Living History Interviews

A co-op design student in the 1940s--by Jim Alexander, FIDSA

On a bright September morn in 1938 in our still almost new 1937 Ford V-8 (the 85 horsepower model, please note) my father and I headed north from our home on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee bound for Cincinnati, Ohio. There was no I-75 in 1938, but you could choose between US 27 (that became Colerain Avenue when it reached Cincinnati) and US 127 (that's Hamilton Avenue in Cincinnati). We chose the former. Object of the trip: to enroll me as a freshman in the University of Cincinnati's School of Applied Arts.

Why U. C.? In a word, co-op. Originated there in 1906 by Dean Herman Schneider, the now well-known pattern of alternating school and professional practice periods (currently quarters) has been widely copied in over one thousand U.S. and Canadian schools. Closely following U.C. in adopting co-op was Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. My father was a great admirer of Arthur Morgan, the president of that college and, incidentally, a director of the TVA (Tennessee valley Authority) in the 1930s. If Antioch had offered a program in architecture I might have ended up there but its programs were only in the liberal arts--so U.C. and architecture it was. Incidentally, architecture was a compromise--my father leaned toward engineering and I, a seventeen-year-old automobile "designer" favored industrial design.

But back to our trip. We headed north past Soddy-Daisy, seperate villages before a new dam on the Tennessee made necessary the removal and consolidation. Some thirty-five miles north-east of Chattanooga we went through Dayton, the site some thirteen years before of the famous "monkey trial." Here Clarence Darrow defended the young John Scopes' right to teach evolution in Tennessee public schools. Chief attorney for the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan. I can remember, as a youngster of ten or twelve, playing in the lobby of the Aqua Hotel across the street from the courthouse in Dayton. The grandparents of a boyhood friend, John Thomison, owned the little hotel where Bryan died after stuffing himself with a giant Sunday dinner on a miserably hot day.

We could have, but didn't, take time to leave the highway at Elgin to drive seven miles west to Rugby, Tennessee--a Victorian resort founded in the late 19th century by the author of "Tom Brown's School Days," I believe, and designed by him to appeal to sons of English aristocracy who wanted to escape the traditional pattern that, depending on which son (first, second, third, etc.) you were, doomed you to a career as a diplomat, a military officer, or an Anglican priest. I have visited Rugby several times and recommend it highly.

Eight miles south of the Kentucky border we passed through Oneida. I remember two things about the little town: 1) It was the terminus of a quaint little railroad--the "Something and Oneida," and 2) coming out of the town there was a very steep section of the paved highway paved with, I presume, locally produced bricks. Thank goodness, the good weather held up and we didn't have to navigate the Ford on a slick brick hill! Ford on a slick brick hill, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof! Tennessee Williams. Oh well......

We made a brief stop at Pine Knot, Kentucky, just over the Tennessee border to greet an old friend of my father. He --the friend--was a maker of simple pieces of furniture (milking stools were a favorite item). For most of my Dad's adult life he was director of purchasing for Cavalier Corporation--originally the Tennessee Furniture Corporation. At home he always kept an active woodworking shop and occasionally made a drop-leaf table or a simple bed or crib. On his frequent lumber buying trips in the mountains, Dad would stop by Pine Knot and chew the fat with this old friend, whose name I've forgotten.

A few miles from Pine Knot we drove through Stearns, a prototypical company town, then and probably now. It had all of the expected features: a remote location away from civilization, a company store, a small inn, a company office and all the unpainted shacks where the workers lived. Owner was an absentee land company there to strip the hills of both lumber and coal. Remember the last line of the old song, "I owe my life to the company store?"

I remember that night before we left home I got something in my eye. I couldn't get it out until we stopped in Somerset, Kentucky and had whatever it was removed by an optometrist with the right-out-of-L'il Abner name of Denny Gooch!

And the last little recollection of the trip was stopping for a late lunch at some roadside lunch-room for a sandwich and milk. Doesn't sound very noteworthy until I tell you the cap on the half-pint of milk read "Grade D milk!" Knowing nothing about the grading system for milk, but not recalling having seen any rated lower than B. I was sure I had been poisoned. But I survived.

