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15

To fill the hole left by Jake, Shap, Eddie and I had to pitch in harder than ever and just as soon as possible Jake Hause was grabbed off of his educational course in Engineering and brought into the section and put to work. As the section load continued to mount with the development of the war effort, we got Earl Bill, a railroad electrification expert, and put him to work handling the Army and Navy locomotive business. And after him, we managed to get Doc Gillilan, the 44-ton railroad locomotive specialist, and put Doc to work on industrial diesel-electrics for war plants. Our business volume increased 400% in around a year but with this influx of talent, we managed to handle things effectively. Once I had all these individuals with me, I was able to devote virtually all my time to managing the business and I handled practically no specific jobs. I worked on pricing problems, promotional programs, stock manufacturing programs, general government programs and contacts, product planning, general district office contacts and so on. 

One thing which the new job took me into was trade association work. General Electric was one of the leading companies in the National Electrical Manufacturers Association better known as NEMA. A NEMA section GE was represented on was the Mining & Industrial Electric Locomotive Section. Henry Guy was a member of this section and when I became head of Industrial Haulage, I also became a member. The NEMA work was mainly in connection with standards and this in turn was helpful in maintaining order in the industry as well as supplying a basis for sound price structure. The other members of the section were Westinghouse, Jeffrey, Goodman and Vulcan. Out of this activity I gained some of the finest friendships of my business career. The representatives of the member companies were all very high caliber men whom I shall cover in here presently. We met once a quarter as I recall and usually at a member-company city although there was an annual trek to The Homestead at Virginia Hot Springs that the wives attended also. We would usually try to arrive for the meetings the night before and have a sociable gathering and dinner together, spend the next morning on our meeting and sometimes longer if business required, and if there was time there might be golf or something similar in the afternoon followed by dinner and then we'd head for home, in those days usually by rail. It was a fine group working together at a worthwhile activity and I thoroughly enjoyed it, becoming secretary of the section and later chairman. After the war when a great deal of anti-trust activity developed, the NEMA activity became suspect. The first change that was made was to have a hired secretary from NEMA headquarters who sat in the meetings as sort of chaperon to keep proceedings on the straight and narrow. Later all commercial people such as Henry and I were forbidden by GE to be in NEMA sections--only engineering people were allowed and I got out of it around 1947.

Transcription Notes:
Transcription typos 'brough into' to 'brought into' 'electrificaiton' to 'electrification' 'locomotivie' to 'locomotive' 'to mananing the business' to 'to managing the business' 'no specfic' to 'no specific' 'promitional' to 'promotional' 'known an NEMa' to 'known as NEMA' 'Inducstrial' to 'Industrial' 'Henery' to 'Henry' 'mainainting' to 'maintaining' 'Westionghouse' to 'Westinghouse' 'nigh' to 'night' 'gold' to 'golf' 'n' to 'in' 'NEMO' to 'NEMA' (2x)