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There were several GE men on this job whom I've mentioned before but in little detail, who are now worthy of more attention. Our New York Office man assigned to this job was Jay F. Walker and he would almost invariably accompany the New Haven people to Erie for our many meetings. My accounts of Jay's activities go way back to my first days off test, so I'll not go into his history much here except to add a few facts. Jay was a World War I veteran and had fought in France. It is just possible this had something to do with his attitude toward his life and work, which seemed to border on a feeling that he was owed a living and therefore didn't have to exert himself as much as everyone to get ahead. He was a charming guy personally and has been a friend of mine for nearly fifty years but I've always been conscious of the fact Jay had something lacking to get him to the top. Perhaps I'm just trying to make this a difficult analysis and Jay's difficulty was just plain laziness. At any rate, he was passed up for promotion in New York and gradually eased down the ladder in responsibility until, at retirement, and extremely bitter about it, he was the salesman for the New Haven Service Shop. John Davis once told me that Jay's weakness was playing just two or three people in a customer's organization and largely ignoring the rest so that his friends were limited when an order was up, and sometimes his friends were in the wrong places. On the New Haven he concentrated primarily on Vice President Charlie Smith and Phil Hatch. Jay was a handsome little guy with a black moustache as the photo on p.39 indicates. He was always well dressed and neatly-groomed. He had a sharp, rapidly-moving mind which made him great at quipping and repartee, in which he liked to engage, on this job with Ed Kelly, Maurice Guynes and some of the engineers. He was from South Dakota and a good athlete, playing baseball, tennis and golf moderately well. He enjoyed drinking but seldom overdrank and I don't remember ever seeing him tanked. He was great company, and this was his strongest point, but quite unsatisfactory to deal with businesswise from my own experience because you simply could not get him to move fast enough without practically making an issue of a point, resorting to telegrams, long-distance calls, and such to get results.

Now having covered both Ed Kelly and Jay on this job, this is a good place to insert a sort of composite sample of some repartee between these two, who were constantly kidding each other. Jay would usually take the initiative, I think because he realized that most of us regarded these bouts between himself and Ed as sort of a show and when they started, we would become very attentive to the match and thoroughly enjoy it. Also, Maurice Guynes, in a sort of ingenuous way, would take on Ed and seldom failed to lose his scalp before it was over. To a large extent, this was also true of the encounters between Jay and Ed, who usually had the best of the exchange.