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was made marketing manager of the spring business. In the life-and-death battle to come with General Motors, Alco needed all the sales talent they could muster and here they kicked upstairs one of the best salesmen they had. It remains a mystery to me. Latrobe is only a hundred miles or so from Erie and Marsh and I have corresponded on our Christmas cards about getting together sometime for lunch somewhere but we've never done it. He is long since retied and must be pushing up toward 80 by this time. In fact, he may be dead because I haven't heard from him now for a couple of years.

We now pass on to [[underlined]] Vic Rennix [[/underlined]]. I'll begin this about Vic by saying that I completely underestimated his ability and his potential. He came out of Baldwin's Chicago sales office and was a veteran Baldwin man, having been in New York at one time. I'd judge that he was in his mid-40s. He was a thin blond, so thin that he appeared frail to the point of emaciation. He had a long, narrow, sharp face with a small almost-white moustache to go with his straight almost-white hair that he combed back flat. He resembled Robert Louis Stevenson in features and body, when Stevenson was struggling against tuberculosis. But Vic only looked that way. He must have been pretty tough because he still had a long and demanding career ahead of him which he couldn't have carried off as he did unless he'd been basically pretty well.  He was Ed Harley's roommate in the small Wardman-Park apartment I've already mentioned. Vic stayed in Washington most weekends as I did and as a result he and I bummed around together quite a bit from time to time. He couldn't drink very much without becoming either stoned or ill and he had the good sense to pace himself on this and not try to keep up with the guys with larger capacities. ^[[(]] I think he liked the girls thought hew as quite circumspect with them as far as I ever knew. Most of the time he and I got along well and I liked him but occasionally he'd get off the beam with me on our work as if he were jealous of me. He may have been because I was finally offered the job of assistant chief of the whole branch under Andy Stevenson and Vic may have aspired to this himself. Of course, I didn't accept the job. All this is covered in detail in my diary of the last half of 1942. ^[[ ) ]] Vic's job in the section was finally heading the materials until under Charlie Creasser as I headed the small locomotive operation and Marshall Raymond the large locomotive scheduling. Vic was a very hard worker and I guess he did good work on the materials program, particularly setting up the Controlled Materials Plan (CMP). As a Baldwin man, he was primarily a steam expert because Baldwin was very late getting into the diesel business> However, Baldwin represented Whitcomb, their subsidiary, in the field and one day Vic said to me, "You must have been the guy who took that Boston & Maine order away from me when I was working in New York." It had been the initial B & M order for 44-tonners I'd worked on so long and diligently back in 1940 with Whitcomb competing.