In due time we arrived at the University and I was assigned to a room in the Memorial Dormitory, the University's only men's dorm at the time, and met my room-mate, Jim de Loach, who was from Marianna, Arkansas (that's near Helena, I was told. And where the Hell is Helena, I wondered). The dormitory was, and still is, an impressive building, generally Gothic in style and dominated by a tall, square tower. The "memorial" referred to World War I, the appropriate war to memorialize when the building was built. The tower's first floor consisted of a memorial room which served as the building's only lounge. The exterior of the brick tower sported appropriate carved stone ornamentation: a gargoyle or two and, if you looked closely, you could find the form of a World War i airman pointing a machine gun at you from the carved Gothic foliage (it was a 30-caliber machine gun, I believe.)

"Jim, you're wandering," I can hear my wife say, "let's get to the point!" Yes, well first I want to make clear what I don't intend to do: 1) I won't discuss the architectural curriculum other than to mention that the department's budget was too limited to cover the cost of membership in the Beaux Arts Academy (American branch headquartered in New York) with its emphasis on unrealistic design projects--you know, a hunting lodge for a deposed monarch--that sort of thing. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, believe me. 2) I won't bore you with a lot of statistics about the co-op system then and now, other than to report that today--only two years from its 100th anniversary, the University's co-op system counts 3800 students. They come from 40 academic disciplines, work for 1400 employers and come from 34 states and nine foreign countries, and 3) neither will I dwell on the organization of the Professional Practice Department which coordinates the placement of all these students in appropriate jobs, evaluates their performance and certifies when it has been satisfactory.

It may well be of value, however, to know that in 1938 when I arrived on the scene the faculty serving the School of Applied Arts Co-ops consisted of one and a half people: for all the male students, Mr. Stockdale, who seemed to carry his filing system with him (a two-inch stack of 3 X 5 cards complete with a rubber band) and our share of Mrs. Palmer (her husband Frank taught surveying to civil engineers and architects). Mrs. Palmer was the coordinator for all of the female students--not only in our Applied Arts School, but also in the other two participating parts of the College--namely Engineering and Business Administration.

What I do plan to do is describe the six co-op jobs I held during the ten work periods between November 1939 and May 1943. During this period the basic rhythm was seven weeks in school followed by one week vacation, then eight weeks of work. To make it come out even the summer work period was ten weeks and summer vacation was three. The co-op job was always filled. As a Section One student left the job his alternate in Section Two would wind up his short vacation that followed his section and report for work the following Monday.

Following the full-time first year of all students, I started my first section of co-op work in November, 1939. The country was beginning to come out of the Great Depression, which meant good co-op jobs were still hard to find. A few examples: That Fall the girl I was, unbeknownst to me at the time, to marry some three and a half years later, enrolled in the Art-In-Industry option and for her first co-op job was sent to the Gibson Art Company in a Fourth Street building that later became a parking garage. Her job was to put greeting cards in envelopes, eight hours a day. The girl stationed next to her was a stripper at the "Big G"- the Gayety Burlesque Theater up on Vine Street. Hoping to get something a little more challenging. Our heroine (we'll call her Petty--everyone else did--that was her nickname--she couldn't stand her real name Alice) requested a change. She was moved five blocks east on Fourth Street to the Western and Southern Life Insurance Company. Here her new job was to return file folders to their cabinets, eight hours a day. Next term she transferred to General Art, a non-co-op (full-time) option.

Another example: Robert Deshon, an architecture student four years ahead of me was sent to a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp for his first co-op job (the camp was on the side of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee--of all places). He helped convert an old railroad bed to a bridle path for horseback riding in the national park that the mountainside was becoming, thanks to Mr. Adolf Ochs of the New York Times, and before that, of the Chattanooga Times.

I also recall an arrangement with the Heekin Can Company to take off Mr. Stockdale's hands any "unplaced" men co-ops and put them on the company's loading docks loading empty cans on box-cars. Some government agency, it may well have been the NYA (National Youth Administration) provided funds to hire co-ops to pave with black-top the network of short-cut foot-paths that had been worn across the lawns of the campus. Some of us speculated that if we picked out a prominent spot in the campus lawn and repeatedly tramped down the grass in, say, a thirty-foot diameter circle leading nowhere, that when we returned to school after the next eight-week co-op period, we would find a neatly black-topped 18-inch wide circular walkway where we students had so purposefully trod in our previous school period. Of course, we'll never know--we never followed through with the scheme. I do recall years later when i returned as a teacher giving a name to one narrow but carefully black-topped little path along the contour of a hillside and connecting two concrete sidewalks serving two different entrances to the DAA building. I called it the Norwood Lateral.

