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9

could find any feasible, legal way to avoid it. As for Industrial Haulage, when the war was over, Jake Brauns returned a hero with about five years of action in the South Pacific behind him plus two or three rows of ribbons and a full colonelcy, and Whitey felt he owed it to Jake to give him a whack at managing the section when I took Henry's job. So Jake became manager and Jack wound up in St.Louis. And Jake turned out to be a pretty good manager although as his boss for about ten years, I suspect I acquired a few extra gray hairs.

The Industrial Haulage business had been running along at about $3,000,000 a year with mining locomotives the leading line and the diesels just beginning to sprout with a sporadic order for one or two occasionally. Jake had been very aggressive in getting the diesels started with a sale of several 20-ton 150 hp unites to Lehigh Portland Cement through out Philadelphia Office in 1939 and from this evolved a 45-ton 300 hp unit with swivel trucks and each truck driven by a single motor with side rods. And then came a 50-ton two-axle 300 hp for steel mill service. Jake deserved a great deal of credit for sparking this program in 1938 and 1939 and after the war I was partially responsible for getting him a Coffin award for it, preparing the citation among other things. The small diesel-electrics appeared on the scene at a very opportune time because they were exactly what industry needed in the mushrooming war effort and also they were enormously valuable to the armed forces in direct military operations behind the lines and were used by the hundreds, even thousands, as the war theaters expanded. As a result of all this, our little Industrial Haulage business soared in a matter of a couple of years from a $3,000,000 to a $15,000,000 business which became a challenge to sales, engineering and manufacturing to handle. I took over from Shap just about as this activity began to balloon. In order to get "production" the small diesels had been ordered on the factory on manufacturing orders, that is, stock orders for standard units and these were later sold to specific customers. This also had the advantage of providing shorter shipments that available if each order was produced after the customer placed the business.  Prior to the war explosion, with some trepidation these locomotives would be ordered in lots of five at a time and then the sales people would sweat until they were sold to customers and were no longer a threat to wind up in inventory. But along about the time I moved in, we suddenly found ourselves obliged to increase manufacturing orders to ten units and then to twenty at a shot because the demand was so great customers were fighting to get them. Nothing like it had ever occurred before in the locomotive business and it was almost unbelievable. Our district sales people resorted to all manner of subterfuges to get a locomotive for their particular customer before someone else did. Short shipment was paramount. Long distance lines burned with pressure.