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I must confess, however, that all in all my relations with the I.C. crowd in general, left me with a distinctly bad taste in my mouth. I don't look back upon that job with any nostalgia as I do on my New Haven experiences, for example. I was always glad to get a respite from the I.C. contacts when I felt like this, which was most of the time. I had one such occasion early in December when Jim Chambers came to town for a day and I had dinner with him, Jim Hyde and D.P. Orcutt of Electric Storage Battery, and old friend. We had a few drinks and then a very good dinner at The Den to the accompaniment of Jim's usual matchless line of stories. Jim Chambers was much "regusted" at losing the Peoria & Pekin Union locomotive job to Alco because of a $10,000 price differential which he probably blamed secretly upon GE, but this soon passed and he was in fine fettle and we had a good time together. I always liked Jim Chambers as well as Jim Hyde and I'd been fond of old D.P. Orcutt for nearly ten years at this point. I was a refreshing little outing after the often tortuous and sordid exploits of the other crowd.
That pretty well clears up the 1935 story of the I-R I.C. locomotive, which was shipped in February 1936. It had been my intention to cover the Busch-Sulzer story by starting it in 1935 also but now that I review the situation, I believe the story would be covered better if I put it all together in the 1936 section because it was in 1936 that the most interesting and semi-tragic part of it took place. I will say just one thing however at this point: The Busch-Sulzer people injected a breath of fresh air into the atmosphere of the job although their efforts were doomed to failure ultimately. I never worked with a finer crowd of people, particularly Rudolph H. Schneider, Engineer in Charge of Design, who was the Ralph Miller of B-S. Compared to the fetid atmosphere which often seemed to hang low around the I.C. operations and personnel, a cool clean breeze emanated from the B-S quarter which was very refreshing indeed. And much as I liked the I-R crowd, I think the B-S gang was even better from the standpoint of sheer wholesomeness.
Evidently the Sales Analysis Institute (SAI) Course had been in progress for the first time, that autumn. This course was aimed at training sales personnel in the art of scientific salesmanship and while it took a lot of ribbing, it did have a lot of good psychology in it. I was to become a "professor" of SAI in later years along with Chuck Church. Bit I find that on December 18th, we had a "follow-up meeting" with Profs. Fred Gantt of our Cleveland Office and Clarence Bailey of Schenectady conducting. Gannt was a born comedian and Clarence the epitome of smooth gentlemanliness. They put on some great skits on overcoming policy obstacles which brought down the house. But they key thought was never to say die--put your bean to work and often you can pull out of an apparently impossible situation.