And finally, my first co-op job. It was with the Mitchell Furniture Company of Cincinnati. It was located in an old building on John Street, not far from the Spaghetti Factory Restaurant's later site. All of the mud from the 1937 flood hadn't been cleaned from the factory walls. The work: sand-papering console radio cabinets--getting ready for the Christmas Season. Silvertones, Farnsworths, Capeharts, Philcos--all on the assembly line. The pay: 30¢ an hour, thanks to the Wagner labor Act--otherwise it would have been piecework. What did I learn? How to sand with the grain.

Other recollections: wondering if the payroll would be met on Friday, dirty pictures behind the loading dock, wee Bonnie Baker singing, "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, how you can love...!" via the jukebox at a riverfront bar and grille, and finding two old German craftsmen still working on beautiful hand-carved church furniture, way up on the top floor of the factory. I was the only one of seven co-ops to stick it out for the full eight weeks. I reminded Mr. Stockdale of this when i made a pitch for a "good" job the next section.

My second job was at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was a "good" job and I worked there for four sections. In 1940 only a fraction of the rescued and rebuilt 1893 Columbian Exhibition Palace was open to the public.

Before getting into describing the job, I must provide a little background of this magnificent building. It was one of several grand "palaces" that were arranged around natural and man-made waterways that collectively transformed Jackson Park into the "Great White City" - white, because its white classical structures were bathed in the light of thousands of electric light bulbs. Grand though they appeared, the buildings were of light construction and the exterior was of plaster rather than marble or limestone.

There was one exception to this. The Palace of Fine Arts, because of the value of its contents, was of fireproof construction, and was therefore not demolished and cleared away within a few years of the exhibition's closing. Magnificent though it was with its four Porches of the Maidens copied from those on the Erectheum in Athens, and the three domes based on the one on Rome's Pantheon, the unused building began to decay and soon became one of the greatest "white elephants' in existence. For a brief period, Mr. Marshall Field started and maintained a small museum of natural history there until he closed its doors and opened a much grander Field Museum on the lake shore at Grant Park opposite the center of downtown Chicago. So again decay resumed and the Park Board was left with its aging white elephant.

Shift the scene to Munich, Bavaria in the early years of the 20th century. Visiting this handsome city were industrialists Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, his wife and their young son. At this moment there is great consternation in the party. The young son has disappeared and cannot be found. Finally he is located in the city's Deutches Museum completely absorbed with pushing levers and operating do-it-yourself exhibits. After the happy reunion, Mr. Rosenwald did some thinking. Why was it that this romantic southern German city known mostly for October-fest celebrations and mad old King Ludwig, was home to a remarkable museum dedicated to how modern man accomplished great things through invention, science, and industry? With the possible exception of London's Science Museum, there was no other institution in th world dedicated to this mission. Why Bavaria? Why not the U.S.A.--the country of the future?

To make a long story short, when Rosenwald returned home to Chicago, he invested several million of his own dollars and talked fellow philanthropists into supporting this plan for the realization of his dream. For a location he, of course, chose the decaying Columbian Exposition Fine Arts palace and soon he began a complete remodeling and upgrading of the site. Limestone replaced plaster exterior. New exhibition space was created by excavating a new basement level, and the ingenious and, to the eye, realistic coal mine was created beneath the center of the complex. It was to this building, or to be truthful, to the completely remodeled west wing (plus the coal mine) that the public was invited in 1940.

Many of the 1940 exhibits were salvaged from the 1933-1934 Century of Progress World's Fair. My job: a "demonstrator." The Museum relied on co-ops from U.C. and Antioch for most of the lecturing and demonstrating. I went there to work in the Architectural section--only to find it wasn't open yet! Instead, I worked in Sound Physics: the whispering gallery, the binaural hearing exhibit (working with Oscar the dummy on a sound-proof stage), the wave tank, seeking "perfect pitch" with a stroboscopic device, the General Electric Hall of Magic (seeing sound, hearing, light, etc.)

When the Architectural/Civil Engineering section opened months later I happily dug holes with a working half-scale power shovel (then filled them up again), put a model of Boulder Dam through its paces, conducted guided tours of Milan Cathedral and constructed the Appian Way, step-by-step, with the help of models and diaramas, and also blew apart a few well-hinged flour mill models in a dust explosion hazard performance in the little theater. The pay: finally 50¢ an hour the last section I was there, but they would let you work extra hours as a night watchman--in the coal mine, yet!

