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The I.C. gang lived at the Ford Hotel and when Jack Walker came to town , he'd stay there to be with them although it was a second rate place. I believe it was sometime in the fall that George Bennett got married and brought his bride to Erie where they lived in a rented house on Trask Avenue in Glenwood. Later they moved into an upstairs apartment in a house across from the Unitarian Church on West 9th. They drove a beautiful Packard convertible and I'm sure all this wasn't done on the salary George got from the railroad. George was charming, in fact, always has been, and so was his wife, a tiny little person who was pretty and completely unaffected. I've often wondered just how much she knew about her husband. As far as I know, the marriage was successful although I think she was unable to have children.

With the gang living together at the Ford, they kept each other company very well and I had it easy as far as entertainment of this bunch was concerned. When Jack Walker would come to town, I'd usually take them all to dinner a time or so but otherwise I didn't see much of them outside the plant. However, when the I-R locomotive finally went to test late in the fall, perhaps Jack came oftener or stayed longer--at any rate, during December, when I was keeping my diary briefly, it is evident that I was more active with the boys. I'll first recount what the diary has to say about the locomotive aspects of the situation and then cover the extra-curricular doings. This is a good spot to inject a photograph of the I-R locomotive taken on the test track. The Busch-Sulzer job lagged the I-R a bit at this point and was to lag it a great deal more before all the chips were down.

[[image - black and white photograph of locomotive, labeled I.C.R.R., 9200]]
[[caption]] Different is the only word to describe IC's 171-ton 1800 h.p. No. 9200, which introduced the C-C diesel wheel arrangement to the U.S. in 1936. Note I-beam frame and track-mounted couplers [[/caption]]
^[[TRAINS , Dec. 1970.]]