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-- it might have been the Illinois Central -- and he called up the head of Commonwealth Edison and asked him how much notice he would require to get ready to handle the additional load; and the utility man's reply was, "Well, could you give me just a few hours soI'd have time to warm up another machine in case we might need it?" And lastly there was Prof. Hazlitt, the English teacher, from whom I got very high grades indeed, particularly on my written submissions.

For summer work in 1921, I got a job as a casting snagger at the Easy Washing Machine Co. way out on the north side and rode my bike to work, the trip being 8-10 miles total, but it saved carfare and the exercise was probably beneficial. However, I got plenty of exercise on my casting snagger work. We'd get a lot of castings direct from the foundry; they would be clean but that was all and our job was to grind all the parting metal off of them as well as any other excess material. We worked in a walled off enclosure and I think there were six or eight of us in the place, each assigned to a grinding wheel. It was a piecework set-up and by really applying myself, I could make as much as $30 a week, a bonanza. I think I made close to $300 that summer and that was enough largely ^[[to]] pay my tuition for the whole year. I don't remember a soul who worked at that plant, neither foreman nor fellow workers.  It was a neat, modern, one-story factory and it was rather fun to see Easy washers, which were among the best, being made, but I must have kept my nose pretty close to the grindstone both literally and figuratively that summer because my memories of Easy are might sparse.

Hillegas and Holly had graduated and in September, we got a new roomer, Frederic Armstrong Thalman of Rome, N.Y. who enrolled in the Engineering School in mechanical engineering. It developed that Fred was to become the second of my two best friends at college, the other being Rog Casler. But in Fred's case, the friendship was to last until this day whereas I got out of touch with Rog as soon as we graduated and have seen him only once in the ensuing 48 years and until this past Christmas, neither had we corresponded. I could write a book about Fred and have thought several times that I'd try a novel based on Fred's life. Fred was the exception that proves the rule that to become a Deke, all you have to do is own a Cadillac. Fred's family had a Cadillac and a chauffeur and Fred's mother, who was one of the Rome Armstrongs, was brought up in the bosom of Rome society -- and Rome was a town of a good deal of wealth because of the copper fabricating industry. But Fred's mother asserted her independence by marrying Martin Thalman, a big, handsome man who, as far as Rome society was concerned, had just one thing wrong with him -- he was the son of a bartender. And that ^[[was]] apparently the end of Fred's mother as far as Rome society was concerned; she never recovered entirely from her one