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42

   We drifted along through the fall with things slumping lower and lower. It was a poor time to be pessimistic because then, besides having little at present, you had even less to look forward to. But when December came, I was extremely pessimistic, and when that way, the only thing that helped was to take a walk, calm down, get myself reoriented and thinking clearly again. One beautiful morning I felt this way and took a walk to Bldg. 60, Locomotive Test. The sun was shining, the air hardly chill. It made me feel better and I looked at things in a more optimistic way. I counted my blessings and they were many. But there were no business blessings in view that morning. Bldg. 60 was absolutely flat. Metzner, the foreman, was there and Harry Craig, his assistant, was running the boiler. They were all. There was no work at all. Bldg. 10, the locomotive shop, was empty except for the two fire-damaged R-2's the New York Central had returned to us for repairs. Even for this work, we were getting very little because at least some of it was being done on complaint. The cab shop, Bldg. 26, was flat except for one electric milk wagon Devlin was building. For the very first time for us, conditions actually looked really bad. I suppose there was a little business in the motor and control shops but not much and most of it would be renewal parts. It promised ill for 1933 because there was no sign of anything developing.
   Before closing out the year 1932 on a couple of hopeful items that nothing ever came of, however, I'll cover a few miscellaneous things and people of interest:

   Because of the [[handwritten]] ^[[PRR]] [[/handwritten]] coordinated design required of GE and Westinghouse on equipment for the electrification, there were suddenly a lot of GE-W contacts necessary, their people frequenting our establishment and our people theirs until it got to seem quite natural. During the summer, as a result of this new and strange alliance, a W-GE golf tournament was arranged on neutral ground, maybe Cambridge Springs or Edinboro. The thing was expanded to include more than those working on the PRR job and I got in on it. All I can recall is that there was a W control engineer named Gemmel in our four-some and he proved to be a very nice guy, a sort of eyeopener to me, who'd always carried the somewhat childish idea that if a guy worked for Westinghouse, he had to be both non compos mentis and a son-of-a-bitch also.

   Maynard Allen was the GE chauffeur who drove the Company Packards of that era and thereby acquired a fine reputation among the visiting GE dignitaries and customers whom he served. He was a handsome man, wore a well-tailored gray uniform, handled himself well, was throughly reliable, and made a distinct contribution. But he had higher ambitions and talked somebody into making him the guy who handled customer's inspectors, messengers, people coming in and out on such missions--and thereby, in my opinion, he transformed himself