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on their books while the customers suffered. I became particularly involved with Vulcan when in WPB regarding their Army steam program and learned to respect them very highly, particularly Tom and Joe, who visited Washington regularly. Many of these people I'm writing about appear in my 1942 diary which was kept during my WPB tenure.

[[underlined]]Fate-Root-Heath Co.[[/underlined]]: This builder was located in Plymouth, Ohio, a small town in the north-central farm country south of Sandusky. They were one of the principal builders of internal combustion engine locomotives with mechanical drive, which went under the trade name "Plymouth." They had carried this development up to their "Flexomotive," which was a 65-ton 600-hp 3-axle job with a single, slow-speed Cooper-Bessemer engine and was an impressive performer although expensive, somewhat inflexible, and inclined to have high maintenance cost. However, wanting an anchor to windward, Plymouth played around a little with electric drive and took part in some of our standardization talks. We cultivated them as a potential customer for electrical equipment. I once visited their plant. The head man was [[underlined]]Earl Heath[[/underlined]], one of the family, who was a hell raiser and his righthand man in Washington was [[underlined]]Jack Hogsett[[/underlined]], who was a bigger hell raiser than his boss. When I was in WPB I learned soon to steer clear of this pair, who would rent a suite at the Willard Hotel and then proceed to entertain everyone they could lay their hands on, day and night and sometimes all night. Earl came to a tragic end as I recall after the war by committing suicide or dying of acute alcoholism or something similar, his wife having divorced him long since. But the surprising thing about Plymouth was that they had the best production record and supplied WPB with the best data on their business of any builder including GE as I recall it.

[[underlined]]Atlas Car & Mfg. Co.[[/underlined]]: Atlas was a small specialty builder in Cleveland who produced coke-quencher locomotives, battery-operated trammer locomotives for gold mines, special self-dumping cars for steel mills, weigh cars and an occasional diesel-electric locomotive. They were a good customer of ours for electrical equipment for these various special vehicles and we knew them well and had for years. Their president was a dapper, smart, sharp little man of middle age named [[underlined]]Schellentrager[[/underlined]] and we called him "Schelly." I think he was the engineering brains behind their various flamboyant car designs. I once ran into a couple of Schelly's diesel-electrics in Hawaii in 1945, one at Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar on Maui and the other at Lihue Plantation Company on Kauai, hauling cane trains from field to mill. Schelly was the impresario of this fascinating little company and he had his business and his competitors just about in the palm of his small hand. A really competent operator.