Two Characters

There were several colorful individuals in the group at Wilmington. On the maintenance side there were two people in particular. They were “Shorty” Coe (given first name Douglas) and A.B. Cox. I don’t think I ever knew what the initials stood for. He was always called A.B.

Shorty was the maintenance foreman and thus had more contact with the fledgling engineers. His father had been a political boss in some eastern citiy and Shorty had acquired a dislike for such activity and had gravitated into a rather adventuresome life. In World War I he had spent time in Russia with some kind of Allied force — my knowledge of the history in Russia directly preceding the revolution is kind of vague, anyway it was the period between the armistice that ended the war and the takeover by the red faction.

Shorty, as the name implies, was short in stature, but of a husky build. He was sandy-haired, rather bald and one eye had been injured ( in a barroom brawl?) so he viewed the world at an odd angle. An individual in every sense of the word, he did not deign to wear a hard hay, though that was prescribed attire for persons working in the plant even at that early time.

At the start of the war he tried to enlist but was turned down, I suppose because of his age and his damaged eye. Physically he would have been a match for any draftee or enlistee regardless of age. His vacation pursuit was to go cross-country skiing, I suppose in the Sierra. On these occasions he would often go alone, though I think on one of these trips one of the engineers working up in the office went with him.

He was always needling the young engineers, one of his favorite comments when one of them would come to him with what they considered a problem but which he thought they could easily handle themselves was “Wave your sheepskin at it.” I guess diplomas were on sheepskin in his background.

I always got along well with Shorty. During the war he inveigled me into a wager on when the war would be over. It was one of the few times I have made a bet that way. I did participate in the football pools when working in the San Francisco office and I recall winning $10 once. I bet Shorty that the war would be over by June 1945 and so I lost though not by much.

The last time I saw Shorty was one time when I was on a business trip to the Los Angeles area. I called him up and we had dinner together — I guess he drove in from wherever he resided. About the only thing I recall about that dinner was that he ordered borscht (beet soup); I wonder if this was because of his Russian experience in WWI.

A.B. Cox was a very different kettle of fish. When I knew him he was probably nearing 60 years of age and I think he retired not long after the war ended. He had started out as a machinist, like Jean’s father, and in many ways he resembled her father. He was fairly tall, thin, balding though what remained of his hair was still pretty dark. He also resembled Jean’s father in disposition though he wasn’t quite as crusty and uncivil. But he could be pretty acerbic at times.

When I knew him he was classified as a mechanical engineer having arrived at that designation without any formal training. At work he did such things as design small pumps for laboratory scale pilot plant units capable of outputs of ml/hr with discharge pressures of up to 1000 lb/sq. in.

One thing I remember about Shorty or A.B., I don’t recall which. They had the definition of a machinist as a workman who could make a piece of metal-working correctly the first time — any person reasonably acquainted with metal-working could make it eventually but not necessarily the first time.