Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1180196
19 THE CAPITOL DOME with the increased power he wielded. Eventually, Mein Kampf made Hitler a millionaire. By 1939, Hitler had already begun executing the plans he spelled out in Mein Kampf. Cranston had grown up in what is now Silicon Valley in California with his father William, mother Carol, and sister Ruth Eleanor. A brother had died before he was born. William Cranston's real estate business suffered as a result of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and then again with the Great Depression. However, his fortunes improved, and he provided Alan with a comfortable and happy childhood enjoying life in a home with a farm and acres of velvet green meadows where he thrived under the California sun and the serene vista. Here, he grew to love nature and later became a champion of preserving the environment for generations to come. He was close to his supportive parents and sister and shared a love of travel that included trips to several European countries while he was in his teens. Cranston developed a passion for track and field, adventure, and journalism. A voracious reader, he also showed an early talent for writing. His dream was to become a foreign correspondent, which he envisioned would be a glamorous life full of adventure. He began filing stories for the school and local newspa- pers while still in his early teens. He grew up idolizing his father's good friend, Fremont Older, a pioneer in journal- ism in California. The Cranston family had a wide range of friends, including writers and creative people from all walks of life, so young Alan was exposed to a diversity of views. He was also a track star at Stanford University (fig. 3), where he clocked in at 9.9 seconds for the 100-yard dash and 48 seconds for the 440. He was was fast but he missed making it to the Summer Olympics. He resolved to work harder and gained greater discipline which was to serve him well for the rest of his life. He maintained that discipline later in life and set a world record in the 100-yard dash for seniors at 55 years old (12.6 seconds). He was called the fastest man in the Senate. 3 Cranston honed his marketing skills at Stanford by fundraising for the campaign of a non-sorority student in an election for prom queen. He hired an airplane service to skywrite her name. The stunt, unusual for its time, was a tremendous attention-getter and broke fundraising records. However, their success only served to the rally their opponents, so they went all out even more aggres- sively to raise funds. Unfortunately, Cranston's candidate lost the election. Still, it showed that Cranston wasn't afraid to try something new and demonstrated a flair for marketing. He was fast on the track and also easily made his deadlines while reporting for The Stanford Daily. After graduating from Stanford in 1936 (fig. 4), Cranston was hired by the International News Service (INS), a news wire service that was part of the William Randolph Hearst media empire. INS was later merged with UPI. He traveled to Europe and filed reports from Ethiopia, Rome, and London covering Italy's longtime fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and the rise of Adolf Hitler. The increasing power of Hitler was especially dis- turbing to him because of his eyewitness experience: he had toured Europe, including Germany, with his family and had spent a semester of study in Germany mingling and getting to know Germans in 1934. His travels enhanced a working knowledge of the language, includ- ing reading Mein Kampf in its original German. In addi- tion to German, Cranston had also studied Spanish and French during college and spent a summer studying at the University of Mexico. Cranston studied at Pomona College in California ( June 1932 to December 1933) before transferring to Stanford in January 1934. One night on the streets of Munich, Cranston got a clear look at Hitler—close enough to describe the chan- cellor as having a glazed look in his eyes. He had watched on the sidelines at one of Hitler's speeches and the Fig. 4. Cranston's 1936 Stanford University graduation picture