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35

There was a seventh member of the Railroad Boys who didn't join up until early August but I'm going to put him in here with the others to make the story complete.  He was [[underlined]] Matlock K. Tate [[/underlined]] of Lima Locomotive, the third builder of large steam but not to be compared with Baldwin and Alco.  Mat came from Lima, Ohio, headquarters and lived at the Wardman Park, where his wife joined him occasionally as well as his daughter, who had a job in New York as I recall.  I had very mixed emotions and opinions about Mat.  He was sort of Diamond Jim Brady type on a small scale.  He was in shovel sales at Lima but had been a locomotive man and particularly smaller locomotives such as those used by the logging industry--all steam, of course, as Lima missed the diesel boat completely.  Mat was a Virginian and I think a graduate of the University of Virginia although he didn't have a strong southern accent.  He must have been in his lower 50s, a big, wide, somewhat paunchy man who loved to eat and drink, particularly drink.  He dressed very well and I had the impression that maybe all the Tate income didn't come from his salary.  In fact, I sometimes wondered just how able Mat was.  He was a great entertainer.  He threw money around in bars and restaurants.  For instance, he'd bet me a dollar he could get a table beside the dance floor and then tip the headwaiter $5 to give it to him.  He tipped everyone lavishly even including people who hadn't done anything for him.  One of his ideas of achievement was deliberately to get a person or persons blotto drunk.  When doing this, he would sometimes take it easy on his own drinking and at other times, go right along and get stoned also.  He loved to throw big parties.  He threw one at the Carlton in honor of his Lima boss, Henry Barnhart, head of the shovel business, and Mat got roaring drunk, took offense at something Barnhart did and was going to beat him up until Barnhart simply kidded him out of it.  Mat made it a point to have superb relations with all the maitre d's and head bartenders wherever he went.  The best illustration of this was a party Mat arranged for a small group of us WPB boys at the Wardman Park where we were astounded to have simply delicious steaks served at a time when they were virtually unobtainable anywhere.  Mat persuaded the maitre d' to "borrow" them from Vice President Henry Wallace's food locker but it was discovered before he could replace them and he was summarily fired.  But Mat pulled strings and got him a good job at the Carlton.  Mat wore heavy glasses and a sardonic smile much of the time.  He was an exciting kind of guy to bum around with if you didn't care what sort of mischief you might get in in the drinking line.  I once got Mat and Henry Guy together and they hit it off tops as might be expected.  I found myself liking Mat although I felt there wasn't anything very substantial about him.  I don't know just what he was brought into WPB to do but he wound up during his first few months at least, helping me with the small builders, taking over Porter almost completely when I got into the inevitable hassle with