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Erie for material and had considerable success. My diary soon was abandoned so I have no record of its building or shipment but apparently the project was carried out.
   On January 5th, I note that I received the galley proof of my AIEE paper on the Cleveland Union Terminal project which was written with Pinkerton, the CUT Electrical Engineer, and that I wasn't "particularly proud of it." This wasn't surprising because I don't think it was any more than a high class technical description of the locomotives and other things.
   Such projects helped to give me a little to do, however, and as such, were valuable. Another chore of a literary nature that I'd picked up, was the editing of the GE Griswold Club FLASHES, the club's monthly news sheet. Also, I was vice-president of the club while Lanier Greer was president, having succeeded Tom Perkinson.
   On January 3rd, Tom Sawyer, who'd left FE to join the Alco Engineering Department, breezed into the office. He was the same old carefree Tom. When he'd been in Erie, he'd given Maybelle quite a play. She'd been single then and I think she fell pretty hard for Tom but nothing came of it and he left town in due course. The story went that Maybelle married Walt Scarborough on the rebound. Tom ended by marrying the daughter of Ennis, who was Alco's vice-president of engineering. Tom was generally a nice guy but I think he'd been spoiled while being brought up in an affluent home--his father was Willets Sawyer, a transit company president in Columbus, I think--and as I was to learn a few years later, Tom could be both arrogant and disagreeable when he felt in the mood. But he was a selfstarter with a lot of push as he demonstrated by personally installing electric drive on his Jordan car, adapting various gas-electric bus units to the job. Now he was a customer.
   The previous November the New York Central had asked us for a proposition on a diesel-battery locomotive using four ancient GE69 MU-car motors they had in their stock to cut the cost. I'd spent about six weeks working on this proposal with the assistance of our engineers and thought we'd come up with a very good offering. It was only one unit and for a special application but even the prospect of an order for one unit was very alluring at the time. So we presented our proposal all frilled up with fancy specs and a rock bottom price and sat back expectently--only to find in due time that the railroad had bought a secondhand locomotive from Bethlehem Steel for the job. We were crushed. But a few days later, Jay Walker phoned me to say there was nothing definite settled yet about the Bethlehem locomotive so not to get discouraged. However, I'm sure we never received such an order because it would have been as conspicuous as a palm tree growing smack in the center of the locomotive assembly floor had we built it in the otherwise empty shop. But I was bitterly disappointed because I'd worked hard to put this one across. Moreover, I had still to learn there's many a slip twixt cup and lip on such jobs.