genius for organization the special qualities that were needed to get his unique project properly under way, induced him to accept the General Management and Vice-Presidency of the Torrance company. Collaborating with the noted landscape engineer, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Mr. Sinclair helped plan the industrial city of Torrance, in which an increased economy for the manufacturer has been kept no more steadfastly in mind than a healthful and uplifting environment for the employee. Torrance's history is still in the making, but the striking success which has attended it down to the present is sufficiently traced in a recent number of Sunset.
The intimate study of California's economic and industrial possibilities incident to his work at Torrance makes Mr. Sinclair's view on that subject an interesting one. "With the completion of the Canal," he said recently, "California will tend more and more toward self-sufficiency. Hitherto we have depended almost entirely upon the Eastern states for our manufactures and as a market for our agricultural and horticultural products. The Canal will bring us a great working population which will consume more and more of the products of our soil, while its labor is going to produce here the manufactures we now bring from the east of the Mississippi, thus effecting a saving of freight in each instance which should operate toward materially lowering the cost of living on the Pacific Coast. We will have a great trade with the Eastern States and the rest of the world, but it will not be long before we are independent of them for the main requirements of our daily life."
As it would not be possible to consider Pacific Coast yachting without speaking of Captain Henry Sinclair, so, too, will a sketch of the latter be incomplete without some allusion to his connection with Pacific Coast yachting. Since a voyage around the Horn before the mast in his boyhood days, Sinclair's mind, in the few idle moments he has known, has always turned seaward, but the 10,000-mile cruise through the islands of the South Pacific on the "Lurline," purchased from John D. Spreckels, was his first chance to satisfy a lifelong ambition. A meeting with Honolulu yachtsmen in the course of that cruise resulted in the first of the now world-famous biennial transpacific race from a California port to Hawaii, an event which Captain Sinclair himself subsequently won twice with the "Lurline." His time of a little over twelve days from San Pedro to Honolulu stands as the present race record.
It is far easier to draw Mr. Sinclair out on yachting than on industrial progress, especially on such occasions as the present when, as a half dozen times before, he begins to talk about retiring from active business and taking a rest. His idea of a rest, be it known, is to stand a double watch at the kicking wheel of a fifty-ton schooner, with all the canvas close-reefed and a roaring sou'easter tearing the tops off the waves and slamming them down on his shivering deck. I know, for I've seen him taking rest and change on a good many occasions in just that way. I haven't a particle of doubt that, if he had his own way, the Captain would be off on another cruise within the month. But this can hardly be. The Pacific Coast will have too much work during the next decade that no one else can do quite so well as Henry Sinclair to be able to spare him at this time, and I shall miss my guess if he is not up to his neck in some new pioneering project before the year is out. Lewis R. Freeman.
A Secretary and Her Salary
MISS Fern Hobbs, age twenty-seven, is drawing the highest salary of any woman in public service in the United States. She is private secretary to Governor Oswald West at Oregon and receives $3000 a year. If she had secured her position through the manipulation of politics the telling about it would not be half so interesting; but she secured it because she earned it. She says she won the place because the governor is broad enough to employ a woman as readily as a man when she does the same work. All that he wants is results.
Born in Nebraska of early Puritan stock, at the age of six Miss Hobbs went to Salt Lake City, Utah, with her parents. There she lived for twelve years, finishing the high school. About that time her father met with serious financial reverses and she was compelled to make her own way and help support a brother and a sister. She came to Oregon and became governess in a wealthy home in Portland. She was ambitious. She wanted to get out into the
