McKenna Process Company
Plant formerly located in Joliet, Illinois - ca. 1920.
The Life of George Langford, Sr., 1876-1964
by George Langford, Jr., 1901-1996
Transcribed & lightly edited by George Langford, III, 1936-

Author's note: I feel exceptionally well qualified to act as Father's biographer; we were very closely associated in a number of ventures during practically all of Father's life: Oarsman; Scientist; Steel Mill Operator; Pater Familias; Personality; Social Life; Paleontologist; Archaeologist; Paleobotanist; McKenna Process Company; Life Partner; Genealogist; Artist;Sculptor;Author;Poet;Musician; Epilogue.

OARSMAN: Very early in my life, I came to know Father as a famed athlete.  I was very young when I first learned to read, and my favorite "textbook" was four fat scrapbooks of Father's, full of newspaper clippings of events that had interested him:  college football, club track and field events, professional boxing, and, of course, rowing.  There were many pictures and descriptions of races between college crews: Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Yale.

So; here was Father, tall and slender and tough-looking, along with the rest of the Yale eight-oared varsity crew.

Father was frequently given special attention; he had been chosen, as a freshman, to row stroke on the varsity crew ... a position usually filled by a seasoned veteran oarsman ... but by a Freshman ? Never.

In the last quarter of the 19th Century, the heroes of sports were champion boxers, bicycle riders, runners, and oarsmen.  Father, rowing on an extra good Yale crew and singled out for attention for his selection as a Freshman stroke, got a full share of publicity.

During my growing-up years at home, some of Father's famous athletic friends would drop by to see him, so I got to meet several of his crewmates and some of the legendary footballers of the period: Ross Hickock, Orville Hickock, Pudge Heffelfinger, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, later to be a long-time football coach at the University of Chicago.

It didn't strike me as unusual when Father took up golf.  He could do practically anything he wanted with his good right arm.  The loss of his left arm made him develop a roundhouse golf swing, and he was the longest and also the wildest off the tee at the Joliet Country Club, where he earned a twelve handicap.

Years later, on visits to St. Paul, he rowed a few times in a pick-up crew, just to see if he could row with one arm and for old times' sake.

SCIENTIST: Also, when I was very young, I was familiar with Father's reputation as a scientist, not only because of his active scientific ventures, but also because in Joliet he was viewed as a sort of resident scientist, and whenever an event occured involving any kind of science, the newspapermen would come to Father for explanation.

Father also had many visits from scientists in various special natural science fields; men from Yale, Harvard, the Universities of Chicago and Illinois, and from the big museums.  They would discuss their specialties with Father, and I would listen with both ears, comprehending very little of it at the time, although some of it eventually rubbed off on me.

STEEL MILL OPERATOR:  Father's job with the McKenna Company was a hard and demanding one.  He spoke freely about operations problems, and when I was only about six years old, he would take me on occasional Sundays to the mill to see what was going on.  I didn't understand what the problems were, but I was very much aware that they were serious and hard to deal with.

PATER FAMILIAS:  Our family life revolved around Father.  In my early childhood I viewed him as a combination of athlete, scientist, steel mill operator and general advisor.

He was always available to anyone: Mother's artist and club women friends, visiting family members, scientists, newspaper people, and very much to my sister and me and our friends.

PERSONALITY:  Endowed with superior intellect, he never let it overpower people; he never talked down to them.  Father had a modest, unaffected personality, a natural charm that inspired the affection of his friends, men and women alike.  Most of the memorials that I have saved speak of this quality.  He was a truly lovable man.  The Unmack boys - Al, Fred and Henry - and I treated a two-mile square area as our personal domain.  We knew every square foot of it, where each bird type nested, where the animal burrows were, where Indian relics were to be found, all the geographical twists and turns of our Sugar Creek.  We found all sorts of interesting things, and we constantly asked Father for answers.  We got straight-out answers, often full of scientific words that needed explanation; and so we learned.

SOCIAL LIFE:  Despite all of his scientific and mill-business interests, Father led a far from anti-social life.