Recollections on the job: Watching the transfer of administrative power in the Museum. The two delegations met in "my" department. Leaving the directorship: scholarly old Dr. Philip Fox--he of the late night private cello recitals in his offices high up in the darkened museum. Taking over: the dynamic Major Lenox Lohr, former general manager of Century of Progress and major executive in NBC and, I believe, RCA; falling flat on my face when my knees buckled as I led a large group of visitors down a short flight of steps in the Physics section the day after I had tried--and failed-- to do as many push-ups as my two engineering co-op roommates; the sheer delight, after finishing my gloomy night watchman rounds (complete with miner's helmet and headlamp), of meeting friends on the 55th Street promontory, watching the lights on the Wrigley Building, far down the arc of the lake shore, go out at midnight, then taking a forbidden plunge off the breakwater boulders into Lake Michigan.

Recollections as a co-op in Chicago: The three of us making the late Saturday night dash from Cincinnati to Chicago (always with a wee-hour coffee stop at a white-tiled all-nighter in Rushville), locating, renting, and throwing our belongings into a furnished apartment; and reporting to work at noon--ready to lecture and demonstrate exhibits to Sunday afternoon crowds, the old Queen Anne style house on Harper Avenue that six of us (three from U.C., three from Antioch rented for $60 a month (including weekly maid service) from a University of Chicago professor off for the summer in Canada, and the 75 overnight guests we logged in our guest book (mostly students just passing through Chicago), and the free concerts in Grant or Jackson Parks with which we entertained them, the realization that the liberal arts-based Antioch students were in many ways more interesting individuals than my U.C. engineering roommates, and two young lady co-ops from Antioch who had social service jobs and who lived in a nearby apartment--one of whom, with her fingers crossed, I'm sure--swore that one of her ancestors had been a pontoon, not a patroon, on the Hudson River.

I recall running into an old friend from Chattanooga studying at the University of Chicago and through him joining a student co-operative (very cheap meals!) and through it attending an evening supper meeting featuring a meal of cornbread, sorghum, and apples, illumination by candles, a real live sharecropper imported especially for the occasion from Arkansas and an appropriate speech by a sociology professor, with all of us joining hands and singing the Internationale--all of this in a stately Gothic campus hall--and there was the thrill of finding out that the attractive music student in the apartment next door in the Blackstone Apartments was the sister of famed "Whizzer" (later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) White...many wonderful people.

And oh, yes, I can't forget the Democratic national Convention of 1940. I attended the session that produced the candidate for vice-president. Handsome, silver-haired Paul V. McNutt was the crowd's favorite for the job. Time and time again, like the good party man he was, he went to the podium to read a statement withdrawing his name for consideration. Time and time again, the crowd shouted him down. This went on for quite some and came to an end only when Henry Wallace's name was put in nomination and, obviously with the blessing of those in command, the famous "voice from the sewer," with its own P.A. system in the basement, bellowed forth with cheers for Wallace. The Kelly-Nash machine earned its keep that night! At the same time, several hundred demonstrators, none holding tickets of admission, erupted from basement stairways, each person waving a cornstalk and shouting for the candidate from Iowa. Mrs. Wallace, sitting on the stage with other notables, was openly weeping she was so embarrassed. I found myself, normally a fairly civilized liberal-minded Democrat, so agitated by the obvious phoniness of the whole thing that i was shrieking my head off for William B. Bankhead, Tallulah's father!

Working four co-op sessions at this job meant just to get to and from work I had four round trips between Cincinnati and Chicago, and here are a couple of quick items related to this trip, with which I'll close this chapter. At the end of one work period I caught a night train from Chicago to Detroit to meet architecture professor George Roth, who was leading a three-day inspection trip of Detroit. After joining this group, I enjoyed visiting the Cranbrook Schools, a revolutionary new shopping mall on the north side and, of course, Father Coughlin's Church of the Little Flower.

For reasons having to do with money, or the lack of same, Dick Scobell, a senior, and I decided to hitch-hike to Cincinnati instead of taking the train. All went well until near Lebanon, our current driver had to leave us by the highway as he turned off onto a side road. But lo and behold, an old sedan full of people saw us, stopped, and invited us aboard. The older son of this family had earned a furlough from his Army unit, had called home from the Cincinnati Greyhound Terminal, was so eager to see his family that he instructed them to start driving to Cincinnati and he would start walking toward Lebanon. Dick and I earned our trip by changing a flat en route, but when the family did let us out at the old Sears store on Reading Road (the nearest spot to campus) they had still not met Private First Class Sunny Boy. I've often wondered how they even got together--or if they did!

