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One of the features of the senior year in Engineering, was a series of inspection trips to various plants of industry and associated or related undertakings. I suppose one of the purposes of these trips was to help provide background to facilitate decisions on what sort of work to seek after graduation. We visited MacIntosh & Seymour in Auburn, the diesel engine manufacturer that American Locomotive ultimately bought. Like Busch-Sulzer and Nordberg, M & S produced big, slow-speed engines for heavy duty applications such as marine drives and power plant work, and some of them were mammoth and highly impressive. An elderly M&S design engineer named Harte Cooke had lectured us at school on engine design and he was one of our guides on the plant tour. Later I was to have some contacts with Harte Cooke on locomotive engine projects for the New York Central. Another Auburn inspection trip was a trip through the shops of Auburn prison, of which I have two very distinct recollections: seeing my onetime friend  Luke Dennison in one of the workrooms, about which I've already written; and being given a look at the electric chair, which, I believe, was one of the original chairs, maybe [[underline]]the[[/underline]] first one. Just why this tour was included in our schedule, I don't really know since none of us certainly would aspire to a prison career -- maybe in was intended merely as a warning to lead the straigh life and keep out of trouble. If so, it was quite effective. Another trip was to a power plant in Lyons, N.Y. -I remember little about the power plant, which wasn't too impressive, but I do recall that we all visited a beer parlor although, because of prohibition, it was presumably near-beer.

However, this inspection trip of the greatest significance, although not for its own sake, was that to Merrill-Soule, a processed food plant in Syracuse, where they made and packaged mince meat and a well--known product of the day called Klim (milk spelled backward) which was powdered milk and was terrible. This inspection occurred along in the spring on the day that George Pfeif, the General Electric recruiter, was at school to interview prospects for GE. I knew he was there but I'd not even intended to talk to him, first because I still had no idea of leaving Syracuse. So when I started off on the inspection trip it was my intention to go directly home when I returned from the trip, which would be late in the afternoon. However, when I got back up on the hill about 4:30 p.m., I decided that even if I had no idea of going with GE, it might be good experience for me to interview Mr. Pfeif and learn just what such a job interview was like in anticipation of job interviews with local companies. So I returned to school and decided that if Mr. Pfeif hadn't already left, I'd talk with him. Well, he was still there and that was an apparently minor circumstance that affected the whole