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7

The Industrial Haulage secretary was not to be passed over lightly either since she had a career behind her as well as ahead of her and she and I were associates on and off for a number of years. She was

[[underline]] Jennie Post [[/underline]]--Jennie was a tall, dark-haired, pink-cheeked girl with a long, rather pretty face. Jennie was a spinster perhaps 30 and Jewish and smart and a secretarial whiz. She had learned her trade by working a public stenographer in the Ford Hotel. She probably had every other girl in the Department backed off the map for speed, accuracy, style and neatness besides being a shorthand artist supreme. We were lucky to have her in Industrial Haulage but it was evident that Jennie would move up the ladder. When Miss Giblin retired, Jennie became Whitey's secretary and he and I shared Jennie when Henry retired in 1945 and I became Whitey's assistant manager. In the meantime, however, Jennie had spent several of the war years in our Washington Office as Pat Murphy's secretary in between Industrial Haulage and Whitey. She returned to Erie at the close of the war to take the job with Whitey and when he moved upstairs to boss the whole show around 1947 and I succeeded him as sales manager, he took Jennie with him and I took Mary Walsh from Urban Transit. After the war Jennie married a coverall salesman for the Lee Company named Cohen but she continued to work. Although not allowed to attend the wedding because it was held in a synagogue where Christians were forbidden to tread, Willie and I went to the reception at Jennie's parents home on Parade Street, tossed off a snort or so with the bride and groom and members of the family and had a very pleasant time. Whitey was always very formal with his secretaries, never using their first names, something like Nero Wolfe, and now he had to switch to calling Jennie Mrs. Cohen. I had my last fling with Jennie in 1956 when I was acting general manager for about five months while Whitey was at Crotonville and it was like old times. And then suddenly Jennie's husband was transferred by Lee to Trenton, New Jersey to a bigger job so Jennie got herself a job at a GE plant in the vicinity of Trenton and moved away without disturbing her long continuity of service by this time. She never had children, perhaps because she waited too long to marry. But she was a great girl and one you weren't likely to forget.  

Since the photographs I have of that period are rather few and far between, I'm using some out-of-period pictures for the sake of displaying at least something even though itis not right on the ball chronologically. Such a shot is that of Shap and me at his retirement party on p.5. And here is one of Jennie and me along about 1946 I'd judge, when I was Whitey Wilson's assistant manager. Who took it or why, I know not.