This curious notebook I’m examining, bound in leather red and black, is identified on the cover with North Dakota Agricultural College. Inside there are printed workbook pages and longhand pages of notes in black ink, the first ones jotted 9 January 1908. Entries continue to 6 March. The writer of the notes was one William Adcock.

Weeks ago I heard from Margaret Olson of Valley City, who was working through some old effects, including this notebook of her father. She asked if there was an appropriate repository where it might go. I’m happy to say that she now has donated the book to the archives of North Dakota State University.

When I picked it up at Mrs. Olson’s apartment, she told me about the family. The parents of William Adcock, compiler of the notebook, were William and Margaret Adcock, immigrants from England. They had a farm south of Valley City. The son married the hired girl, Nora Munson, who came from a Norwegian family. Margaret, their daughter, finished high school in Valley and then worked for a hardware and auto parts firm in Fargo. In 1935 she married Bennie Olson, a teacher who subsequently became an auto parts man in Valley.

Through this narrative run the threads of farm background and mechanical proclivity, which should have given some clues as to the nature of the notebook. Mrs. Olson said her father must have attended a winter short course at NDAC. Examining his notes, I find it was a particular type of course he completed: the certificate program for steam traction engineers. Young Adcock was an aspiring thresherman.

This makes sense, for NDAC was the best place in the country for such training, thanks to Professor P.S. Rose. He had come to the AC the previous year, a graduate of Michigan Agricultural College and had been working for a tool company. He would become a founding, charter member of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers and would serve as editor of important agricultural periodicals, first American Thresherman and Gas Review, later Country Gentleman.

He had the common touch, though. His 1962 obituary says he was "by nature a frontiersman" who at age eight in the Michigan forests "took a man’s place at one end of the crosscut saw, and at fourteen he was a seasoned ox teamster, log loader, and skidder." He had trouble getting into MAC because of inadequate school preparation. Thus at NDAC he had sympathy for chaps like William Adcock who were bright, ambitious, and mechanically inclined, but didn’t spell very well.

That winter of 1908 Rose taught the course for steam engineers. The following summer he offered the first such course for gas tractor operators. Things were in transition. The president of the summer graduating class of tractor operators said in his oration, "We as engineers have and hold dangerous and responsible positions, not only for ourselves but for all others coming into contact with our labor in the field. Let us go forth determined to do our labor well."

Adcock’s notes testify that such students did take their work seriously. Here are careful notes taken verbatim from the professor’s maxims--I can see him pausing at the board, waiting for his charges to catch up in their note-taking. They took down complicated formulae for calculating pressure on metal and, getting to the heart of the matter, the "bursting pressure of a boiler." They also got little historical asides, such as, "George Westinghouse was the inventor of the Air Brake."

Some of the instruction was in the nature of fatherly, commonplace cautions. "Before crossing a bridge look at it and see that it is all right," Professor Rose admonished. "If the law says plank the bridge, plank it."

Another metaphor for life.