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Erie, Penn
Monday, July 1, 1940.
Spent a good part of the day in Bldg. 60 pushing the New York Central for Bill Hamilton's inspection and approval tomorrow.  It is supposed to weight 70 tons minimum and after packing all the sand we could into it, loading in the last drop of fuel oil and water and installing a push pole borrowed from the N.Y.C. roundhouse, she tipped the beam at 139,900 lb. without crew so we expect Bill to pass it.  Wolf dropped the remark that "when they say 70 tons, they mean 70 tons - no more, no less."  I took Ken Wolf over to Waite's Tavern on the East Lake Road way out in the country for lunch and there was one other pair in there - two men - and I'll be damned if one of them wasn't an old college friend of Ken's he hadn't seen since 1926 when they graduated from Tufts!  He was up here putting in a fueling station for lake boats and was working out of Glouster Mass.  That was a "one in a million" coincidence.  As Ken said, things like that hinge on such trivial things - we stopped in front of a restaurant in Laurence Park and then changed our minds and decided to go to Waite's.  If it hadn't been for that change of mind Ken wouldn't have seen this bird and might never have seen him again.  I regretted I hadn't spoken to "Jolly" Archibold recently when I caught a fleeting look at him as I was disembarking from a plane at Buffalo - it was a combination of diffidence and the circumstances of the occasion that prevented it but I was sorry later I hadn't leaned over and said, "N'est ce pas? Yes, Pa." the famed retort improper he made to Miss Coffey once in a high school French class and for which she dismissed him from the room promptly.