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33

I have related that Baldwin hired Dick Packard away from Pyle-National and made him head of their Chicago sales office. When this occurred, Vic apparently decided to look elsewhere for a job and the first thing I heard was that Vic had been hired by Electro-Motive, General Motors' diesel locomotive division, which was about to blossom out and become the greatest locomotive manufacturing concern in the world. ^[[ ( ]] I don't know exactly what jobs Vic handled at first with EMD but he worked out of headquarters at Lagrange, a Chicago suburb. ^[[ ) ]] And it wasn't too many years before he became their sales manager for the whole USA and maybe for the world, a very big job indeed. I ran into Vic occasionally at conventions ^[[ ( ]] and once when we were calling on Al Perlman before he became president of the New York Central, I saw Vic in Denver at the D&R&GW offices. ^[[ ) ]] He has always been very cordial and our brief meetings have been pleasant little experiences. So Vic came out on top of the heap. He obviously had a lot more on the ball than any of us gave him credit for, and particularly Baldwin for whom he worked long and hard for many years. And it was a fortunate thing for Vic because Baldwin is no more as far as locomotives are concerned with Electro-Motive leads the field.

The next one is the only one who might have qualified as a celebrity and had any chance of terminating his early career with a notice in TIME Magazine's Milestones column. He was [[underlined]] Joseph T. Rowbottom [[/underlined]], loaned by American Steel Foundries to WPB. Joes title was "Sales Agent" and his office was at 230 Park Avenue, New York City. Although he had a good job with American Steel Foundries, [[underlined]] it was not his current situation [[/underlined]] that made Joe notable but his past. In fact, [[underlined]] newspaper columists [[/underlined]] had been known to refer to Joe as [[underlined]] immortal [[/underlined]]. This is a long stoy but briefly all this was the result of the [[underlined]] famed student riots [[/underlined]] at the University of Pennsylvania known as rowbottoms having been named after Joe, an alumnus of the Class of 1912. [[underlined]] This I shall cover in a moment [[/underlined]] after writing a bit about Joe himself and his WPB work. Joe was a big, broad-beamed man, a little under six feet but probably weighing well over 200. He had a big, round, pleasant face with dark, humorous eyes and very dark hair which was always combed smooth and neat. He was 52 but looked more like the mid-40s. He had a big, booming voice and a big, round, pleasant face with dark, humorous eyes and very dark hair which was always combed smooth and neat. He was 52 but looked more like the mid-40s. He had a big, booming voice and a big, booming, priceless sense of humor, sometimes a bit on the earthy side but always funny. If a group was sitting together, quiet and disconsolate about something, and Joe suddenly joined them, the cloud would seem to life as if by magic. As "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz might say, "Happiness is having Joe Rowbottom around." I know I always felt better if Joe Rowbottom around." I know I always felt better if Joe was around and missed him when he was absent from the office. AS far as I could figure it out, his job in WPG was to expedite steel coatings. He seemed to have close connections in every sizeable steel foundry in the country and he spent most of his time on the long distance phone putting the pressure