In our living room at home, he and Mother had evolved a geographical setup that worked out just fine.  This room was unusually large; in the center was a social area in front of the fireplace, with two large davenports at right angles to the fireplace wall forming an area about twelve by sixteen feet.  This is where Mother gave bridge parties and received guests.  At the south end [nearer the front of the house - George, III], behind one davenport, was my sister's baby grand piano and Mother's writing desk.  The north end of the room, behind the other davenport, was Father's workplace.  He had a bookcase, two tables and a large worktable.  Father could write or work mending clay pots, repairing Indian skulls, and still see over the davenports and engage in the general conversation, or take a hand of bridge, or whatever.  Visitors were always welcome to come back of the davenport and chat with Father as well as see what he was doing, and Father treated these visits as welcome diversions and not as interference.

Father was well content to have Mother handle the social side of their life together.  She loved to give dinner parties and bridge parties.  They went to dances and out with their friends.  Mother had a special talent for making their home an hospitable place to visit.  She was the ideal hostess, and she and Father made a much sought-after couple.

PALEONTOLOGIST:  In 1887 at age eleven, Father collected marine fossils in the limestone outcroppings on the banks of the Mississippi River at St. Paul, Minnesota.  Aided by his father and grandfather, he learned what they were, their scientific names, and their geological history.  Not long after, he collected fossil fishes in a small, specialized Wisconsin quarry.  By the time he entered the Sheffield Scientific School, the Engineering part of Yale University, he had acquired more knowledge of paleontology than Yale offered in the first two years of that subject.

Father applied for registration in the course taught by Professor O.C. Marsh, then regarded as one of the top men in the field of Paleontology.  But the rules of the university required formal completion of its first two years, and Father felt that he was not entitled to divert that quantity of credit hours from his three-year Engineering course.  The university even denied him the privilege of auditing Professor Marsh's advanced course.  As the result, Father never had any actual, formal training in Paleontology.  This did not weaken Father's interest in the slightest.

In 1898 after receiving his degree in Mechanical Engineering, Father moved to Joliet, Illinois, to take his first job, as an engineer for the McKenna Process Company, which reprocessed worn railway rails for the railroad industry.  The Joliet and Lemont limestone quarries were noted for their extra well preserved marine fossils: crenoids, trilobites and many other species, and Father amassed many superb specimens.

In 1904 while Father was in England, monitoring the construction and initial operation of another McKenna rolling mill, he used odd moments to study the huge British Museum fossil collection and also to collect marine fossils and coal plant fossils, specimens small enough to take back with him to America.

Whenever McKenna business trips took Father near a collecting site, he would resume collecting.  He built up a very large collection of fossil shark teeth from Plum Point on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, which was widely admired by his museum friends.

Father also bought small sized fossils from Charles Sternberg, a professional fossil hunter from the Wyoming Badlands.  And Father had an arrangement with some of his scientific friends to trade his shark teeth for their surplus fossil items.  As Father had no space available to exhibit large specimens, he concentrated on small sized fossils, which he kept in spool cases wangled from department stores [I still have one of these J.&P. Coats cases, albeit filled with mineral specimens of George, Sr.'s - George, III].

In 1907 Father bought from Charles Sternberg a slab of chalk from the Wyoming Badlands, three feet by four feet by four inches thick, that Sternberg felt held the pieces of a lizard-like skull, possibly an entire skull.  Father set this slab up on a sort of easel in the small barn behind our home on Union Street in Joliet.  Although he had lost his left arm in a rolling mill accident in 1900, Father used his right hand very skillfully.  Chipping the chalk away, he soon uncovered piece after piece of a skull and lower jaw.  In areas where we could do no damage, I and one of my playmates were allowed also to chip away the chalk.  I can't remember how long it took, but eventually Father assembled the lower jaw and skull into what is known as an "open mount," that is, unsupported by its chalk matrix.  This specimen, Clidastes Tortor, is still on exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  This display brought Father his first real recognition as a serious Paleontologist.

In June, 1911, Father was near Minooka, Illinois, looking for Indian relic collecting sites and, remembering John Bamford's 1902 discovery of mastodons, drove over to see him and ask what had happened to the excavated bones.  Bamford was still living then and told Father how he had found the deposit while digging a surface well to water his livestock.  He had felt that they were valuable, but the price he wanted was more than the Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History were willing to pay.  Bamford continued work on his well, stacking the bones on the nearby ground, where they lay for over a year, exposed to the weather.  Then he moved them to one of his old barns, where they were still piled when Father talked with Bamford.

Father felt that the site was well worth exploring for more animal remains and for possibly associated human bones.  He interested the American Museum of Natural History, and they secured the right to make such an excavation.  But the territory to be explored was so large, the depth of excavation in marshy soil so great, and the probable cost so large, that the Museum decided not to undertake the project, to Father's great regret.

