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Not too far in the future was a series of promotional meetings in the major district offices all over the country, where I put on a program primarily for the local industrial salesmen designed to acquaint them with the delights and rewards of locomotive selling. To give some idea of the coverage, these meetings included Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Butte, Spokane, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta and Birmingham. In several of these spots we were honored by having the local commercial vice president run the meeting. This whole Industrial Haulage project was a great thing for me by giving me an opportunity to get acquainted with the whole apparatus district sales organization in the way that would have been impossible otherwise. Also there were annual sales meetings at Erie in which Industrial Haulage had a spot; however, these meetings were mainly for our district transportation sales people, whom we were constantly exhorting to carry the gospel back to their district industrial sales brothers.

As time went on, there was another promotional scheme we pushed for selling to the districts the merits of pushing this new line. It was to encourage them each to make a "locomotive survey" in the district and find out exactly where the prospective business existed and what it was by number and size of units. To supply a pattern as well as open the eyes of the unbelievers, we ran such a survey in the territory of the Buffalo Office, prepared a very revealing report disclosing our findings (which were lush with future business), and distributed copies throughout Apparatus Sales with an urge to go and do likewise. Some did so; some did not. There had to be a sparkplug in the local organization to get behind it or nothing happened because people were busy and this wasn't a must at the moment.

The industrial district salesmen were naturally wooed by any product department (like us, for example) who had something to sell to industry. We managed to pull off a brilliant coup in this constant struggle for their attention. A district industrial sales managers meeting was being held in Schenectady and we got permission to invite all of them to stop off in Erie for one day en route to Schenectady so we could show them our locomotives. We persuaded almost all of them to stop and we put on a show for them which included an opportunity [[underline]] to run a locomotive personally [[/underline]]. They were like a bunch of kids. And if they'd been inclined to ignore the industrial diesel line, they wouldn't ignore it from then on. For more see p.43.

Of course, all these things didn't happen in 1941 but they were all connected steps that began in 1941 and ran on and on and are still going as far as I know. So far I've covered the program for selling our own sales organization on the desirability of selling locomotives. Now I shall return to the other