At age 18, Marriner, left, and his friend Norman Salisbury lived in a boxcar while working on the Sumpter Valley Railroad in Oregon. Note the pipe advertisement on the wall along with the pretty women. Courtesy of Spencer F. Eccles Although Marriner claimed he "lived in mortal fear" of his father, he could not resist a few youthful capers. One job of collecting sawdust from a lumber mill was so tedious that Marriner devised ways to capture the squirrels that darted about the woods. When he proudly presented three squirrels to his mother, she silently opened the cage and released them, letting Marriner know that he should not indulge in a frivolous distraction. The summer Marriner neared 14, he and a classmate worked together stacking boxwood. One day they decided to place a roof across two stacks and create their own little house. Next they brought a BB gun, tapioca, flour, butter, and a pan from home, and then went frog hunting at a nearby creek. They stunned the frogs with a blast of tapioca, then removed the legs to fry over a campfire. After the boys enjoyed a few glorious weeks of frog-leg lunches, a foreman spotted a plume of smoke, followed it to the culprits, and uttered the supreme threat - that he would tell Marriner's father. Next, Marriner longed for a .22 rifle, which was forbidden. More savvy by now and working in the company commissary, he simply made sure that his customers noticed a certain cigar, which sported a premium band. If a customer purchased the cigar but did not wish to keep the premium, Marriner asked to have it. Finally he had enough premiums to cash them in for a rifle. "After that," concluded his authorized biographer, Sidney Hyman, "there was much mourning among the cottontail rabbits in the area." Marriner attended high school at the Brigham Young College in Logan, excelling in mathematics and concluding his formal education in June 1909. His father saw no reason for his sons to attend universities unless they intended to become doctors or lawyers. David reminded his incipient capitalists that only two of his employees boasted a college education one a streetcar conductor and the other a motorman on the Ogden Rapid Transit System.