But the bones were still there in Bamford's barn, and Father felt that they should be protected and preserved.  Bamford was agreeable to their removal, and so Father bought them for a nominal sum, about $150, as I remember.

Father owned a Hudson two-seater with no means for carrying freight.  He and one of his mechanics rigged a six-foot-high chicken wire enclosure around the rear of the car and made several trips lugging bone and mastodon tusks and crates full of bison and elk and other animals from Minooka to his home in Joliet.  I made at least two of these trips with Father.

Father stored them up in the third floor of the house, taking over Mother's studio, while he patched and protected the bones and tusks.  There were fourteen identifiable mastodon skulls, some small tusks, and one tusk that was nine feet tall.  All these animal bones eventually found their way to Chicago's Field Museum.

The Bamford site still remained unexplored in 1986.  It lay just above glacial gravel, and the museum people estimated its age at about ten thousand years.  For years, a prized posession on the wall of my bedroom in Joliet was the skull of an extinct bison, much larger than the modern species.

Father never outgrew his interest in Paleontology.  His last collecting occured in 1945, when he and Mother were returning through South Dakota from a nostalgic trip to Yellowstone Park.  Driving along a little-used road, he noticed a patch of exposed bare ground by the edge of the road.  There, on the surface of the Pierre Shale, was the almost complete skull of a large fish.  Near it were the toothed jaws of a small flying reptile, an immediate ancestor of modern birds.  Father brought the specimens back to the Field Museum to add to their collections.

ARCHAEOLOGIST: In the Summer of 1892, Father read in his grandfather's library a report by Squire and Davis, two professional archaeologists, who had done some exploration of one of the large effigy mounds on the farm of a Mr. Hopewell.

Indian burial mounds are common all over the central states and usually contained, in addition to the burials themselves, the arrowheads and  axes and the like, usually found on the surface.  But these Hopewell Farm burials were totally different; with them were artistic items made from shell and sheets of mica, copper items, ornaments made from river pearls, carved bear teeth, obsidian spear heads, and shells from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.

Squire and Davis felt that these mounds had been made by Indians more advanced than the modern Indians of the last few hundred years and gave them the name, "Mound Builders."

Father and sveral of his young friends went by train to Lake Pokegama in Northern Minnesota and camped on the shores of the lake.  Two Chippewa men visited their camp, said they had no knowledge of any mounds, but said there was a cemetary across the lake.  As a lark, the boys rowed across the lake, selected what looked like two small mounds, and dug.

Two feet down in the soft sand, they found two skeletons and expected to find strange and valuable relics.  What they did find was an iron cooking pot, some china dishes, some traces of cloth, and two pennies with post-Civil-War dates.  Disillusioned and conscience-stricken, they filled in the graves, rowed back to their camp, packed up, and caught the morning 6:30 train back to St. Paul.

Very soon after, a lawyer located Father and, assuming him to be the ring-leader, threatened trouble if he didn't make restitution.  Grandfather Robertson got Father a lawyer, and the two lawyers worked out an agreement, that the honor of the Chippewa would be restored by the payment of $25.00, which Father paid.

Later in 1892, Father read a newspaper article about a party of archaeologists exploring the Hopewell mounds and planning to exhibit their finds at the Chicago World's Fair.

Professor Warren K. Moorehead of the Philips-Exeter School, the professional archaeologist in charge, took a remarkable collection of showy specimens to the World's Fair, and in 1893 Father spent time there, mainly to see their exhibit.

Father went off to Yale in 1894 and, after graduating in the 1897 Sheffield Class, went to work in Joliet, Illinois, for the McKenna Company.  He learned that there were two very large Indian mounds fifteen miles from Joliet, but he was just starting his first job as a cub engineer and had no time available for his hobby interests.  He was made an understudy for the Joliet plant superintendent, was sent to Kansas City, Kansas, to build and put into operation a second McKenna rolling mill, met, wooed and became engaged to Mother in 1899, lost his left arm in a mill accident in Joliet in 1900, married Mother in 1900, fathered me in 1901, then my sister in 1903, and moved his whole family to Liverpool, England, for the years 1904 and 1905, where he monitored the construction of yet another rolling mill for the McKenna Company.

