HON. FRED J. TRAYNOR, A.B., LL.B.

There is nothing remarkable about my experience in working my way through college. I do not deem it worth the telling, except that it may help to encourage the boy who thinks that it is more than he dares undertake to obtain an education without means to back him.

I was born in Ontario, Canada. I was fortunate in being able to get an excellent common school training and three years of high school work before having to get out and dig for myself. Since the age of fifteen, when my father died, I have been at all times self-supporting, and, before coming to North Dakota at the age of twenty, I had taken such employment as was obtainable. In the summer of 1898 I had saved enough money to make the trip to North Dakota, looking for opportunities. Teaching seemed to be the most feasible stepping-stone, so that fall, after having spent three months as a farm laborer in this State, and having saved what I had earned, which, together with a little I had left of what I had brought from Ontario, made about $90, I entered the preparatory department 147 then in existence at the University of North Dakota.

It was a month after the opening of the school year when I entered school that year with the idea of taking a winter course for teachers in order that I might take the state examinations for a teacher’s certificate in the spring. Instead of taking the course intended, however, I fitted in as nearly as I could to the regular course of study for the last year of the preparatory department and used what spare time I could obtain to study the common branches upon which I would have to take examination for a teacher’s certificate. By close application to business I was able to carry along the regular course of study and also to secure the coveted teacher’s certificate in the spring.

I left the University that spring at the end of the winter term, March 22, or thereabouts, and taught school from then until about the last week in October. I left the University on Friday and commenced the term of school on the following Monday and had no vacation during the summer; and, in addition to that, I succeeded in obtaining the permission of the school board that had employed me to teach six days a week during the last five weeks in order that I might get back to the University a week earlier than otherwise. My salary was $40 per month. I had barely scraped through from November 1 until March 22 on that ninety dollars, and had to make a loan of twenty dollars from a friend to tide me over until I got a month’s salary. At the 148 end of the term of school I had paid back the $20 and saved about $110.

During the spring term of the University, while I was teaching, I continued my studies as if I had been at the University, endeavoring to do the same work that my class-mates at school were doing and reporting from time to time to the professors. I burn............