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13

When Frank and I arrived at Tempo E, we first saw carol Hanly. No one at Hanly's level had a private office, the boss sitting in the midst of a big bull pen with workers scattered all around him, typewriters clacking, people talking, a picture of motion and confusion. This may be the reason Hanly had his conferences with railroad presidents at their hotels. We told Carroll, whom I already knew, that our purpose there was to get approvals from WPB for all the locomotives we had on order and to accomplish that, we proposed to search out and find a bona fide sponsor for each who would testify to the locomotive's importance to the war effort. I'm sure that Carroll as an ex-PRR employee and very close to being down for the count in his struggle with the Class I railroads' problems, was both ignorant of industrial locomotives and their uses as well as unconcerned with our worries. However, always polite, he listened to our story and then turned us over to Charlie Creasser. So we told him the story and he assured us we were on the right track and WPG would help us in this endeavor in any way they could. An das it turned out, they did help us significantly, in fact, too enthusiastically as will become evident before this tale is completed.

After all this time, I don't remember the precise procedures we lined up to accomplish our objective but I have a pretty good general idea. Our first step was to ferret out a legitimate sponsor for each locomotive and to do this, we had to have assistance from WPB on much of it because of the vast array of government agencies and often the need of an entrée to some of them. To help us Charlie assigned us the part time services of three of the younger members of the Motive Power Section and if they didn't know the answers, they could usually find someone who did. They were three extremely fine boys, all in their 20s, and Frank and I not only enjoyed working with them but also appreciated what they did for us and would express our appreciation occasionally by buying them a few drinks or taking them out to dinner. They were all far about average and I'll sketch them in before we go any farther:

[[underlined]] Bob Coultas [[/underlined]] -Bob was a native of Moline, Illinois, where his father was an official of the John Deere farm implement company. Bob had recently graduated from Augustana College and fully expected to be called into the service soon but in the meantime he thought it would be educational to spend some time in the Washington bureaucracy. So he pulled some strings I assume and landed in WPB. Moreover, he was put in the Transportation Equipment Branch because he'd majored in railway business subjects in college. Bob's ancestors had come over from England but way back beyond that, had come from Portugal and he had a slightly dark-complected Latin look, a very fine boy with a fine future. He was called into the Navy around the middle of the year and went to officers training school where he emerged an ensign in due time besides getting