Back in Joliet in 1906, Howard Calmer persuaded Father to drive with him on a sunny Thanksgiving morning in his one-cylinder Cadillac the sixteen miles to Dan Fisher's farm to see the two big mounds.  The mounds were pockmarked with scars from small excavations, and they were not equipped to tackle such a big job.  Instead, they selected one of the smaller mounds and dug.  About two feet down, they came upon two skeletons and many relics.  There were steel knives, a small mirror, and many objects of German Silver: small broaches, bracelets, arm-bands, a crescent-shaped gorget, and a large silver cross, all obviously post-European.  It started to snow hard, so they hastily filled in the hole and drove back to Joliet.

In the Spring of 1907, Father and Mr. Calmer again drove to the Fisher mounds, planning to dig deeper in their earlier excavation.  They found that unauthorized poachers had beaten them to it and found that they had unearthed a great many more silver items, some glass beads, and glass and ceramic articles, all of post-European origin.

However, Father and Mr. Calmer decided to try again.  They shovelled out all the disturbed dirt from their two earlier excavations, dug down to the underlying gravel, and then about two feet into the gravel.  Father, ever alert to the possibility of multi-layered burials, noted that the skulls in the upper layer were "round-heads," while those deep in the gravel were "long heads."

In 1912, Father recruited two big, healthy men from McKenna, and they explored another small mound, digging two, four-foot holes several feet apart.  They again found "round head" skeletons in the upper layers and "long-heads" in the lower layers, clearly a stratified mound, something not yet known in Illinois.

This discovery really fired Father up; he felt that if he had found two small stratified mounds, perhaps the two large mounds might also be stratified.  He felt that the proper thing to do was for trained professional archaeologists to excavate them.  So he made contact with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

After repeated efforts to convince these universities of the potential importance of his discovery and failing to arouse their interest, he told them that, as long as they declined to excavate the two big mounds, he would do it himself.  The university officials begged off and wished Father good luck.

During the years of World War I, the McKenna rail rerolling mill was busy night and day; there was never any time to continue exploring the two big Fisher mounds.  But Father was interested in whether a "refuse heap" site several miles away from the Fisher mounds might be linked to them.  The "refuse heap" site had been known for many years to arrowhead collectors, who could always be assured of finding quantities of small, triangular, finely chipped arrowheads known locally as "bird points."  I had collected them with Father ever since I was five years old, and I had about two hundred of them.

In countless trips to this "refuse heap" site, Father had never found human bones or any evidence that it had been a permanently lived-in site.  All the bones and teeth were those of animals and fishes.  There was only one variety of thin-walled, rather poor pottery.  Father discovered no link to the Fisher site.  Instead, he concluded that the "refuse heap" site was simply a nomadic Indian hunting campsite.

Father's first recognition as a serious archaeologist came when "The American Anthropologist," in its July-September issue, published Father's article, "The Kankakee River Refuse Heap, Evidence of a Primitive Culture in the Southwest Chicago Area."

Father, Albert [Tinnik] and Tom made occasional quickie scouting trips to the Fisher site.  It had always been farmed, but in 1922 heavy equipment had been used for the first time.  A second heavy plowing in 1923 had almost obliterated traces of the small mounds and the large pits.  And worst of all, the Congress Construction Company of Chicago had bought the site, was already excavating gravel at the west edge, and they planned to continue across the mound site.

This was too much for Father.  Foreseeing the destruction of the two big mounds, he decided to excavate systematically both of the two big mounds.  I was at first away at college and then doing a great deal of travelling on my first job as an engineer for the Belden Corporation of Chicago, so I rarely had the opportunity to do actual digging.  But Father, Albert and Tom kept steadily at it, proving, hole after hole, that both mounds contained stratified burials.

After eighty days of digging, the discovery of 300 burials, eighty pots, and considerable weapons and tools, Father decided that it was high time that he report his findings.  So, in its July-September, 1927, issue, "The American Anthropologist" published Father's 55-page article, "The Fisher Mound Group, Successive Aboriginal Occupations Near the Mouth of the Illinois River."

The article contained maps of the burials in the two big mounds, photographs of the mounds, some of the burials, tools, weapons, skulls, and even the diggers themselves.  The article established two things: first, that mounds had been discovered in Illinois containing stratified Indian burials of two different racial types, and more importantly to Father, it had established him as a qualified archaeologist, not just an "interested grave-robber."

In March, 1928, Father published another article in the "Journal of the Illinois Academy of Science," again reporting the burial stratification of the two big Fisher mounds: "Short" or "Round Heads" in the upper layer, "Long Heads" in the lower layer.

