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complete with gondola rides. Venice also became associated with the “Craftsman” style of architecture. At one point in 1930, the Snyder family lived in a single-family Craftsman home at 221 Market Street.
    In 1928, Hendrick Snyder quit his job painting at the three-story, sixty-bed Santa Monica Hospital on Sixteenth Street. The work paid a tidy sum of twenty-five dollars per week, but when Hendrick was refused a vacation, he simply put down his paintbrush and walked away, leaving his wife to support the family with her housekeeping jobs. The Great Depression plunged the country into an economic morass a few years later, and Hendrick never held another proper job again.
    These were tough times. During young Harry’s teenage years he was a bit of a tough himself, engaging in petty theft and sparring with his friends at the amateur boxing gym in Ocean Park. Throughout, he managed to maintain a fierce sense of responsibility. Although he was just a young man and the Depression had flattened prospects for most, Harry always found a way to earn a buck. He landed a number of odd jobs—and he always supported his family, giving them five dollars every week from whatever money he had earned.
    Among his many jobs, Harry worked as a paperboy. Delivering the Venice Vanguard on his bicycle, he boasted that he could finish his route up and down Washington Boulevard in half an hour. Among his other jobs, Harry worked for a grocer, sold sandwiches, and delivered hot dog and hamburger buns for a bakery. And for a period he worked at the concession stands on the pleasure piers of Venice. Even as the cheap entertainments offered on the piers grew increasingly shoddy, attracting a more vulgar crowd to the once upscale beaches, Harry picked up a number of odd jobs doing everything from selling red hots to picking up rental umbrellas on thebeach. “It was not very much money,” he once remarked. “But money in those days was money.”
    By his own admission, Harry was not much of an academic. Despite his innate intellect, he was never more than a middling student. “I went through high school with a C-average without cracking a book at all,” he once said. “A teacher told me if I had ever studied I could’ve gotten good grades.” Rather, Harry excelled in the areas of common sense and resourcefulness. An amateur electronics enthusiast, he demonstrated the kind of mind suited to putting together and taking apart gadgets.
    During his high school days, Harry developed a keen interest in cars and a fondness for smoking Chesterfield cigarettes—a habit he picked up while playing a regular game of rummy with his buddies. Following high school, he enrolled at Santa Monica Junior College, but quit after one semester. “I couldn’t afford to go,” he later explained. “I had to work to keep myself going.” Many years later when Harry looked back at this period he claimed that the times had briefly transformed him into a radical. “I was a communist,” he declared. “I saw the capitalist system as a total failure. We needed a whole new system, and communism was the only answer. Everyone working together and sharing it all instead of some getting it all.” In all likelihood, Harry’s drive and tenacity were propelled by the uncertainty of watching his parents labor to provide for his family, chasing one opportunity after another, and by the Depression years. And despite his youthful transgressions, Harry grew into a disciplined fellow with a strong sense of responsibility. He had learned early that luck was not something that found you; if you wanted it, you had to go looking for it yourself.
    By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, Harry had already begun to make some luck of his own. Having returned to Seattle at one point, he worked as a railway signal operator. During the war, Seattle became a center for industrial manufacturing; it also