The people in Industrial Relations at Westinghouse gave me the usual policy blurb for new hires, no doubt as a reminder, for I had heard the blurb on my first trip here. They were very good in helping a young single guy to find a place to live. Getting off the Elm Street bus I found the address given me. It was a fine looking old brick house with a full front porch, a much better place than I had ever lived. A kind grandmotherly-looking lady greeted me at the door.

“Good morning, my name is Don Jessee,” I said, “The people at Westinghouse said you might have a room for rent. I’m a new engineer with Westinghouse.”

“Yes indeed,” she said, “Since Mr. Becker, my husband, died I have rented my upstairs rooms to young men. I have two from Westinghouse. One young man just left to get married. I’ll show you the room he had.”

I thanked Mrs. Becker and took the room. It served my purpose very well. The only drawback was that I had to eat out. That was no big deal except on Sundays. The few open restaurants were a mile away, down town. The busses didn’t run and I had no car. After a few long walks I soon learned to keep some snack food on hand.

My new boss was B. O. Austin, Section Engineer of the Control section, a group of engineers in charge of developing schemes and hardware for control and protection of electric power systems for airplanes. This included assuring the proper output voltage of the electric generator and protecting the system from being damaged by overloads, short circuits, etc.

B.O., as he preferred to be called, was a fatherly figure about the age of my father. B.O. was an even-tempered, soft-spoken man from North Carolina. (I never saw him show anger.) He was always on the lookout for innovative ways for doing things. He took a dim view of the “moss backs” who thought, “This is how we always did it.” As a result, B.O. had a lot of patents. It was because of his early influence that I eventually got 27 patents myself. 

In those days transistors were unheard of. A computer was as big as a house. Electronic circuits used vacuum tubes, which were fragile, bulky and produced a lot of heat. Thus, it should be no surprise that virtually all control and protective devices made use of electromagnets. Voltage regulators and switching devices suitable for the environment in an airplane were not commercially available, and had to be made in-house. B.O. obtained several copies of a book about the design of magnets. He handed me a copy and declared me an expert in magnetic design. Before he retired B.O. elected me expert in many other things that I knew absolutely nothing about. We had a sample department where craftsmen built newly designed apparatus. B.O.’s philosophy was to make a few calculations and then go build a model and test it. As a junior engineer I assisted Don Exner and O.C. Walley in refining the designs of their projects.

Meanwhile, I continued to live at Mrs. Becker’s house and ride the bus to work and elsewhere or walk. After a few months Mrs. Becker decided to sell the house. I wondered where I would move to, but an odd thing happened. The tenants went with the house. Mrs. Becker moved out, the Filsons moved in and we tenants stayed put. I had never been sold before, but it worked our all right. Our new landlords proved to be amiable people and we became friends. Their young son, David, enjoyed having big boys in the house to talk to and joke around with. He seemed to have sympathy for me when I used an expression I’d picked up in the army, “Oh, my achin’ back!” implying surprise or dismay.

A member of the section, known as Mac McMaster, had a 10-year old Dodge sedan that I coveted. Cars of that vintage had a fabric rooftop. The roof of Mac's car had rotted away and was replaced by a sheet steel roof held in place by many screws, about an inch apart. New cars were virtually unavailable during the war and Mac was reluctant to sell. Once the war was over he decided to quit his job and move on. He sold me his car, for which I was really glad, for now I didn’t need to rely on bus schedules. I could pursue a lifestyle more suitable to a young man.

I continued living with the Filsons for more than a year, until I was overcome by matrimony. After the wedding David’s mother, Ploma, relayed to me his comment during the ceremony, “I’ll bet he said, ‘Oh, my achin’ back’. ”