23 year-old Scott Theobold is a cipher to most who know him. Most
frequently described as "bookish," or "a mite peculiar," he speaks little,
and appears to most observers to be uninterested in the night-life and
speakeasy carousing most youths his age are involved in. Although he
attended the Georgia School of Technology*1 for a couple of years, the
academic rigor and mandatory Corps of Cadets participation grew tiresome.
Through a little finagling and some creative exaggeration of his academic
record, he was able to earn a Junior Draftsman post at the aircraft
manufacturing plant Northwest of town*2.While it was exciting to be part of this new industry, the drudgery of
plans, and changes, and changes on the changes to the changed plans, was
again wearing thin. Scott spent a lot of his spare time in local book shops
and libraries, enjoying his more preferred unstructured learning. Recently,
through one of those chains of association from book to book and subject to
subject that you could never deliberately plan, let alone recreate, he
found himself in the rare books room of the Atlanta Public Library, under
the disapproving and watchful glare of a spinster librarian of
indeterminate age--and nearly indeterminate gender. Under his gloved
fingers, he gingerly turned the pages of a book that still seemed to carry
the scent of the burning of Atlanta during the recent unpleasantness, and
may actually not have been opened since those fateful days as Sherman
marched on his way to the sea.*1 Renamed Georgia Institute of Technology in 1948
*2 Now Lockheed-Martin Aircraft
