I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as a teenager. So, the worship of industry was easy to relate to. That being so, for me, one of the best experieces was many decades later, age 50, when my wife and I visited Hoover Dam.

RE: "The greatest moments were reserved for when we came across the constructions which would soon form the parts of a great hydroelectric power scheme. Canals, dams, powerstations, they were all visited and explored by Mr Bailey and his enthralled trio. Nirvana was attained when we stopped to look up at the skeleton of the Pukaki High Dam and were told that soon, our road and us would be drowned under 140 feet of water. Great machines, hundreds of times larger than my own toy trucks, gouged at the earth nearby. Men in hard hats with smiles on their faces waved to us. The magnificence of their endeavours and that of the landscape merged into one, and I'll never forget it. ... My love (fetish?) for bridges, skyscrapers, roads, dams, tunnels, etc. was caused in the first instance by something. I can only trace it back to that one trip, and I was hooked. It's the same for many of us (I'm guessing) when we first grasped what Ayn Rand was saying. Perhaps, like myself, it was Atlas Shrugged (although Anthem has a raw emotional hold on me) that we can identify as a turning point in our lives."