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40

While Phil is the only serious looking-one in this picture, he did enjoy an occasional blowout but strictly after working hours. He appreciated a good story and had a wry sense of humor. Phil's story is elsewhere in my diaries and I shan't repeat it here. However, he and his wife, Em, live in retirement in North East, Penna. and we get together occasionally and enjoy thoroughly hashing over the old days. My recollection is that Phil was quite a good tennis player and he, Jay Walker around I would pick up a fourth and play doubles occasionally.

Perhaps the premier character of the entire New Haven crowd was Ed Kelly. His real name was Ernest, which he disliked and had forsworn for Ed. He was a Protestant and Mason. He was a big, brawny six-footer who'd come up through the New Haven's big Van Nest Shop organization and was its chief inspector in 1936. He was around 50. He'd not gone to college. But he knew the practical side of electric locomotive design and maintenance like few others. In the design stages of the job, Phil looked to Ed to apply a maintenance man's perspective to what we were proposing and during manufacture, to see that the New Haven got a good job--a product built strictly to drawings and specifications and in the fuzzy areas hard to pin down, good quality workmanship. Ed kept a resident inspector in Erie to follow the day to day work, coming up himself every week or two to check up on things. This man's name was Oscar T. Mock, a mechanical inspector from Van Nest. Mock was an aging, rather fragile old fellow well into his 60s, and he confined his activities to the mechanical end of the job, leaving GE on its own on the electrical. Ed had an agile mind and was a master at repartee, which he engaged in frequently with Jay Walker, who was pretty good at it too and loved to bait Ed. In these encounters, Ed usually came away with the honors. I shall include a few of these exchanges presently because they were often choice if a bit off color sometimes because Ed had a superb vocabulary of railroad profanity. Maurice Guynes, particularly after a few drinks, would take Ed on, but usually with disastrous results. Also, Ed had a fine stock of railroad stories, mostly true, which he'd reel off evenings at the bar or over the dinner table. I shall include some of the better of these also. Ed had apparently an unlimited capacity for alcohol and enjoyed drinking but during working hours plus whatever hours of overtime were necessary to get the job done, he was all business. Then he'd let the bars down and have some fun. Fortunately Ed took a shine to me for some reason and we got along beautifully. Again he was chief inspector on the 0361-0366 job in 1937 and 1938 and we cemented the friendship still further. Ed eventually became Superintendent of Van Nest Shop, a very fine job. I don't think I worked with Ed after 1938, but we kept in contact through correspondence until a few weeks before he died of cancer in the summer of 1970 at around 83. The following is quoted from his last letter to me,