M: That is right.

P: What did you do for this accounting firm where you began working in
 Houston?

M: Because I had a graduate business degree, and conceivably because of my
 military rank and law degree, I was made a senior accountant immediately.
 I was supposedly guiding people who had worked in the firm for a year or
 two already.

P: Although you were fresh.

M: Even though I was as green as could be. I performed the usual jobs of a
 senior accountant. We would go out and check over the accounting system
 that a company had, and we would then go through and pick out usually two
 months of their detailed transactions and go through every item of that to see
 if they were in conformity with the magic term "generally accepted accounting
 principles."

P: Things were not quite as complicated then as they are now, I suspect.

M: No, things were not nearly as complicated then as they are now. However,
 I managed to overlap the era of the old stand-up desks. The ladies who had
 worked for one company for fifty-some years wanted no part of any kid
 coming in, C.P.A. firm or not, and explaining to them anything about what
 they had been doing very satisfactory since before this kid was born.

P: I can see you had a very warm and cordial reception in that office.

M: The first such reception that I got was from a firm in a little town called
 Liberty, Texas. The people who we audited were the big entrepreneurs in
 town. They had a hardware store, an undertaking business, a wholesale
 grocery store, and a garage where they sold gasoline and a number of other
 things. The one thing that interested me from that was the preceding year
 they had sold $1 million of snuff, and that is a lot of snuff!

P: So you worked for this firm for two years.

M: I worked for them for a year. Then I took my C.P.A. exam and passed it.

P: You passed it the first time?

M: Yes. I was given credit for the law part, so I really had to take only three
 parts of it. I had gotten a very good grounding in the other three parts of
 it at Wharton. We had an excellent course in accounting practice. I thought
 I was going to flunk it; I received a D on it, but I managed to get by. It was
 so different from the normal "add up the columns, take your ruler and draw

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