Autobiography
Page 2

My father, Frank Dudley Smalley, Jr., was the second of four children born to Mary Rice Burkholder and Frank Dudley Smalley (Sr.), a railroad mail clerk in Kansas City. Although my father went by the name of June (short for Junior), he never quite forgave his father for not having given him a name of his own, and for not having aspired to more in life. My father started work as a carpenter, and then as a printer’s devil, working for the local newspaper, The Kansas City Star, and later for a farm implement trade journal, Implement and Tractor. By the time he retired in 1963 he had long since risen to be CEO of this company, and a group of several others that published trade journals in the booming agriculture industry throughout the Western Hemisphere. He was incredibly industrious, talented, and fascinated with both business and technology. He had a wonderfully analytic mind, and loved argument, open discussion, and homespun philosophy. During the depression in the early 1930’s he married my mother (who fell in love with his blue eyes) and was promptly laid off from work. The story of his career is one of total dedication to both his work and his family, a dedication that held steady through a series of tribulatons, many of which I am only now beginning to appreciate. He loved me too, but he could see himself in me, and knew my failings through and through. Until late in life I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.