Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott Read Free Book Online Page B

asked to build a car for Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When serving mandatory military service in 1904, Porsche was called on to drive the archduke on various occasions as well.
    And so the dramatic turn of events that occurred in 1914 hitPorsche and his family close to home. That year, all that speed and dynamic change being generated by the Western world produced a loud and violent crash: the First World War. As a result, the structures of government and country that Porsche had known would soon be dismantled and rearranged. It would be the world’s first mechanized war—replete with machine guns, airplanes, and
     tanks—and so it seems fitting that its opening shot involved one of the world’s first car bombs: Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself was the target, and though he survived the explosion, he and his wife were shot and killed later that same night while riding in their open-roofed automobile. With their murders, the First World War began. By the end of it, two empires would fall and a new balance would descend upon the political and economic world. The war would be ugly, as
     all wars are, and yet somehow, out of all the pain and chaos, a new symbiosis would develop between the United States and Europe, paving the way for the automobile to become the twentieth century’s most intoxicating adventure.

Young Bill Bernbach 1 got a job working at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The past decade had not been easy for him, and now well into his twenties, he was still unsure exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Bill had graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Commercial Science in
     1933, just as the Depression was in full swing and jobs were hard to find, especially for a slight and shy young man, whose brilliant blue eyes were nearly always glued to a book.
    Through family connections, he’d found his first job in the mailroom of Schenley Distributors, working for sixteen dollars a week, stuffing envelopes with promotional brochures. Working in an idyllic brownstone in midtown New York City, Billread fiction and philosophy in the lulls between his mailroom responsibilities. Though he loved literature, he was not someone who thought of himself as a writer or an artist, or someone who had any
     conscious inspirations toward the creative life. He had studied business in school, but he had a contemplative streak that made it difficult for him to fit in with typical corporate manners and moods. Aside from his close relationship to his large family, he was a bit of a loner in those years. Lucky for him, there was another person working in the mailroom who also liked books. Her name was Evelyn Carbone, the daughter of Italian immigrants, fluent in French, with a recent degree
     from Hunter College and plans to go back. She liked to watch Bill drift away into the paperbacks he smuggled into work, and she liked the intelligent way he could talk about what he read. The feelings Bill had for Evelyn were nearly bursting to be voiced by the time Evelyn took the initiative and invited him to one of her family’s elaborate Sunday lunches. On the day she asked, Bill said “yes” even before she could get the question out.
    But Catholic girls were not supposed to ask Jewish boys to meals at their home, or so certain members of Bill’s family thought. When he told his mother about the invitation, she literally threw herself on the floor and wailed. Bill’s parents had experienced persecution in their home countries and had come to America looking for a new life: It was their faith and their religion they credited with having saved and strengthened them, and they clung to it
     passionately, or at least his mother Rebecca did. She was very strict about the Jewish orthodoxies she’d practiced all her life, and she demanded her family respect them as well. She told Bill, her beloved youngest son, that it would kill her if he married a non-Jewish girl.
It’s just a Sunday lunch,
Bill said.
    At that point, Bill was