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33

THE YEAR 1925

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My diary grew desultory in 1925. Each day, I wrote a letter to Mother and to Willie which took considerable time but now I'm about to cash in on those letters in the absence of a good diary. Also, I took an accounting course on the side at GE and that involved a lot of homework. I did keep a diary of sorts from the first of the year through the month of May although it began to fall behind in February and continued to be that way throughout the period -- so it wasn't too accurate or detailed as far as my every day life was concerned. I resumed writing the diary on October 11th and continued until early December but again I failed to keep at it daily and it wasn't really a diary as such during that period. Consequently I'm hopeful that the letter excerpts for the year will truly supply a wealth of detail that's missing almost entirely in the diary. In the following, I'll try to sketch in very briefly the main events of the year from what diary there is plus my memory and then proceed with the excerpts to fill out the picture, which I think should be an interesting one because it was a very important year in my life.

In January, I was getting underway on my job with Christian Steenstrup with a view to becoming a specialist under him on the hydrogen-copper brazing process over which he was enthusiastic as a new manufacturing technique to compete with casting and welding. However, its application to say the fabrication of magnet frames, was ruled out by high cost as compared to welded plate which had been rolled into rings, and I think The King, as they dubbed Steenstrup, could see the process would have a limited application. The result of this was that I soon had to scrounge around looking for things to do although The King tried to keep me occupied at various miscellaneous assignments. My problem was that I had so limited an experience in manufacturing that I wasn't a self-starter and I had to be guided more than Steenstrup had time to devote to me. As a result of this situation, I gradually became very unhappy in my job and finally transferred to test where I literally started all over again on an engineering instead of a manufacturing career. It proved to have been a good change. I really wasn't a manufacturing man at heart anyhow. But while this was evolving, I went through considerable hell, suffering from homesickness besides. I wondered if I was even cut out to be in any kind of engineering at all and perhaps should return to college and study something else. Surprisingly, Mother was the one who straightened me out about GE and convinced me that I should remain with the Company. My first "test" assignment was in AC Engineering for three months on synchronous motor design, followed by three months in one of the most famous of the Schenectady tests, "61 Nights," an experimental turbine test in which not one testman knew what the purpose was of what he was doing. Then I transferred to Erie and was on the beam.