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business failed to flourish significantly under Joe's management. The upshot of this whole affair was that Joe left the Company in 1962 to become director of research and development at Warner & Swasey's research center outside Cleveland. He moved rapidly up the W&S ladder and became their president and chief operating officer in 1969. We have neither seen nor been in contact with them since they left Erie. Today Joe must be about 61 and maybe he's beginning to think about retiring. But he was a very capable man with great promise and I'd say it was fulfilled. But not as it might have been, as head of GE's locomotive business, the job that Bo Vea got and handled well.
I find in my archives a set of six photos of Willard Doud's farewell party at the Community Center. This was on August 30, 1943 and therefore not in the period of my breaking-in as manager of the industrial haulage business but practically all the people shown are the same. Therefore theses shots will serve very well to display a large segment of our Transportation Department group in the 1941-1942 period about which I am now writing. Willard Douds was one of the veterans in the Renewal Parts Section under Dixie Walker. Joe Neill by this time was obviously Dixie's understudy and this may have influenced Willard to leave the Company to accept a better and higher-paying position with a big mechanical equipment builder, the Elliott Company at Ridgeway, Pa. Willard was a good man, well liked, and there was a nice turnout for him at this dinner. There are a lot of absentees also but this was most likely because of people being out of town or otherwise unable to get there. I'm going to devote quite a bit of space to this because it is a fine opportunity to show many of the people I've been writing about.
At the top of the next page, we have two shots of the head table. [[underline]]Dixie Walker[[/underline]] on the left has just presented Douds with a valise and Douds then makes his farewell speech. Dixie was pushing up toward retirement age and was nothing if not a character. He was from the deep south with an accent that, when combined with a machine-gun delivery, made him almost unintelligible a large part of the time. This made him even more uncontrollable than he was normally and he nearly drove Whitey crazy. Dixie had been in the renewal parts business a long time and probably in his earlier days the business was simple enough for him to grasp it successfully; but now it was becoming a multi-million dollar enterprise of vastly greater product complexity, customer diversity, and competitive activity and Dixie was in up to his neck. Whitey picked Joe Neill out of motor design and put him into Dixie's section to learn the business and take over as soon as possible. It was to fall to my lot to have Joe reporting to me for nearly ten years and that was no bed of roses either because Joe was a stubborn, opinionated Scotchman from the West Virginia coal fields who was no cinch to handle either. However, Joe was a smart duck.