Viewing page 99 of 99

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

39

a bit "Mayflowerish" with perfect manners. He liked little theater work and worked as a stage hand with an amateur Gilbert & Sullivan outfit in New York that put on one show a year in an uptown theater seating around 800--they had three performances to a full house which cleared expenses with a little left over. He'd been in the Harvard Glee Club and liked choral singing, preferred all-male to mixed. Although he liked music, he played no instrument. He enjoyed tossing off a few drinks occasionally but disapproved of big drinking parties like the New York Railroad Club's annual blowout and never had been to one. Nor was he at all keen about accepting gratuitous drinks or meals from peddlers because he felt it not only looked bad but compromised him. He seemed to enjoy his bachelor life and doubted that he'd ever marry. He was a very pleasant guy and to me most likable, probably because he and I seemed to have some things in common. I lost track of Ken completely but would be interested to know how he finally wound up.

In 1937, I met an interesting railroad man of a wholly different type named William S. McAbee, who was Vice-President and General Superintendent of the Union Railroad, a U.S. Steel subsidiary in Pittsburgh. McAbee was 51 and a practical railroader up from the ranks, having started at age 14 on the B&O. He'd been very successful with USS and I mention him to show primarily the type of man you sometimes encountered in those days. He was fair and pleasant but extremely biased toward the steam locomotive, with which he'd been closely associated for some 37 years. He said he'd been following the progress of diesel-electric locomotives since 1927 and USS regarded him as an authority on the subject. He was convinced there was no economical place for the diesel on the Union Railroad. On the contrary, he'd had turbine drive in mind for years and was keenly interested in our steam-electric. He said he was still interested in diesels but not too optimistic about their future. The apple of his eye was a 0-10-2 steam job referred to as the "Union" type built for him by Baldwin under protest because they said it wouldn't stay on the track--but it did. He had a pet theory about the diesels which he felt might be their salvation--to increase their tractive effort through some sort of electrical legerdemain. He said he'd had Westinghouse working on it with him for months before they gave up the diesel-electric locomotive business. Of course, eventually the Union Railroad went the way of practically all industrial railroads and put in diesels.

In 1937, Ingersoll-Rand folded out of the locomotive business.

In 1937, H.L.Andrews moved to New York but remained our boss.

********

Transcription Notes:
Reviewed