She didn't care if I looked right, wore the right clothes, dated the right girls, was popular at sports--none of those prejudices existed in the public library. When she handed me the card, she handed me the world. I can't even describe how liberating it was. She recommended westerns and science fiction but every now and then would slip in a classic. I roared through everything she gave me and in the summer read a book a day. It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five-gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank."
1 The love of reading and the outdoors eventually took Paulsen to Bemidji College. "As I'd grown up hunting and trapping, I was able to pay my way through the first year by laying trap lines for the state of Minnesota."1
From college, Paulsen went into the army for three years. "I worked with missiles. When I got out of the service, I took extension courses and accrued enough credits to become a field engineer."1
Working in that capacity, Paulsen was employed in the aerospace departments of Bendix and Lockheed after the army.
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