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Tom Evans, the president of Porter. [[red left bracket]] I think Mat probably remained longer with WPB than any of us and he did more than anyone to hold us all together after the war.  He had "Dollar a Year" keys produced which most of us bought and Willie has mine on a "key bracelet" right now.  Mat concocted some sort of "alumni organization" all of us belong to and attend annual meetings.  I think I went to one, the attendance was poor and I don't believe there was more than one more before it folded.  Mat liked to do things like that they're very hard to make fly.  I saw Mat at one or two meetings of the Buffalo Railroad Club.  And then it seems to me I soon heard that Mat had died of a heart attack. I suppose he was around 60.  He'd led a hard life but I'd say that he'd enjoyed it. [[red right bracket]]
 
So there we have my so-called Railroad Boys.  They were an interesting and memorable group whom I enjoyed working and playing with as much as the GE-IGE study team in New York in the 1953-54 and the NEMA crowd in the 1940s.  But now I must leave this working level of WPB and ascend the heights to get at the next chapter of this story. I've done a little researching on this portion but failed to turn up everything I wanted;  it would be possible to do so but would involve more work that I think justified so here goes with what material I have.  Prior to the birth of WPB, there was a federal agency called the Office of Production Management (OPM) which was the first to undertake the regulation of war production and existed largely through 1941.  Its co-directors were William S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman.  Knudsen was president of General Motors and Hillman a top labor leader and thus was achieved a labor-management coalition in directing the war effort in industry.  In OPM, Donald Nelson was in charge of the priority program.  But the joint direction of industry under OPM did not work at all smoothly because Knudsen and Hillman pulled in different directions. Accordingly the Truman Committee of the Senate, which had been studying the war production situation, recommended to President Roosevelt that OPM be scrapped and replaced by a new organization headed by one man. The result of this was WPB with Donald M. Nelson as chairman and was to head WPB from its inception at the beginning of 1942 until along in 1944.  He had been executive vice president of Sears Roebuck and hailed from Missouri.  William S. Knudsen became director of production of the War Department and given the rank of Lieutenant General.  I believe Hillman drifted back to labor-leading.  General Electric's Charles E. Wilson left its presidency to become a vice-chairman of WPB in 1942 and in 1943-44 he was executive vice-chairman.  I believe there was another vice-chairman in 1942 named Jim Knowlson of Chicago and a friend of the Graces, who ran the Requirements Committee, a prestigious group who dished out practically all of the strategic material in the country.  Also during this early period, in either OPM or WPB and occupying a high post, was Earnest Kanzler, who was Henry Ford's son-in-law.