Viewing page 1 of 113

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[centered]] THE YEAR 1930 [[/centered]]
[[right justified]] 1 [[/right justified]]
[[centered]][[horizontal line]][[/centered]]

1930 was a good year.  The stock market did some more plunging but we were able to hang on to our stock and imagined fondly that in the near future they would recover magnificently, blissfully unaware that we'd only seen the beginning of the slump.  I was busy at GE and starting my new job in Transportation Engineering with the year to be climaxed by a three-month stint on the Lackawanna helping put their two new 3-power locomotives into service.  Willie and Babbie and I were blessed with good health and Bab was the cutest thing we'd ever seen as some of the photographs will indicate.  Our social life was developing well.  We decided to remain at 702 Delaware for another year.  But it is rather evident that we were thinking of our financial situation from the fact we began in the spring to keep a budget record.  Moreover, it was evident also that while we had a lot of current work in the shop, the business prospects were not too encouraging.  But at this point I don't think any of us were particularly concerned about the immediate future.  The days of desperate worry were still a couple of years ahead.

A casual consideration of what I have to work with in writing up 1930 seems to indicate very slim pickings.  There are eleven letters to Mother dated from February 20th to May 25th and these are the last of my letters to Mother that she kept.  There are seven rather sparse diary entries in June and twelve entries in November when I was on the DL&W, and that's it, except for my "Ohms vs. M's" story that was in TRAINS in 1971 which represented quite a lot of research and which I'm including in full plus several other Lackawanna items not included in the article.  But in spite of this paucity of obvious material, I find I'm coming up with a lot to write about as a result of my memory coming into play again when stimulated by various things.  One project I've spent a lot of time on is the organization of the Transportation Engineering Dept. when they moved to Erie late in 1929 and which I joined early in 1930.  It has been fun because it has been like solving a detective yarn.  I've consulted Earl Bill, Gordon McDonald and Frank Sahlmann, as well as Charlie Reed about some related affairs, and I think I now have a clear and correct picture with a few minor exceptions.  So I'm including this along with impressions of many of the people as it was an interesting group.  When I started to write up 1929, I thought I might wind up with 25 pages total but I had 51.  At present, I already have seventeen pages of photographs and the TRAINS article prepared, so I'm off to a flying atart and I believe I might come up again with around fifty pages.  We will see.

Forman H. Craton
Erie, Pa.,
August 28, 1973.

Transcription Notes:
Next to last line "flying atart" as in the original