This is the memory palace of Nate de Mayo.

Let me introduce you to Ethan Weinberg, and to Dr. Clifford Weinman, and Royal San

Sarah, and Rodney Weinman, and C. Sterling Weinman.

But first, let me introduce you to Stanley Clifford Weinman, seven years old, working

on the front desk of the Dunwoody Motel in Yonkers, in the middle of the night on August

27th, 1960, right before the two gunmen walked in.

He had been working the motel's graveyard shift for a year, which was longer than he had

spent at nearly any other job he'd ever had.

He liked it.

He liked the hours.

He liked the quiet.

He gave him time to think, and to remember, the people he had known in his life, and the

people he had been.

Stanley Clifford Weinman was born Stephen Jacob Weinberg, in Brooklyn in 1890.

His parents encouraged the boy to dream big, but they couldn't afford to send him off

to the schools he'd have to attend if he wanted to achieve his particular dream, one

of Overseas Adventure and White-type luxury, as a diplomat.

So after high school, Stephen Weinberg got himself a job, assisting a portrait photographer

in Lower Manhattan, with an uppercross clientele.

The men who would come to the studio to sit weren't rocker-founders or asters.

They weren't the men atop the pyramids of capital and government, and public works.

They were the men who held the pyramids up.

...