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I really don't remember much about the competitive situation as we undertook to get this order. As I've said, I-R was out. I don't think that Alco had yet offered their 900-hp super-charged six-cylinder engine. I do believe that General Motors had something to offer but Ford wasn't overly inclined to give this business to their arch competitor--at least, that's what we fondly told ourselves. But perhaps the best thing we had going for us was the fact that Ford wanted something individualistic and we were the people who were prepared to make it for them. And even beyond this, the relationship between Ford and GE was a close one and we enjoyed a large part of their considerable apparatus business. Moreover, they liked GE quality. For example, they had a GE steam turbine in one of their power plants that had run continuously for [[underlined]] seven years [[/underlined]] --so we had quite a reputation to live up to. Happily, I can say that I believe we came through in pretty good style because Ford bought six more essentially duplicates by 1940. And they used the eight locomotives for nearly 20 years before disposing of them on the secondhand market.

I shan't go into the technical details of the locomotives save to repeat that they were 125-ton 1,000-hp center-cab units with one Cooper-Bessemer 500-hp GN6 engine under each of the end hoods. However, I shall cover the appearance of them because therein lies a story. As I say, Ford liked individualized things and were willing to pay for them (to a point) so here was a place where we could bear down and give them a pair of showpieces. I still fancied myself something of an amateur artist and industrial stylist, recalling the success of my "Spanish Villa" portable-kitchen offering several years before for the Refrigerator Department, so I made several sketches of my idea of what this locomotive should look like to appeal to Ford, patterning the general motif on the 1937 Ford car as far as front end was concerned. Also, I had the whole locomotive prettied up with chrome-plated radiator grills, handrails and lettering and numbering. The engine hoods were smooth and sloping. The color-scheme was basically black with red trim. I showed my sketches to P. J. Speicher, the locomotive mechanical designer handling the job and a very tough and practical guy, and he took one look without even bothering to take the sketches out of my hand to study them. I told him I wanted an outline drawing based on these. Spike nearly gave me a withering glance, said "shit" vociferously, turned on his heel and walked away. But Spike's bark was worse than his bite usually and I finally got him to come around. When I departed for Detroit with the final proposition, I took along a large perspective drawing in color that I'd made of the proposed locomotive and submitted it along with our formal proposition to Mr. Kellogg, who was in charge of all special purchasing as distinguished from production purchasing. Mr. Kellogg liked the drawing so well that after he'd placed the business with us, he kept the drawing under the big piece of plate glass