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days, so he's off tomorrow night for Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Birmingham, Sheffield, Louisville & back here. He gave me a good line-up of his trip - tried to cooperate. I went home and worked until 11 PM trying to catch up.

Mother is 71 today, and we had a little celebration. Willie was awfully sweet about trying to make things birthday cheery, bringing in cupcakes each with a tiny candle for desert. The pressure there has seemed to abate quite considerably much to my relief. Maybe Willie is simply suppressing her feelings for my sake; I hope it is something better than that for her.


Erie, Pa.,
Thursday, Nov. 21, '40.
Whitey returned today with news Harmon is willing and apparently anxious to cooperate on standardization so perhaps we can get somewhere on that.  Also Harmon suggested we all go to the Gov't. and ask for a reasonable allocation of the big loco. program without the hit and miss system of competitive bidding - a good suggestion and I wrote to Horn about it today  Whitey has assigned Bearce to follow the ordnance work and I can unload on him.  Took him to a 5"/38 gun mount meeting today to get him started.
  
Speaking of Harmon, Whitey says Harmon told him Marsh's story about Baldwin being willing to build the 20 & 30 ton gas-mechanicals was all wrong.  Baldwin was as leery of it as we and had a whole lot of strings tied to their offer - also the price of $25,000 for the 30 ton seemed to be Marsh's idea of what it should be rather than Balwin's idea of what it would be if they built it.