” She responded,
“Tomorrow.”
They had four children, including twin girls, Maye and Kaye, born in 1948.
One day on a trip he spotted a For Sale sign on a single-engine Luscombe
airplane sitting in a farmer’s eld. He had no cash, but he convinced the farmer
to take his car in exchange. It was rather impetuous, since Haldeman did not
know how to y. He hired someone to y him home and teach him how to pilot
the plane.
The family came to be known as The Flying Haldemans, and he was
described by a chiropractic trade journal as “perhaps the most remarkable gure
in the history of ying chiropractors,” a rather narrow, albeit accurate, accolade.
They bought a larger single-engine plane, a Bellanca, when Maye and Kaye were
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