Some of the professional anthropologists and archaeologists became interested and visited the site.  Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole of the Anthropolgy Department of the University of Chcago requested and reveived permission for a group of his graduate students to excavate at the Fisher site under Father's watchful eye.  Following their super-careful technique, they excavated one small mound and then some lodge pits, which by that time had almost been obliterated by the intensive farming cultivation.  This was a happy period for Father; he made many life-long friends among the attractive group of young people.

In 1929, when Father, as he put it, was "ejected" from the Fisher site, he undertook an excavation on the Adler site, near the outskirts of Joliet, which consisted of one large mound and several small ones.  He and Albert Tennik were joined by several University of Chicago people.  Their findings were totally different from those at the Fisher site and led to speculation, never resolved, that the Adler mounds were in some way related to the Hopewell culture.

Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole and Father developed both a scientific and a personal rapport through their common interests during these years.  By this time, Father had filled shelves in Mother's third-floor studio with row after row of toothfully grinning skulls, mended pots, and the like, and she and Father both felt that it was high time a permanent home be found for the whole collection.  Dr. Cole wanted them for the University of Chicago, and Father wanted them preserved somewhere near the Fisher site, so it appeared to be an ideal arrangement.  The Department of Anthropolgy people transferrred it all to Chicago, pleasing Father very much.  The gift resulted in Father being appointed "Research Associate" by the University of Chicago, and Dr. Cole kept Father up to date on his exploration plans.

In 1930, Dr. Cole invited Father to join his excavating project in the Jay Morton mounds in Putnam County, Illinois, and Father spent a couple of weeks there observing.  The university team spent too much time and effort in cautious, centimeter by centimeter layer digging and record keeping and too little time in actual dicovery, for Father's taste.  The scientists had found nothing in ten days of work, so Father secured permission to make a small excavation of his own.  In half an hour, he found a fine clay pot and some implements.  Father's modus operandi was to dig down rapidly in the upper, non-productive layers and then very carefully as he approached the burials, the total opposite of the "scientific" technique.  Fortunately, each camp was tolerant of the other's methods.

It became apparent to Father that Dr. Cole was in the business of Anthropology and had to protect and enhance the scientific aspects, while Father was no longer planning any research on his own, so, in a sense, their ways parted, even though their personal rapport continued.

About 1931, Father received word that Don Dickson was excavating a large mound on his farm near Lewiston, Illinois, and wanted Father to come down to see it.  So I drove Father to see what it was all about.  Don Dickson had eracted a roofed structure to protect the mound and his excavation and had left all burials in situ, protecting them by glass plates so they could still be seen.  He had built a walkway around the walls of the building so that visitors could see everything that he had found.  At that time he had exposed 190 burials, with many pots and artifacts.  To Don Dickson's disappointment, there was no evidence of stratified Indian races.

This, as I recall it, was Father's last visit of any kind to mound exploration, although as the Joliet expert in such matters, Father was often consulted by the local nespapers when any digs were reported.

About this time, the University of Chicago and Dr. Warren Moorehead engaged in what they called a "reconnaisance" of Indian Culture in Illinois.  Its original purpose is obscure, but the outcome was a vigorous effort by Dr. Moorehead to have the state government protect "Monk's Mound," the famous huge Indian mound of Cahokia, near St. Louis, Illinois.  The State had theoretically protected it by creating a state park around it but had allowed concessionnaires to create what amounted to a Coney Island around it.  Dr. Moorehead strove to have a very large protected area created, about 7,000 acres, to protect both the mound itself and the village areas surrounding it, which he felt apeared to be a more advanced culture, similar to what he had found at the Hopewell mounds in Ohio.  He failed in his attempts, and the Cahokia Mound area still looks like a big country fair.

Father's well known collecting activities in the Fisher mounds had aroused a much-delayed bit of research that revived his memories and really pleased him.

