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10

There was another phase of my GE responsibilities which began to require increasing attention as things picked up. This was customer entertainment when visiting Erie. This had always been in the picture but with the end of Prohibition in December 1933, drinking places began to proliferate and instead of somewhat furtively obtaining and swigging bootleg liquor, usually in a hotel room, great vistas of bibulous opportunity opened up with dozens of places to patronize. Most of our customers enjoyed a few drinks at the end of a hard day at the plant and expected their GE hosts to do the right thing by taking them to a suitable drinking spot and finally to dinner. Our expense accounts were designed to handle this without the slightest question as long as things were kept within reason. So I had to gradually handle more and more of this sort of diversion as my responsibilities increased and particularly as I handled more and more work involving customer visits to Erie. The Illinois Central locomotive jobs were a good case in point and I shall devote some space to this whole matter in due course. In addition to these activities I've mentioned, I'm sure I engaged in a lot of minor jobs, particularly proposition work, but I'd judge that in 1935, the three orders I handled, covered in the previous paragraph, occupied the major part of my time.
 
Taking them chronologically, I'll begin with the Boston & Maine diesel-electric car. But first it should be understood that during this period, the business arrangement under which we operated had Ingersoll-Rand the prime contractor, who made the sales of both locomotives  and railcars direct to the customers. In the case of the locomotives, GE was the sub-contractor who supplied the locomotive mechanical and electrical portions and assembled the unit. It was a sort of tail-wagging-dog set-up but that's the way it was. In the case of a railcar, the B & M car in particular, I-R subcontracted the carbody and assembly to the St. Louis Car Company and the electrical equipment to GE. I shall try to explain how this made for a rather complicated group of relationships for us in the case of the car job. 

Although the prime contractor, the only part of the car that I-R supplied was the two 10x12-inch 400 hp diesel engines. In furnishing the electrical equipment, which we sold to I-R, we had to satisfy I-R that our apparatus, particularly the main generator-exciter sets, would be compatible with their engines. Also we had to collaborate with St. Louis Car Co. in applying our electrical equipment to their carbody and trucks, involving a lot of detail on a brand new design such as this. And besides all this, we had to satisfy the Boston & Maine as the ultimate customer, that our electrical equipment would be entirely acceptable to them. In this case, the "B & M" was really E. K. Bloss, Supervisor Motor Cars and Oil Electric Equipment, and about as fussy a customer as you could hope to find anywhere in the railroad industry although we developed a good