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A Chicken Soup-like tale warning us against the folly of judging people solely by appearances hit the Internet in mid-1998. As usual, the framework of the tale bore some general resemblance to the truth, but details were greatly altered so as to turn it into something quite different from the real story: The very premise of the tale was completely implausible. Leland Stanford (1824-93) was one of the most prominent men of his time in America: He was a wealthy railroad magnate who built the Central Pacific Railroad (and drove the gold spike to symbolize the completion of the first transcontinental rail line at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869), as well as a Republican Party leader who served as California's eighth governor (1862-63) and later represented that state in the U.S. Senate (1885-93). He was an imposing figure, hardly the type of man to dress in a homespun threadbare suit, walk timidly into someone's office without an appointment, and sit cooling his heels for hours until someone deigned to see him. Harvard's president would had to have been an ignorant buffoon not to recognize Stanford's name and promptly greet him upon hearing of his arrival: Moreover, the Stanfords' only son (Leland Stanford, Jr.) died of typhoid fever at age 15, in Florence, Italy. His death would hardly have been described as accidental, nor had he spent a year studying at Harvard while barely into his teens: The closest this story came to reality was in its acknowledgement that in 1884, a few month's after their son's death, the Stanfords did pay a visit to Harvard and met with that institution's president, Charles Eliot. However, the couple did not go there with the purpose of donating a building to Harvard as a memorial to their dead son -- they intended to establish some form of educational facility of their own in northern California, and so they visited several prominent Eastern schools to gather ideas and suggestions about what they might build, as Stanford's website described the meeting: The Stanfords did found their university, modeled after Cornell and located on the grounds of their horse-trotting farm, in memory of their son (hence the school's official name of Leland Stanford Junior University) -- not because they were rudely rebuffed by Harvard's president, but rather because it was what they had planned all along. The rudely-spurned university endowment theme of the Stanford story has reportedly played out at least once in real life. In July 1998, William Lindsay of Las Vegas said he contacted an unnamed Scottish institution of higher learning by telephone and told them he intended to give some money to a university in Scotland. Taking him for a crank, the person he spoke to rudely dismissed him. His next call to Glasgow University met with a warmer reception, and in March 2000 that school received a check for £1.2 million, enough to endow a professorship in Lindsay's name. A 2001 version of this e-mail falsely attributed the piece to Malcolm Forbes, the founder and publisher of Forbes (a business magazine).
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