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thoughtful way, "You fellas are spending nearly all your time down here with us.  How would you like to have a couple of desks to use?  I've got two old desks you can use, at least for the time being."  We accepted gratefully because we were accumulating quite a file and it was becoming a problem.  So, along in May sometime, we graduated to our own desks in the Motive Power Section and continued our project.  but even after this innovation in our informal WPB careers, Andy Stevenson continued to ignore us completely.  I think he ^[[underlined]]appreciated[[/underlined]] what we were doing but knew at the same time that we were illegitimate, so he chose to keep his head averted.  And soon after that, the Branch was moved from Tempo E to the marble-halled Railroad Retirement Building, which was nearby, quite ritzy, and most important of all, air-conditioned.  Frank and I moved over there with the rest of Andrew's flock.

As our sojourn in the Motive Power Section lengthened, we became better acquainted with many more people.  Some of them I'll mention briefly here.  ^[[ ( ]]There was [[underlined]]Tipton[[/underlined]] of the Pennsy, whose assignment was trying to persuade railroad shops to convert to war work.  [[underlined]]Vic Brady[[/underlined]] was a young Wall Streeter who had presumably gone into WPB to avoid the service as long as possible and had done a good job,but was finally drafted. ^[[ ) ]]  [[underlined]]Press Miller[[/underlined]] was an Alco service engineer who decided to quit Alco and join WPB.  I got to know Press pretty well.  He was married with young children and was a trifle odd at times like riding to work on a bicycle no-hands and playing a flute.  You might infer from this that he was off his rocker but such was not the case.  In his past was a record of having been a fine athlete and a member, I think, of the Yale varsity crew; in his future was the job of chief of motive power of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad.  ^[[ ( ]] There were other younger men like [[underlined]]Lou Malcolm[[/underlined]] and [[underlined]]John O'Farrell[[/underlined]] who worked on the material program but I didn't get to know well. ^[[ ) ]]  Another, not so young, that should be mentioned, was [[underlined]]Fred Barden,[[/underlined]] a middle-aged, well-dressed, well-groomed little man with a clipped short moustache and smooth as hell, a polished gentleman and a bachelor.  He was the "procedural expert" of the Branch and was regarded by some as "a soldier of fortune."  I don't know what he did specifically but he was a charming man ^[[ ( ]] and at Christmas time, he threw a cocktail party for all the members of the Branch and their wives at the Garden House of the Dodge Hotel, a real bash that must have cost him significantly. ^[[ ) ]]

There was another group in the Motive Power Section I have not yet mentioned, with one exception.  This was the contingent that was recruited from the big locomotive builders and suppliers.  This group were concerned primarily with the big railroad steam program that got Hanly so fouled up.  I became deeply involved with this crew after I returned to WPB in July but in the spring I merely got superficially acquainted with them.  Nevertheless, I'll introduce them in due course to prepare the reader for them in the summer.  I did mention one of