Viewing page 23 of 80

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

25

ful wife, Elsa, became our very close friends and we were to enjoy many memorable times with them over the next decade until they moved to New York. We are still in touch and see them from time to time. There is a great deal in my diaries of the 1940s regarding this couple so I shan't dwell at length on them here except to say that Elsa was Norwegian and the niece of Ole K. Kjolseth, the chief mechanical designer of our railway locomotive engineering group. Her father, who was O.K's brother, had also been in this group but chose not to transfer to Erie. I don't have a photo of Elsa and Chuck at this time but I do find the following excellent shot of Willie and Elsa at a Peninsula picnic. Willie can't place the time but thinks it might have been in the mid-40s:

[[image: black and white photograph of two women in 40's style day clothes in a park setting, at a picnic table with a large fish atop. The woman on the left [[labelled "Willie"]] is reaching to help the woman on the right [[labelled, "Elsa Church"]] who is holding a knife and poised to gut and clean the fish]]

Chuck and I proceeded on the basis that the first step in making a sale was somehow to acquaint the salesman with the fact that a customer was a locomotive prospect. This was a thought that had never passed through the minds of 90% of GE's industrial salesmen. We designed our internal sales program around our "Hound Dog" symbol. To my great disappointment, I'm unable to locate any of our actual Hound Dog material after 35 years but I do have the set of slides used at my retirement party in 1962 and there are several of the dog who may have provided the inspiration to the artist who created the drawings of our dog, who was to become quite famous in the GE apparatus sales offices all over the country. I'm supplying a print of this slide at the top of the following page. The hound became a celebrity and in the process, enhanced by reputation to the extent that 20 years later at my retirement, the Hound had quite a prominent place in the program in spite of my having been separated from industrial haulage as such for many years.