And finally, on one of our drives home in roommate Joel's car. In southern Indiana at about two A.M., we came across an accident. Apparently two trucks had side-swiped each other, and one of them rolled over and caught fire. When we pulled up behind it the flames were out of control. What was the truck carrying? A mixed load of chrome-plated bumper guards loosely bundled together, and cases of cans of Vienna sausages. The flames were reflected over and over in all the little chrome surfaces, and every few seconds a can of Vienna sausages popped open spurting hot juice and great aroma over the scene. I can think of nothing profound to observe here, but it's still a weird mix: chrome-plated bumper guards and sizzling Vienna sausages.

My third co-op job was with the Foster Engineering Company of Indianapolis. Two work sections of excellent experience with a firm with a long record of hiring Cincinnati co-ops; my boss, Mr. Erickson, had come up that route. The traditional view that architectural firms shouldn't also build the buildings they had designed didn't prevail in Indiana, and as a result, I was able to be a draftsman on a job and then come back two months later and serve as clerk-of-the-works as the building took form on the site. Also, much good experience detailing church interiors--Mr. Foster designed Christian Science churches all over the country.

Once I realized how big a share of the office's work was designing Christian Science churches, I hurried to the public library and checked out a biography of Mary Baker Eddy. It turned out to be the wrong biography--the author had been no follower of Christian Science, he (or she) was one of its founder's severest critics.

Recollections of the job and of Indianapolis: The cold pre-dawn ride with the construction foreman from Indianapolis to the job-site twenty-five miles away in Anderson, designing and supervising construction of modular pre-fab construction field office buildings--and being arrested by the state police for towing one of them with my boss's car and an unlicensed trailer, working on my required co-op report one Sunday alone in the office (a rendering of a church in Kansas City the office was designing) when the news of Pearl Harbor came over the radio, trips out to Fort Benjamin Harrison's induction center to visit with friends who had been drafted, my embarrassment at shearing several teeth off a gear on a crane they let me operate on the construction site before I got the "feel" of the clutch, taking my boss's daughter to basketball games at Butler (her fiancée was in the service, and I was considered "safe"), boarding house lifein an old faded mansion in Woodruff Place, the number of lodge halls and funeral parlors Indianapolis seemed to have, and the instant notoriety my home town was given by the popular hit of the day, Glenn Miller's rendition of "Chattanooga Choo-Choo."

Having lived in a U.C. dorm my school sections and having my Crosley radio there tuned in to WLW-The Nation's Station, I was somewhat familiar with the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis and its flamboyant founder ("It gives me great pleasure to introduce your friend and my father, E. Howard Cadle. Thank you Buford.") with this background I found it doubly interesting when taking packages from the office for mailing in the main post office (our office was in the Knights of Pythias Building, just a stone's throw from the post office) to see the evangelist check his box in the post office, pull out a handful of letters and, as he needed cash with which to buy his cigars, see him tear open one or more of the envelopes, take out the ever present five or ten dollar bills, discard the envelope and proceed to the cigar stand.

Also remarkable was the number of parades we saw during this post-Pearl harbor winter and spring. To me the most amazing of the paraders were the rank upon rank of white-dresses females tramping by. (Were they auxiliaries of reserve units? I don't know.) They wore identical white dresses, their freshly-whitened shoes made their feet seem larger and their shining chrome-plated helmets seemed to make their heads seem smaller as well as brighter. Looking at them from the curb or from office windows above they always seemed like an invasion by a hoard of strange ant-like creatures.

A pleasant note on which to end this section. One weekend three of our female classmates from Applied Arts (yes, Petty was one of them) came up for a visit (the mother of one of the in-town co-ops put the girls up for two nights). We went swimming at a place called Broadripple and had a very nice weekend in general. The amazing thing about the whole affair was the means of transportation employed to get them to Indi. Have you ever taken a 224-mile round trip on a cross-town bus? Yes, the Greyhound fleet was so strained that old Cincinnati Street Railway busses had to be drafted to help handle the traffic.

