Success Stories of a Failure Analyst: The Life of Franklin St. John

MY FATHER-IN-LAW WAS BORN IN 1938, in a house without a toilet, in a flyspeck of a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His grandfathers were both lumberjacks. His father was a plowman. If anything was expected of Franklin St. John at all, it was that he would follow one of those two career paths. Instead, through more quirks of fate that can quickly be recounted, he became, of all things, a metallurgical engineer. . . .

What he sees as a personal account of random events that happened t...