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17

According to my records, when TED was set up in Erie, Andrews was assigned also the motor, control and locomotive engineering operations which were under the immediate command of F.E. Case. I suspect, however, that this was one of those situations in the old days, where a man had two bosses. In this instance, Case had "reporting responsibility" to Andrews but "functional responsibility" through Emmet to the VP of engineering in Schenectady. Also in 1930, Walter Harris and his "Automotive Equipment Engineering" group were moved from Lynn to Erie and set up shop in an office adjacent to TED on 4-14. In this unit were J.U.Neill, Lanier Greer, Willis Davis, Vern Norrish, J.D.McDonald and Curly Tyrell. They designed rotating machines for battery trucks, gas-electric buses, trolley coaches and similar vehicles using small, high-speed, frame-mounted equipment. Harris reported to Case I believe. Harris was to prove a rather unique and controversial figure clean through his career and retirement and up to his death about two months ago.

I have already described my immediate boss, Sam Dodd, but before going father, I believe I should give some treatment to the three "big bosses," Andrews, David and Guynes, who were to influence my life and affairs considerably over the next few years. I'll take them in the following:

[[underlined]] Hardage L. Andrews: [[/underlined]] I think Andy was basically a pretty good guy but if you hadn't gotten to know him fairly well, you would seldom suspect it. He was a Missourian, a big, raw-boned man with a hard, handsome face, somewhere around forty. He'd come up through traction motor engineering into railway application work and had been Potter's assistant. He was distinctly an "executive type" and he had faults. One of his faults was a propensity for hair-trigger decisions based on insufficient knowledge of the matter in hand. He was snappy and did things very rapidly. When I was on motor test, a large batch of 1500/3000 volt traction motor armatures were going through on a complaint for the Paulista Railway in Brazil and I was told this was because of an error made by Andy on the original equipment when he was in motor engineering, the kind of error usually attributable to carelessness. Andy was dynamic and in his desire to develop a locomotive to compete with the diesel in the mid-thirties, he swallowed, hook, line and sinker, a promotion by the Turbine Engineering people in Schenectady that the answer was a very high-speed steam-turbine operating between a very high-pressure flash boiler and a condenser. On the strength of his highly-convincing pitch to the board of directors, including an estimate it could be built in nine months, he got an appropriation to proceed. It took more like two years, lost the Company about two million dollars, and was ultimately an abject failure. I think Andy had poor judgment. Even I could have told Andy at the time that he was being led