Viewing page 21 of 80

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

was an important customer for many things and when they yelled bloody murder like this, our Philadelphia Office, who handled headquarters, yowled in mortal agony. So Gouldy, the engineer, and I, the commercial man, were dispatched to Charlestown to try to put out the fire. We spent the first day riding the locomotives and looking into what had actually happened, returning to Louisville late in the afternoon. We were staying at the Kentucky Hotel and got hold of Willie's father to join us, Gouldy knowing him well from his many visits to Erie when a bunch of us always had one or two poker sessions, which the "Colonel" loved. After dinner we retired to the bar in the hotel to have a couple of "old fashioned toddies" as the Colonel called them. They were very good and we were all having such a fine time that I think we had more like four or five of them before all of us decided to go to bed. The Colonel left and Gouldy and I went to our respective rooms. I decided that a shower might be good for me before retiring. So I turned on the shower in the tub but before stepping in, I brushed my teeth. Having done this, I pulled back the curtain and discovered the tub was rapidly filling with water. The drain was closed but I was unable to figure out how to open it. So I thought I should turn off the shower; but to my intense frustration as well as mounting dismay, I found myself unable to do this. I twisted the faucet handles but they refused to move. The bathroom was full of steam, the tub was nearly full, and water was splashing around as I tried desperately to shut off the torrent. Finally I rushed into the bedroom and phoned for a plumber, who knocked on the door presently as I breathed a sigh of relief. I rushed to the door to let him in and, I'll be damned, I couldn't get the door open! Finally the plumber said, "I'll get the key to the Servador and I can get in through that." He left. While he was gone I discovered I'd overlooked withdrawing the extra bolt on the door, which was located a foot or so above the knob; having done this, the door opened without trouble and was open when the plumber returned. But I was still excited about the shower blasting and I poured out my problem to the plumber as he entered the room. He walked into the bathroom, put his toolbox on the floor, and promptly turned off the shower by closing the two shower vales on the wall. He gave me a withering look, picked up his toolbox, and left, shaking his head. It dawned on me that I'd been trying to turn off the shower by operating the tub valves down below, which were already closed. Feeling like a fool, I retired. I met Gouldy the next morning in the lobby, thinking I'd probably withhold a confession of what happened. But Gouldy had a huge black eye! He claimed that when the phone rang with his getup call he'd reached for it beside his bed and had pulled the phone off the table and it had hit him in the eye. So I confessed my experience. We both agreed that from then on we'd have more respect for the lethal qualities of old-fashioned toddies.