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Formon Coots isn't it?) and he said he designed that whole apparatus in it right on his desk in only a few days, it being a sort of makeshift, hurry-up job. They are designing equipment now, among others, for a big self-unloading limestone dredging ship for the Bradley Transportation Co. on the Great Lakes. I believe it's to be my first job. Mr. Dunham said today he may have me start working on the wiring diagram for it; possibly I shall work on the Panama Canal tugs too. So you can see what a marvellously interesting place I'm in. And in addition to the ship propulsion work, I'm also to work on diesel and gas-electric locomotives, the last word. I think I'm certainly about as lucky a boy as ever lived.....Mr. Webb is the man who designed all that marvelous apparatus for those two gigantic airplane carriers, the "Saratoga" and the "Lexington," each ship having a power plant on it big enough to supply the power needs for a city the size of Philadelphia. He's a very unprepossessing looking man but there are brains in that head of his beyond the ordinary.  I think he'll be a fine man to work for too; he certainly helped me through holding that job for me for three weeks. He told me Monday he was mighty glad it was all settled and that he'd done all he could because he'd made up his mind he wanted me and wanted to see me get a square deal. So I certainly did feel good after that and thanked him......Somerville is in the Motor Engineering Department and all week has been figuring out the schedule of train on a section of a railroad over in New Zealand that they want to electrify, making separate calculations for every curve and grade and tangent on the whole line.

[[underlined]] To Willie, November 1926: [[/underlined]] Yesterday I finished the wiring diagram for the Panama Canal tugboats and it went to the drafting room this morning. Now I'm checking Atlantic Refining Co. diagrams and finishing them besides checking Southern Pacific diagrams, which latter are for equipment going into the largest ferryboats in the world, being built for the Southern Pacific System for carrying automobiles across San Francisco Bay; each boat will carry 90 machines.

[[underlined]] To Mother, November 1926: [[/underlined]]  The West 10th apartment I looked at is very nice although the rooms are rather small and the rent is $50 including heat and water and janitor service, which is a lot. However, the location isn't so good. It's on the third floor and faces across the street where all the garages are. On the back is a porch and across a rather narrow space is the rear of one of the other buildings, and as Dick Lottridge says in his very funny way, "You can almost reach across and pick your neighbor's milk bottle off the other porch." I also stopped at a place on West 9th which I think very nice.

Erie, Pa.,
Friday, November 26, 1926.

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