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Cleveland, Ohio., 
Thursday, Feb. 22, 1940.

Up at 5 AM and down to catch the 6:28 for Cleveland. The east is lighting up well at 6:30 AM now and one knows that spring is on the way even though the weather belies it most of the time. Hoddy, Aubrey ^[[insertion]] Dougherty [[/insertion]] and craven, Service Manager of Cummins Engine from Columbus, Ind. met me at the station and we went out to Republic at once and into session with Seibel about crankcase dilution. Craven talked convincingly and we felt he would accomplish something, but they tell me Dave Buttles talked just as convincingly recently to Seibel and accomplished nothing. However, I think Craven, who described himself to Gerry over the phone as "a little guy with a tweed suit, red hair and glasses", will come through. At least he authorized them to shift to a lube oil costing half as much which is something.

After Craven left we shifted to our own problems which mainly is dirty commutators on the Open Hearth Pouring Floor job, caused I saw at once (ahem!) by the quantities of graphite and tar in the air around the job. We rode the locomotive and took enough data to see if we can't eliminate the separate ventilation. Once we were standing at the entrance to the pouring floor and the engineer pointed out a "thimble" full of white hot steel that was spouting periodically from pocketed gas in it. "See that", the engineer said calmly, "That's liable to blow up." But we continued to stand there 30 feet away from it and the bubbling and popping continued and no one seemed to mind. 

Seibel is a good egg -- he goes along with us on our problems and tries to cooperate 100% but they had a Cummins service man here recently - Tinkey - who did so much criticizing and alibiing that finally old Si got