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Car and the B & M. The latter were always on the receiving end and I don't recall that Meissner's people ever participated one way or the other. One of Jim's favorite ploys was to assemble a small group in a hotel room in the evening and simply shoot the breeze to the accompaniment of a few drinks. Although I can't remember for sure, I think Jim still retained some of his huge stock of Prohibition applejack and carried a quart or so of that along with him as in the old days. Very occasionally, he'd have one or two girls in the crowd who might be secretaries, waitresses or girls he'd run into in some local bar but if there was ever any funny business with the girls, it must have come later on because I never knew anything about it. As I've outlined previously, Jim's personal philosophy about selecting girls to be friendly with was to favor the least attractive one at the party for his attentions, but in doing this, he always performed in public, at least, as the perfect gentleman--quiet, deferential, attentive, thoughtful. He contended that women were grateful for such manners no matter how tough they may appear to be. Almost invariably it paid off according to Jim, who, without much doubt, was an expert on the subject.
The B & M crowd who were involved in this job in addition to Ernie Bloss, included Larry Richardson, Assistant to the President, who was a small, pump, middle-aged, slick-haired, businesslike type whom I got to know very well in later contacts on the 44-tonners and who is covered in my diary at considerable length in connection with that. Larry loved to gamble for small stakes, was an amateur psychologist, and enjoyed the bottle to a reasonable extent. Roy Baker was the air brake supervisor, a husky young teetotaler in his 30s who was a classmate at Penn State of Carl Brancke, one of our control engineers. Roy was a very fine guy but I'm sure he was never entirely in sympathy with some of the high jinks that went on sometimes after hours. Sid Dunningham, a road foremen, was in St. Louis to learn to operate the car. He was a big, humorous, Bostonian and a very good egg. However, the real hellion was Jack Craig, the B & M inspector at the Car Co. He was sixty, short, slight, and with a flushed, pock-marked face, and he could and did drink like a fish. And there was Ed Gallagher, the I-R service man assigned to the job. This pretty well covers the group involved and with whom I worked, not to mention at all, the gang of GE designing engineers at Erie who worked on the various phases of the electrical design.
One fine, stinking-hot, August day finally arrived when 1140 was ready for her road test. I think this was done on a Burlington branch line easily accessible to the Car Co. plant. The B & M crowd was there in force to observe the performance and I think Ernie Bloss was in the forefront, also very critical of the layout of everything, the wiring, piping, welding--everything. That was Ernie. Larry Richardson wasn't an engineer, as I recall, so he was no problem to Meissner, but