Viewing page 37 of 154

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

15

[[underline]] To Willie, September 29, 1924: [[/underline]] The one bad feature of leaving Schenectady on a weekend like that, is the awful letdown one has on getting back to town. It seems as though one minute you are in heaven, and the next minute in Schenectady. However, I don't mean to insinuate that this city is in any way connected with the place where raccoon coats are not a necissity. In fact, Schenectady is an unusually nice and interesting town but almost any city would suffer by comparison with the Lake George country. ...... It was queer, wasn't it, that you should have walked right to the Schenectady flowers. Things like that seem to happen so often that I sometimes wonder if, after all, they are queer. It seems as though perhaps they are the [[underline]] natural [[/underline]] thing. ...... The church here is very nice. I like the young English minister and the people were all very cordial and pleasant to us, making us feel quite at home. There's no YPRU but the minister seems favorable to the organization of one, so we may get one going yet. At present, the boys attend the Laymen's League and the girls have a club of their own, which is characteristic of Schenectady, it being said that it is a city of old maids and bachelors. ...... Just at present, my job requires no head work at all. I am putting in the requisite two weeks on a small drill press. Most of the machines in the battery are run by 16 or 18-year-old boys and consequently the prices are low. I figured up tonight that I made $11.13 last week according to the piece rates. We get our regular pay anyhow, so it's all right, but I guess $12 a week is considered pretty good money for the boys. ...... Right now, they (Bldg.60) are building turbines for all over the world. My friend is working (as "assistant helper") on "the dinky", "Sioux City No.2". Although they call it "the dinky," because it is so small in comparison with most of the others, it weighs 140 tons. I am enclosing a picture of one of the Detroit Edison turbine-generators in the process of assembly. This one is as large as any in the world. You can't gain any conception of the immense size of the thing because there is no person with whom to compare it. However, the largest wheel must be about fifteen feet in diameter. The generator is not yet installed but you can see the end bearing. When we work around such marvelous things as that, we feel glad to be engineers. But, after all, one might paraphrase Joyce Kilmer and say:

Turbines are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Next week I go on small assembly and switchboard assembly for a couple of months. Then I plan to get downstairs into the turbine department, where I want to follow one of the big machines from the time the parts are received for assembly, through erection and test, until the outfit is ready to be torn down for shipment. One of my friends is on such a job now, being "assistant helper." The result is that he mostly observes and does very little actual work. However, there is a lot to observe in that shop.