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38

also had been admiring our train only he'd stuck his head out a side window to get a better view as we'd entered the cut.

When Lew had recovered consciousness in the hospital, he'd remembered one vitally important thing anyhow. The first thing he'd whispered to the doctor was, "I'm a diabetic." Perhaps that had saved his life.

When we were allowed to see Lew briefly that evening, the first thing he whispered weakly to us was, "How did it go?"

"Great," I told him. "Everything worked 100%."

This seemed to please him and he smiled weakly. And he recovered fully. I think he spent a couple of weeks in New Haven Hospital and then returned home. He was back in harness not too long afterward. And I decided that he was a pretty tough guy in spite of looking otherwise.

The following month, I returned to New York to participate in some MU car acceleration tests on the New York Central. The idea of the tests was to increase the accelerating rate on some of their older equipment with the ancient GE69 traction motors and observing motor temperatures to see just how much pushing they would take. We shoved acceleration up to 1.25 MPHPS (miles—per—hour—per-second) finally and the poor old GE69s were really getting a bad fever. The New York Central men present were Bill Hamilton, Lee Beyerl, Tex Weinberg, Fred Butt and Dusty Rhoades. The GE people were Walter Hedley, L.T.Carter, Jay Walker, Bob Williamson, Harold Batzold, John Aydelott, Fay Catlin and me. Also a couple of NYC men I didn't know named Dasha and Dick. (I wonder if "Dasha" wasn't really George Dania whom I thought I'd known in Erie.)

On this same trip, I also visited a Prof. Klemin at Columbia to discuss streamlining trains and locomotives but I can't recall what if anything came out of it.

My propensity for writing seems to have propelled me into a few projects that helped to fill my hours as the regular work fluctuated from feast to famine. Fred Brehob and I wrote an AIEE paper on the New York Central and Lackawanna 3—power locomotives to be presented at the Winter Meeting in New York. I'm virtually sure that I also wrote an AIEE paper with Pinkerton of CUT on the Cleveland Union Terminal locomotives although I find no reference to it in my diary--but that's not surprising inasmuch as the diary was very sporadic. I was also lined up for a paper on the New York Central R—2 West Side freight locomotives and was figuring how I might convince Maurice I should spend two weeks in New York gathering material but that project never came to pass. I was also writing technical articles for Railway Age, Railway Electrical Engineer, Railway Purchases and Stores, G.E.Review and a few other periodicals as time passed. Unfortunately none of these literary efforts paid anything. My first paid article was for the magazine STEEL a number of years later and I was astounded to receive a check from them for $45. In 1931, I also switched from the ASME to the AIEE, having been in the former since college.