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[[opening bracket in red pencil]] During this initial part of this account, I'm going to hit only the high spots with regard to everything but particularly the many people involved. The people are just about everything in this tale and there are a lot of them but if I pause now to review them all as we hit each spot the firt time, the story will not only lag seriously but also lose a lot of continuity. So I've covered Cap Horn and Pat Murphy only, for the moment, have skipped the IGE gang entirely for the moment, and shall touch only on a very few leading lights in the WPB, leaving the rest for later. [[close bracket, in red pencil]]

Having paid our respects at the office, Frank and I headed for WPB. It had already grown enough to be scattered around in various locations. Our destination was the Motive Power Section of the Transportation Equipment Branch of the Bureau of Industry Branches of ^[[the]] Division of Industry Operations of the War Production Board. It was located in "Tempo E" which meant Temporary E Bldg. which was one of the "temporary" buildings erected on the Mall during World War I and was in the general vicinity of the Capitol, at 4th St. and Madison Drive NW to be exact. These "temporary" buildings," some of which lasted 40 years, were one-story, frame construction, cheaply and rapidly built and painted gray as I recall and were anything but inspiring. Furthermore, they weren't air-conditioned and in the Washington summer heat, they were hotter than hot; they were simply sweltering. The biggest boss in residence in Tempo E was Dr. Andrew Stevenson, who was chief of the Transportation Equipment Branch. Dr. Stevenson was an ex-college professor with a PhD who had worked for the Securities&Exchange Commission before joining WPB. Although I don't think he had any railroad background, he was an extremely smart man and one with whom I became quite involved before 1942 ended. After the war, Andy, as we called him, settled down as a permanent employee of the House Interstate & Foreign Commerce Committee and retired only recently. Since I quit working for him at the end of 1942, he has sent me a birthday message every year without fail, usually a longhand note on a piece of pink House memo paper. It always arrives right on the day unless Sunday and I have always written him a short letter of thanks giving him what few comments on my activities I think might interest him. Since retirement, Andy sends me birthday cards and the one this year said "I wouldn't say we're getting older, but.....do marshmallows seem sharp to you lately?" However, when I first began contacting the Transportation Equipment Branch, Andy didn't know me from Adam and paid no attention whatever to me to the point where I got the utterly erroneous idea that he was a bureaucratic snob interested only in the big shots of the railroads or the industries serving them. Judging people incorrectly with regard to their attitude toward me was a failing of mine and it has taken years of eye-opening experiences like the one with Andy Stevenson to teach me how mistaken I could often be.