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in being one of the very few GE men who have been fired by the chairman of the board in person. As Phil grew older, I believe he began suffering increasingly with arthritis and retired early as a result. He had built a home in the West Indies to which he retired. As far as I know, he is still living and would be about 77.
And so Frank Headley and I faded out of WPB but our job was essentially completed. However, Charlie Creasser and Andy Stevenson immediately began a drive to get me back on a dollar-a-year basis to take over the small locomotive program. However, there was alot of opposition to this. It was Charlie Wilson's opinion that the General Electric Company had had some "pretty shabby treatment" from WPB and he wasn't enthused about any more GE men joining the organization; I think the "shabby treatment" had extended also to what had been dished out by other government bodies such as the Truman Committee. Within the Company and probably reflecting Charlie Wilson's views, there was violent opposition to my returning to Washington on the part of Chet Lang, the apparatus sales vice president and E.O.Shreve, the apparatus VP. As for Phil Reed, he reportedly stated that as far as he was concerned, as soon as he left WPB, it would be okay for me to join up; apparently he didn't like having GE men working for him in WPG. [[underlined]] Now that I [[/underlined]] look back on it, I suppose the biggest thing that was bugging these men was a fear that GE men would get themselves into compromising positions while carrying out their WPB duties. I took no stock in this. I thought the Company owed it to the war effort and I became quite exasperated at the attitude. However, I was to learn by extremely unpleasant experience how well founded this fear was. There's usually a rotten apple in every sack no matter how good the rest of them are. In this case it proved to be Thomas Mellon Evans, the president of the H.K.Porter Company; details on [[underlined]] Tom Evans [[/underlined]] may be found on [[underlined]] p.20 of my 1941 write-up. [[/underlined]] But I had to find this out the hard way. A step-by-step account of this will be found in my diary for the last half of 1942 as I got progressively in deeper with Porter. [[underlined]] So I returned to Erie [[/underlined]] the last of June to take a week or so to clean up my desk and then indulge in a two-weeks vacation before really getting back into the swing of things. If Charlie Creasser had his way, I'd be returning to WPB in the very near future but there was nothing to indicate that the GE higher brass would play along with it.

My diary resumes with a summary of what happened from November 28, 1940 to July 16, 1942, all done up brown in five hand-written pages. The day-by-day diary begins again, to run without any appreciable break for the next five years.

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