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11

So this situation led us into an extensive educational and promotional program for internal use in winning over our own district sales people. And beyond this, of course, we undertook a comprehensive promotional program aimed at prospective customers. I’ll cover the details of these later. For, in spite of a great demand for locomotives building up, there was also a lot of competition out after it; again, I shall go into this later with details.

And so we struggled ahead with everyone working hard. I divided up the work so even old Eddie was loaded and happy for the first time in years and he rose to the occasion. To my great happiness, even Shap cooperated fairly well and we had none of the flare-ups that had been anticipated. Jennie was superb, handling a typing load that must have been double what any other girl in the plant was capable of. Also she had a knack of getting along with Shap through a half-flattering and half-bullying approach which seemed to work like a charm in keeping him somewhere near the middle of the road most of the time.  I believe Shap refused to use an Ediphone so Jennie had to absorb the full load of his dictation but she never complained. I used an Ediphone a good deal in the office besides keeping one at home where I’d often cut a dozen cylinders on a weekend. The Ediphone work was all transcribed in a typing bureau downstairs. But Jennie was to leave us within a year to go to the job in Washington with Pat Murphy, drawn by the glamor of Washington in wartime. After she left, we had a succession of girls none of whom could hold a candle to her. Furthermore, two of them became amorously involved with married men in adjacent offices and there was great to do over this with me suddenly discovering there are all sorts of facets to the job of a boss.  The juicy details of some of this are covered in subsequent diaries.  I have a photo, however, of two of our secretaries who worked close by who were lovely girls and more representative of the crowd:

[[image: sepia photograph of 2 women [labelled "Marie Uzzell" and "Betty  Hopson"]. One sitting on a desk, the other sitting at the desk in front of her]]