Viewing page 1 of 141
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
1 THE YEAR 1926 ----- 1926 was another very important year for me because I finally got myself pointed in the right direction and took off so to speak toward a goal that this time held pretty steady ahead of me. Again, there is quite a good record for this year. The diary is again desultory but there are many letters to Mother and Willie filling out the record although apparently Willie and I had agreed to stop writing to each other every day as an unnecessary drain on our time. The diary is good for the first three weeks of January, then drops abruptly to few entries in May follow-ed by a gap to mid-September, then a pretty fair record for the rest of the year. Additionally, there are excellent photographic records of Erie, Lawrence Park, GE test, and our summer vacation trip to Kentucky. Some of the early January diary was written on Bldg.61 steam turbine test paper in pencil so I shall type that up on this 6 1/2 x 9 looseleaf paper to be more easily filed. Otherwise,I may let the diary stand as is and insert the letter excerpts in the proper chronological spots among the diary pages, or it might be more accurate to say I'll place the diary pages at the right spots among the excerpts. I took the train to Erie Sunday, January 10, 1926, and Erie has been my home ever since, some 47 years at this point. I spent that night at the YMCA and the next day moved to a room in Lawrence Park in the home of Bill Schryver and his wife, Bill being a toolmaker at GE. I took my meals at Mrs. Webster's boarding house directly behind the Schryvers. The plant was less than a half a mile away but it was some five miles to the center of Erie. I lived with the Schryvers until summer, when I rented a furnished apartment on Poplar Street I think for Mother and me to use as she spent the summer here. My impression is that I couldn't get back into Schryvers in the fall and took a room a couple of doors from them on Silliman Avenue. Also Willie visited here that summer at the apartment. In January 1927 I rented an apartment at 1308 West 9th Street where Willie and I set up housekeeping after our marriage January 22nd. My GE work in Erie was fascinating. I started on Bldg.6 motor test days, remaining there for about one month and then took a "sign-up" on both days and nights for six months, during the latter period, being head of the night test. I then moved to locomotive test where it was like living in a dream for someone like me who'd always been fascinated by locomotives and railroads. As early October approached, I looked forward to transferring into railway equipment engineering which was in the process of being transferred to Erie from Schenectady, with control as my first assignment. But in order to be in position to move around the several design departments and get a diversified experience, one had to be accepted for what was nows as "Anderson's Course." This was really a course aimed at training men for application engineering and commercial work eventually and
