ought
to do, though, is to advertise that this concession will be put up at
auction. Indeed, if this sale were made an annual event, women bidders
would flock to California from all over the world.

A Native Son told me once that he had been given the star-assignment
of newspaper history. Somebody offered a prize to the most beautiful
daughter of California. And his job was to travel all over the State
to inspect the candidates. He said it was a shame to take his pay and
I agreed that it was sheer burglary. All I've got to say is that
if anybody wants to offer a prize for the handsomest Native Son in
California, I'll give my services as judge. I will add that after nearly
two years of war-time Europe, in which I have had an opportunity to
study some of the best military material of England, France, Italy,
Portugal, Spain and Switzerland--the Native Son leads them all. I am
inclined to think he is the best physical specimen in the world.

But there is a great deal more to the Native Son than mere comeliness.
That long list of nationally-famous Californians proves this in one way,
the high average of his citizenship in another. Physically he is a
big, strong, high-geared, high-powered racing machine; and he has an
inexhaustible supply of energy for motive fluid and an extraordinary
degree of initiative and enterprise for driving forces. That initiative
and enterprise spring part from his inalienable pep, his vivid interest
in life; and part from that constructive looseness of the social
structure, which gives them both full play. If the Native Son sees
anything he wants to do, he instantly does it. If he sees anything that
he wants to get, he promptly takes it. If he sees anything that he wants
to be, he immediately is it. He saunters into New York in a degage way
and takes the whole city by storm. He strolls through Europe with an
insouciant air and finds it almost as good as California. All this,
supplemented by his abiding conviction that California must have the
most and best and biggest of everything, accounts for what California
has done in the sixty-odd years of her existence, accounts for what San
Francisco has done in the decade since her great disaster, accounts for
that wartime Exposition; perhaps the most elaborate, certainly the most
beautiful the world has ever seen.

The Native Son has a strong sense of humor and he invents his own slang.
He expresses himself with the picturesqueness of diction inevitable