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[[black and white photograph of two women sitting outside of a home in Adirondack chairs with names handwritten Mrs. Downie on left and Mother on right]]

From here on, this account of the first half of 1942 will be devoted almost entirely to my business activities. The first quarter might be characterized as [[red pencil underline]] "normally abnormal" [[/red pencil underline]] as far as I was concerned. The war was now in progress with the U.S.A. participating directly so that things were beginning to [[red pencil underline]] accelerate [[/red pencil underline]] even more rapidly but right at the start, they already were booming along so the changes [[red pencil underline]] weren't violently evident. [[/red pencil underline]] The small locomotive business was rocketing ahead at several times the pace of a year before. We had literally hundreds of them on order. [[red pencil underline]] But neither their production nor their buyers were controlled. The free enterprise [[/red pencil underline]] system was still functioning. But that was only temporary. As the first quarter got under way, the government took the first steps to take over [[red pencil underline]] control [[/red pencil underline]] of all strategic industry. From then on the normally abnormal begin to metamorphose rapidly in to the [[red pencil underline]] abnormally abnormal [[/red pencil underline]] as far as the locomotive business was concerned. It began with material controls which were brought onto the scene as [[red pencil underline]] PRP [[/red pencil underline]] which stool for the Production Requirements Plan. Under PRP, we had to apply to the War Production Board for [[red pencil underline]] allotments [[/red pencil underline]] of material to carry on our business and this material had to be procured in competition with others through the use of "priorities" which were supplied along with the allotments. The allotment was a per [[red pencil underline]] mission to buy but if your priority wasn't high enough, you still might not be able to procure your needs. [[/red pencil underline]] PRP was so important that we put [[red pencil underline]] a topnotch man [[/red pencil underline]] exclusively on handling the PRP procedures. The man selected was [[red pencil underline]] Francis Suleski [[/red pencil underline]] and he was a gem with whom I enjoyed working enormously for some