Mr. Tavenner. Will you give the committee, please, a brief outline of your formal educational training?
Mr. Dennett. I graduated from high school in Rickreall, Oreg. I was out of school a year, unable to raise the finances to go on to college. The second year I made arrangements to finance going to normal school by carrying a paper route.
I graduated from the Oregon Normal School in 1928, and started teaching school. That was a 2-year college at that time, or 2-year normal school. It has since been changed to a college of education, and it is a 4-year school now. That was at Monmouth, Oreg.
After receiving my teaching certificate and starting to teach, I carried on extension work with the University of Oregon, and later, at a later year, I took a couple more quarters of advanced work at the University of Oregon in the School of Education, Sociology, and Philosophy. I did not graduate.
Mr. Tavenner. When did you complete your work at the university?
Mr. Dennett. Well, the work that I took, which was not sufficient for a degree or graduation, ended in 1931.
Mr. Tavenner. Will you tell the committee, please, briefly, what your employment record has been since that time.
Mr. Dennett. Well, after I left teaching I was unemployed for quite a long period of time. The great depression had started, and I became active in the unemployed work.
Later on when the CCC’s were organized, that is, the Civilian Conservation Corps, since I was in a soup line here in Seattle and saw an announcement that it was possible for us to leave the soup line and go out in the woods in the CCC’s, I chose to do so, and spent a year there, about 15 months, in fact.
When I came out of the CCC’s one of the fellows whom I had worked with in the CCC shanghaied me onto a boat here in the sound. And, unbelievable as it may sound, I actually was shanghaied to work on the waterfront, working on one of the Puget Sound freight boats. I didn’t know a thing about it. And that is how I got started, a fellow just shoved me on and fed me, and the boat pulled away from the dock without my knowing what was going on. Then I got started working in the waterfront work and continued.