Early Life and Career
James Jesse Lynn was born into relative poverty to Jesse William Lynn, an itinerant farmer, and Salethia Archibald Lynn near Archibald, Louisiana, in the southern part of the United States. His early childhood was spent helping the family pick cotton, milk cows, churn butter, and doing other family chores. His simple education began in a small log schoolhouse.
Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he began working for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sweeping floors for $2 a month. He continued with various railroad jobs for a few years, quickly moving up to the position of chief clerk to the division manager in Kansas City, Missouri. In Kansas City, he took night classes to finish his high school education, at the same time that he took law and accounting classes.
At 21 he began working at the Bell Telephone accounting division and, before even graduating from law school, he was admitted to the Missouri bar. In 1913, he was married to Freda Josephine Prill of Kansas City. At age 24, Mr. Lynn took and passed the Missouri certified public accountant exam, earning the highest score on that exam ever made. Soon after, he began working for the largest underwriting insurance company in the country, U.S. Epperson, and quickly worked his way up in the company. By the age of 30, Mr. Lynn had taken out a significant and risky loan to buy the U.S. Epperson Underwriting Company. That step launched a successful business career that included insurance underwriting, oil well and orchard ownership, and large investments in the railroad business. He would become a prominent businessman in the Kansas City area as head of vast oil interests and as president of the world's largest reciprocal fire-insurance exchange.
Read more about this topic: Rajarsi Janakananda
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your childrens infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married! Thats total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art scientific parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“In a period of a peoples life that bears the designation transitional, the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (18181883)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)