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On the plus side, I learned a good deal about coal mining and the equipment used in the operation by wandering around the exhibit hall and using my observational faculties. I met a number of our mining salesmen I wasn't acquainted with as well as other Company people involved in the activity one way or another. Also I met quite a few customers at the booth as well as in our hospitality center at the hotel. I think I soaked up quite a bit of feel for the industry, its people, and the stuff it took to run it. But the thing that made the most enduring impression on me was the wide-open, unabashed amorality that went on during the recreational periods. As I say, I'd attended plenty of conventions, railroad club meetings, and similar gatherings by that time and I knew what went on "upstairs" so to speak, but never had I seen it carried on right out in the open for all to see. Convention-followers had flocked into Cincinnati from all directions and roamed the hotel at will, welcome in all "hospitality rooms" at any time. In such spots after the drinking had been long and heavy, voyeuristic performances were put on by girls and convention delegates before enthusiastic groups of a dozen or so -- as many as could stand around a bed. It was absolutely unbelievable to me and I've never seen anything like it since. I decided the miners must be a lot tougher crowd than I'd ever encountered before. The morning after one of these bacchanalian revelries, a man's body was found on the roof at the bottom of an inner court of the hotel and I don't recall whether he'd fallen, been pushed, or jumped out of a window the night before. The whole affair was a phantasmagoria of heavy drinking, wenching, gambling and general hell-raising such as I'd never run into and it left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth; it's still there 35 years later as I write this. And it was completely at odds with my impression of the general tone of the business as conveyed to me by my new friends in our wonderful little NEMA section so very recently. I'm glad to say that as my relationship with them ripened, my initial impressions of all of them settled down into solid friendships which were never shaken. They operated at a far different level and had a completely different set of values but they'd been through the mill just as I was going through it and they knew what went on upstairs.
It seems to me that they suspended just about all conventions during the war so I didn't attend another Coal Show for several years and that was okay by me. That one exposure in 1941 was enough to last me a lifetime. Our mining locomotive crowd back at the Erie Works I already knew pretty well, all except the mining locomotive assembly shop foreman, who reported to Dick Miller. He was a hard-bitten old Irishman named Mike Flynn and he looked as though he must consume enough whisky to immerse one of his little locomotives fairly frequently. But Mike and his small organization turned out some beautiful work and contributed a good deal to GE's fine reputation in the mining locomotive field. I liked Mike, who always called me Crate."