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43

I guess the lengths to which the situation had gone scared even old Shap finally and he subsided. Soon afterward Evelyn moved to Illinois to teach school. This occurred not long before Lynch transferred to Chicago. The whole thing was largely hearsay and nothing was ever proved one way or the other but it didn't help Wayne's reputation.

In a last desperate effort to get an authentic picture of our Hound Dog, I wrote a letter the other day to Chuck Church in Schenectady where he's not retired and asked what he might have in his memorabilia. And darned if he didn't phone me the next day to say the only thing he has is "Blueprint for Action," the brochure we made up from talks prepared for and photos taken at the District Industrial Managers Meeting at Erie which is referred to on p.28 and wondering if I might have a copy of that. And I have and dug it out and I'm putting it in here because it not only includes the Dog but also a lot of terrific shots of so many men I knew well and worked closely with at that time. This meeting was apparently held late in the fall of 1945 because Jake Brauns appears and he returned from the service about that time. The brochure was printed in February 1946.

Before concluding my comments on my GE affairs in 1941, I should cover a most important item, which is covered in m notes by "5,000 and Elfun." This means that I finally got my salary up to $5,000 per annum and became a member of the Elfun Society. Both of these matters deserve comment. First the salary, which sounds woefully, almost unbelievably low in the light of today's pay scales with San Francisco street cleaners getting $17,000 a year. I started with the Company in 1924 at $1,560 on the Factory Management Course, went to $1,820 in six months, dropped back to about $1,300 in 1925 when I decided to forget factory management and went on test and when I got a job in engineering in Erie in November 1926, I got back to the $1,560--and got married. Then began the upward struggle and things went pretty well so I think I got up to about $2,100 by 1929 and missed a raise to $2,500 on a technicality just before the market crash of 1919. And from that time on for free year pay went down instead of up so that in 1932 I was working four days a week, lucky to have a job, and my pay was around $1,800. Then gradually things began to improve and I worked my way back up the scale until I got the absolutely thrilling raise that carried me at last to that magic $5,000 level. This took 17 years thanks to my delay in getting into engineering followed by the Depression. Quite inadvertently recently I came into possession of some salary information in our transportation commercial engineering group in Schenectady in 1926. One of the top railway electrification experts, a man with the skill to direct the work of a railway electrification installation, was paid a salary of $8,400 and after 26 years of service. A section head with 30 year service made $5,800. I'm sure there was some small extra