• Born: Nov. 5,1855, in Terre Haute, Indiana.• Died: Oct. 20,1926, Lindlahr Sanitarium, Elmhurst, Illinois. Buried in Terre Haute,

Indiana.• Education: Attended Terre Haute Public schools, dropping out of high school at age of

14 to take job as painter in railroad yards. In 1870 became fireman on railroad. In his spare time, he went to night classes at a local business college.

TimelineSeptember 1874 — At his mother’s insistence he gave up job as railroad fireman and went to work in wholesale grocery firm of Hulman & Cox as a billing clerk. February 27, 1875 — Became charter member and secretary of Vigo Lodge, Brotherhood of Locomo-tive Firemen. He continued work at Hulman & Cox and used his salary to help the fledg-ling local union and conducted its work at night. Later the same year he became president of Occidental Literary Club of Terre Haute. Brought famous personages to Terre Haute including Col. Robert Ingersoll, James Whitcomb Riley, Susan B. Anthony and many others.1878 — Made assistant editor of national Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine.1879 — Elected to first of two terms as City Clerk of Terre Haute on Democrat ticket.1880 — Named Grand Secretary of Brotherhood of Railway Firemen and editor of the Magazine.1884 — Elected state representative to the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat rep-resenting Terre Haute and Vigo County. Served in 1885.June 9, 1885 — Married to Kate Metzel whom he loved and cherished until his death. They had no children.1892 — Convention of Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen prevailed on him to retain editorship of Magazine.June 1893 — Organized in Chicago first industrial union in United States, the American Railway Union.April 1894 — The American Railway Union struck Great Northern Railway. Not a wheel moved on Great Northern and at end of 18 days, the railway granted demands of union.

1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1920 — Ran as candidate of Socialist Party for President of the United States in some of the most dynamic campaigning ever seen in the United States. Made his greatest showing in campaign of 1908 which featured the RED SPECIAL train which went to every section of the country.1907-1912 — Named Associate Editor of the Appeal to Reason published in Girard, Kan. He was paid the then fabulous salary of $100 per week. The weekly magazine achieved a circulation of several hundred thousand due to the powerful writing of Debs. The bound files of the Appeal to Reason for the years of 1907 to 1914 are part of the library in the Debs home.

Eugene V. Debs circa 19201916 — Ran for Congress in his home district in Terre Haute on the Socialist ticket and was defeated.

June 16, 1918 — Debs made his famous anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I which was raging in Europe. For this speech he was arrested and convicted in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio under the war-time espionage law. He was his own at-torney and his appeal to the jury and his statement to the court before sentencing, are re-garded as two of the great classic statements ever made in a court of law. He was sen-tenced to serve 10 years in prison.April 12, 1919 — Debs began serving his sentence in Moundsville, W. Va. State prison and was transferred to Atlanta, Ga. Federal prison two months later. His humility and friendliness and his assistance to all won him the respect and admiration of the most hardened convicts.1920 — For the fifth and last time, while a prisoner at Atlanta, he was nominated to run for president on the Socialist party ticket. Conducting his campaign from inside the prison, he was given nearly a million votes but was defeated by the Republican, Warren G. Harding. On Christmas Day, 1921 President Harding released Debs from prison, com-muting his sentence to time served.Dec. 28, 1921 — Debs arrived home in Terre Haute from prison and was given a tremen-dous welcome by thousand of Terre Hauteans. Debs spent his remaining days trying to recover his health which was severely undermined by prison confinement. He made sev-eral speeches, wrote many articles and finally in 1926 went to Lindlahr sanitarium just outside of Chicago.Oct. 20, 1926 — Eugene V. Debs died in Lindlahr sanitarium. His body was brought back to Terre Haute where it lay in state in the Terre Haute Central Labor Temple. Great men and women from the world came over to Terre Haute for his funeral which was con-ducted by Norman Thomas from the front porch of the Debs home. ThIrty-eight years later, Thomas returned to Terre Haute to dedicate the Debs home as a memorial to the great humanitarian. Debs was cremated and his ashes were interred in Highland Lawn cemetery, Terre Haute, with only a simple marker. Ten years later his beloved wife, Kate, was buried beside him. Over the years, hundreds have journeyed to his grave to pay trib-ute to this great man whose many reforms have now become a part of the American way of life. There is hardly any American alive today, rich or poor, whose life has not been touched in some beneficent way by the influence of Eugene Victor Debs.

“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves.”— from an address on Industrial Unionism delivered at Grand Central Palace. New York City, Dec. 18,1905.

Born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan, Henry Ford had two brothers and two sisters. His father gave him a pocket watch when he was fifteen. Even at such a young age, Ford re-assembled it and gained the reputation of a watch repairman. When his mother died in 1876, he refused to take over the family farm. Ford became an apprentice machinist in 1879. He also worked for Westinghouse company as a steam engine repairman.Henry Ford built his first steam engine when he was only fifteen. He constructed his first internal combustion engine in 1893 and his first automobile in 1896. Ford changed the way automobiles

were designed and built, bringing in the assembly-line factories for the mass production of vehi-cles that later led to lower prices, and therefore caused a storm in automobile ownership through-out the United States and abroad. He created his first gasoline-driven buggy or Quadricycle in 1893 which was entirely self-propelled.Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and was president of the company from 1906 to 1919. He resumed his post from 1943 to 1945. The gross sales of his company exceeded 250,000 in 1914. The total sales went over 450.000 1916. Ford became the vice president of the Society of Automotive Engineers when it was established in 1905. The institute was formed to system-atize automotive parts in the United States.Henry Ford fell ill and went into retirement in 1945. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage two years later in 1947. Ford was buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit. He was 83 years old.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

and the American DreamF. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. The son of a failed wicker furniture salesman (Edward Fitzgerald) and an Irish immigrant with a large inheritance (Mary "Mollie" McQuillan), Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment.1935 Portrait by David Silvette, courtesy National Portrait Gallery.

Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. His high school newspaper published his detective sto-ries, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. He dropped out of Princeton University to join the army and continued to pursue his obsession, writing magazine articles and even musical lyrics.At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons re-jected it, but with words of encouragement. Beginning a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career, Fitzgerald decided to rewrite "The Ro-mantic Egoist" and resubmit it for publication. Meanwhile, fate, in the form of the U.S. army, stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, where he met and fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern belle - Zelda Sayre. Scribners rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income. Unfortunately, his paltry salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribners finally accepted the novel after Fitzger-ald rewrote it for the third time as "This Side of Paradise", and published it a year later. Fitzger-ald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication.In between writing novels, Fitzgerald was quite prolific as a magazine story writer. The Saturday Evening Post in particular served as a showcase for his short works of fiction, most of which re-volved around a new breed of American woman - the young, free-thinking, independent "flap-per" of the Roaring Twenties.

The Fitzgeralds enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel - "The Beautiful and the Damned" a year after they were married. Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: "The Great Gatsby."The extravagant living made possible by such success, however, took its toll. Constantly globe-trotting (living at various times in several different cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and eight of the United States), the Fitzgeralds tried in vain to escape or at least seek respite from Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness.Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death (due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Car-olina in 1948). Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing. He described his own "crack-up" in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health.Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life - he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie colum-nist. He had started writing again - scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood - when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44, a failure in his own mind. Most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the ex-cesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds to-day until years after his death.