Not sure what age, but I must have been older than one or so because I was walking (running, in fact), but younger than two years, three months, because that's when I got polio, and that ended the running.

I had one of those toys they called "windmills" or "pinwheels"—a small plastic (celluloid, actually) four-bladed propeller attached to a stick with a pin (something like THIS, but not quite this fancy). A breath of wind and the propeller would spin. I remember running around the house (not in the house, but outside, around the house) at top speed, holding the thing in front of me and watching the propeller whirl.

The second memory, from around that same time, was from shortly thereafter.   We (my mother, father, big sister—two years older than me—and me) were on our way from Los Angeles, where my sister and I were born, to Seattle, where our parents were from. We went by ship (you could do that back then). I remember standing on a steamer-trunk and staring, fascinated, out a porthole at the vast expanse of water. The following morning when I woke up, I scrambled up on the steamer trunk, looked out the porthole, and saw, a few feet away, a forest of pilings covered with creosote and barnacles.

I yelled, "Get it out of the way, daddy, get it out of the way!!"

My dad laughed and said to my mother, "My God, he wants me to move the San Francisco harbor!"

Don Firth