Viewing page 81 of 102

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

11

rapport with Ernie as time went on and he and I became very good friends. In our dealings with I-R, their representatives usually visited Erie, men such as Jim Chambers, Mechanical Engineer, Locomotive Dept., and Jim Hyde of the Oil Engine Dept. Our relations with the B & M could be carried on in Boston, Erie or St. Louis and I think were in all three places on this job. Contacts with St. Louis Car, however, seldom took place anywhere but in St. Louis. My job was to coordinate GE's relations with all three of these groups of people and to make sure insofar as possible that our equipment proved satisfactory to all of them. Moreover, this activity stretched over a time period encompassing design, manufacture, testing and installation into service of the complete railcar plus a suitable service period to assure everything was going to be okay. There was nothing unusual about this. It was simply the way that such a job had to be handled under the conditions existing at that time. It was anything but ideal.
I made several trips to St. Louis on this job getting the details ironed out and assisting in the testing of the car. I think it was my first experience with the St. Louis Car Co. and it was memorable because it was a  memorable place. They built every sort of a railroad car except Pullmans as well as streetcars and trolley coaches. Also subway and rapid transit cars. The place was an incredible-looking collection of ill-assorted buildings of all types and descriptions ranging from red brick affairs that must have dated back to the Civil War to Quonset huts. The interior of some of the shops looked like something out of Charles Dickens, with grimy men laboring in gloomy, dirt-floored rooms illuminated by an open bulb here and there hanging from the ceiling. Many of the men had their faces covered with wet towels to allow them to breathe the foul-up atmosphere. The machine tools were ancient and many driven by belts from line shafts. Directly outside the main entrance was a sheep pen which was always occupied by sheep because Ed Meissner, the boss, thought that sheep brought him good luck. There were no dining facilities on the property and the best place in the vicinity was a sort of one-armed lunch room where we'd repair at mid-day for a snack. And yet this fantastic place produced a fine product at very low cost and gave the whole car industry the jitters whenever they bid on a job because they seemed able to underbid just about anybody in the industry and still make money.
Ed Meissner, the president, was undoubtedly the genius behind this unbelievable operation. He was a tall, rather heavy set, smooth-faced, coarse-featured, middle-aged Jew. He had a beautiful office magnificently pine-paneled and complete with wood-burning fireplace--a dream. It looked completely out of place in such a dump. Ed had bought it for a song when one of St. Louis finest old mansions was being torn down, and had transferred it to his plant where he'd had it reassembled. He would buy manufacturing buildings the same way, transfer them