My fourth co-op job was with Raymond Loewy Associates in New York City. At last, a chance to work in the field that was my first love---industrial design-and with the leading office in the country at that. The pay: nothing per hour (they did give me a nice check as a surprise when I returned to school, however), and I was able to parlay the job into a good post-war position with the firm four and a half years later when I returned from overseas military service in Japan. The work: Since they didn't plan to pay me, they didn't presume to tell me in which area to work! I chose transportation. In the Loewy office that meant such accounts as Studebaker, Greyhound Bus, Moore-McCormick and Panama Lines, and Pennsylvania Railroad (and all the railroads in which Pennsy had a controlling interest). Mostly grandiose postwar plans, new double-decked sleeping cars and rear-facing tiered glass-bubbled observation cars for the new versions of the big-name passenger trains--that were never built. Some war work: a logo and shoulder patch for the Service of Supply, some camouflage work, a helmet incorporating sensitive sound detection equipment for use by guards at military and defense installations. The thrill of working in the same office with many young designers who would become leaders in their own right after the war.

Other recollections: a four-dollar a week dorm room at Columbia University--before the Navy V-12 program moved in and took over, attending some meetings of NYU students who banded together to protest the suspension of the school's architectural program--and ended up working with interested professionals to design a better curriculum they hoped could be used after the war, getting to know K. Lomberg-Holm, the man credited with organizing the system behind Sweet's Catalog and one far ahead of his time in that he thought of obsolescence, production and sales of products and goods--the spirit and friendliness on the office--the spirit, tempo, and excitement of New York in general--every designer should experience a taste of it sometime in his career.

(At this point I learned that I had been selected editor of the University's year-book, the "Cincinnatian." With the wisdom of a twenty-year old, I accepted the position--and the restriction that my remaining co-op jobs would have to be in Cincinnati. Of course the five hundred dollar honorarium that came with the year-book editorship--enough to pay for my senior year tuition--had something to do with my accepting the position.)

My fifth co-op job was with Tietig and lee, architects, Cincinnati, a respected old-line firm. I remember my first interview with Rudolf Tietig, an imposing old gentleman who looked up at me through his thick-lensed glasses and delivered a lecture, the gist of which was that young men shouldn't attempt to become architects if their parents couldn't afford to pay for a first-class education (he was MIT, class of about 1898, I guess), pay for travel and study abroad, and, after all that, pay a good architect to take them on as apprentices. As I remember it, he closed he "interview" with a sigh, a muttered recognition that times were changing, and instructions for Pat Barone to see if he could find something useful for me to do in the office. The work: much routine tracing, lettering, detailing, trips to the blue-printer, learning from the old-tmers in the office. The pay: I don't remember, but I'm sure it wasn't sensational. The conclusion: that it was good experience and a necessary and important element in this mosaic I was working on.

(I spent many evenings up on campus working on the year-book and felt I locked up th Student Union Building as often as did the night janitor.)

My sixth and last co-op was with Wright Aeronautical Company, Lockland, Ohio. My "war" job in the plant that is now part of general Electric's giant jet engine complex in Evendale. The work: Plant Engineering. The pay: Sensational! 75¢ an hour with plenty of weekend overtime at time-and-a-half. Recollections of the job: car pool riding out the new Lockland Highway, the forerunner of I-75, a giant parking lot, security check points, time clocks, recognizing recent U.C. architectural graduates among the rows of white-shirted draftsmen and engineers in the department. Endless work with floor plans, templates, colored blocks representing different machine tools---trips down on the floor to observe, measure and verify layout of machinery--the end product: Curtiss-Wright radial engines not only for the U.S. Army Air Force but also for tanks of the Armored Forces--that old (then current) joke about the frustration of the security guards who every night sifted through a wheelbarrow load of sand one worker wheeled out at the end of his shift--frustration at not finding concealed microfilm, machined parts or classified documents, untill it finally dawned on them that the worker's game was stealing wheelbarrows!

Well, that was the end of my co-op program. We skipped the last work period so I could graduate early in April and, with my fellow advanced ROTC cadets, report to Officer Candidate School and finally join the war.

April was a little crowded that year (1943), I wrapped up all my schoolwork, got my diploma in a special early graduation ceremony, and Petty and I were married. Our honeymoon: three nights in Chicago's palmer House with train rides to and from sitting in reserved seats in the observation car of the James Whitcomb Riley, the New York Central's streamlined--but coal-burning--train designed by Henry Dreyfuss, probably second only to Raymond Loewy in importance in American industrial design of the forties and fifties. Somewhere in that last month I managed to to come down with a beautiful case of the hives! On the good side, however, we were in the wedding party of our best friends, Bob and Tiel Hilton.

The next three and a half years: the army. But that's another story.

James M. Alexander, Jr.