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12

My recollection of these two girls is a bit hazy after some 35 years but my memory is clear that Marie Uzzell was a real doll and the daughter of a foreman in our locomotive shop. I recall his name was Tony Uzzell. Marie married Al Jerensik, one of our young engineers and quite a sailor, crewing for Mendel Kitzmiller on the WREN.  Willie and I went to the wedding in a small Protestant church on Lighthouse Street and later attended the reception which was held upstairs over a restaurant way up around West 28th & Cascade where a good time was had by all and the father of the bride really tied one on. Willie says her mind is a complete blank on the whole affair as well as the people involved which is surprising because she more often remembers things that I don’t. It seems to me that Al Jerensik went with the IGE and he and Marie wound up in Brazil. Just a thumbnail sketch of a GE romance. ( [[underlined]] Special note [[/underlined]] : By pure coincidence, we attended the Book Club dinner soon after I completed writing the above and Kitzmiller was there so I asked if he remembered Al Jerensik.  Kitz said no but Al might have sailed with Tom Donahue and Wib Brown, the other two co-owners of the WREN, when Kitz wasn’t around. The name Jerensik didn’t ring a bell with Kitz at all so I decided my memory’s failing me. However, just to satisfy myself, I reviewed my 1945 and 1946 diaries and sure enough I found that all of the above is essentially correct except Al sailed with Tom Donahue and Larry Kritscher, another GE engineer, but Kitz was still a co-owner. See July 2, 1946 for an amusing account of Al and cute Marie visiting us one evening on Kahkwa.)

Just as things were beginning to roll pretty well and I was feeeling a little bit at home in my new domain, things were dealt a heavy blow by Jake Brauns suddenly being called up. We knew it was coming but thought we’d have at least a few weeks of warning. There was almost none.  It occurred in January 1941. Jake came in on say a Tuesday morning and announced he’d been ordered to report for active duty in the U.S.Engineers the following day in Pittsburgh I think. This would be his last day!  Regardless of Jake’s deficiencies, failure to carry a heavy load was not among them and he was always up to his neck in proposition work because of beating the bushes everywhere he went; the game he flushed wasn’t always too desirable but there was lots of it. And here we suddenly discover that tomorrow he’ll be gone! And gone for God knew how long – nearly five years as it turned out. I think Whitey was out of town so I conferred with Henry Guy. There was an even more immediate problem than how to handle Jake’s work; we wanted to give him a sendoff worthy of him as well as the occasion but his departure was so imminent that it presented a serious problem. Henry and I considered lining up a farewell dinner but the time was simply too short and furthermore we discovered that most of the key characters who should attend it were either out of town, like Whitey, or otherwise occupied. We finally came to the conclusion that we, Henry and I, would simply wine and