When Father was excavating and came upon animal bones and teeth, he saved them, interested in what the hunters brought back for food and other uses.  Most excavators simply discarded this sort of material.  But Paul W. Parmalee of the Illinois State Museum, learned that all these animal remains from the Fisher mound site had been preserved in the big collection that Father had given to the University of Chicago back in 1930.  He secured permission from the University of Chicago to study this material, and he published his findings in the "American Midland Naturalist" issue of October, 1962, entitled, "The Faunal Complex of the Fisher Site, Illinois."  [See also this PDF of another Parmelee article - George, III]

Parmelee identified 16 species of freshwater mussels, 10 of fish, one amphibian, 10 reptiles, 38 birds, and 22 species of mammals.  He noted many interesting facts: the largest single species was the white-tailed deer; there were almost as many mussel shells; an unexpectedly high count of snakes; a wide variety of turtles and waterfowl; another unexpectedly high count of hawk and eagle species; and one lone bison bone.  Deer meat was obviously the standard food item; the mussels were used both for food and for conversion to implements and decorations; hawks and eagles, probably for their feathers; the bison was one of the last of his kind East of the Mississippi.  But, why snakes ?   Maybe: only in hard times.

Note added by George, III: see also the recent work of Michael Strezewski, "Prehistoric Warfare at the Fisher Site, Will County, Illinois," describing his analysis of George, Sr.'s notes and materials.

Dr. Cole led a group of professional anthropologists in a project to identify tribes of pre-European Indians by their degree of progress in the art of flint chipping, their use of bone, antler and shell, their skill in the mixing of clay for pots, the making of the pots themselves and the decoration of the pots, and in their use of copper and mica.  Dr. Cole asked Father to participate, but Father felt he could not add much to their data.  Besides, Father was then Curator of Fossil Plants at the Field Museum.

Before Father died in 1964, he was pleased when the State of Illinois made the Dickson Mound area a state park and appointed Don Dickson Curator of the Dickson Mounds.

PALEOBOTANIST:  Father's Grandfather Robertson had acquired a few Mazon Creek fossil plant nodules in the 1890's, and Father saw a lot of them at the British Museum in 1904.  So in 1907 he took me on a "search and collect" trip to this long-known site.  We went by horse and buggy from our home to the railway depot in Downtown Joliet, then on a Chicago & Alton Railway local to Morris, Illinois, then by rented horse and buggy to a spot near the creek.  A farmer showed us where other people had collected, said that he "didn't see any fun in it," and left us.  Wearing only a pair of shorts, I waded in waist-high water, feeling the nodules in the soft mud with my toes.  I would bring Father a pail-full at a time, and he would crack them open on the riverbank, saving only the nice ones.  It was a hot day, and the farmer came back with a cantaloup, "to cool us off."  Then, back home to Joliet.  We may have made more than one trip like this; I can't remember.

For many years, Father's time was fully occupied managing and operating the three rail rerolling mills of the McKenna Process Company and, in spare moments and, on holidays, excavating the Indian burial mounds on the Fisher farm southwest of Joliet.

In 1937, we learned that the strip mine spoil heaps contained nodules just like the Mazon Creek nodules, and our dentist-naturalist guided us to where they were being found.  At this spot, they were scattered by the hundreds all over the ground, but they were all of one species, so we spent about half of our time looking for other, more interesting sites.  We were very successful and found a very wide variety of leaves and bark and a few animal specimens.

We didn't know what any of them were.  So Father, using his appointment as "Research Assistant in Anthropology," found from Dr. Cole of the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology, that a Dr. A.C. Noe, considered the top man in paleobotany, was Professor of Paleobotany at the university and arranged a meeting at the university to have him look at the specimens and tell us what they were.

We put four piles of cracked-open nodules in Father's car, each specimen carefull protected by wrappings of Saturday Evening Post pages, and showed them to Dr. Noe.  Dr. Noe nearly exploded.  These were the finest specimens he had ever seen, and he brought out all his graduate student class to share in the excitement.  As fast as he would identify a specimen, I would write the name down on the wrapping.

But, time after time, he would say, "This is new to science," and, "I believe this is new," and persuaded Father to leave them with him so he could take a more careful look.  Dr. Noe was awfully nice to us; he persuaded Father to bring him a load of specimens on a routine weekly basis, and we did this most of that Summer.  He always returned the new-species specimens to us. and Father carefully preserved them as "type" specimens, valuable to science as being the first of their species ever found, and Father gave Dr. Noe a great many particularly fine or showy specimens of the already-identified species.  This was really a fine period for both Father and Dr. Noe, but it lasted only the two years until Dr. Noe's death.

Father and I made many collecting trips to the strip mines during the periods when the McKenna rerolling mill was awaiting orders.  We would fill five-gallon pails and leather postman's bags with nodules, bring them back to Joliet, and crack them open in the rear driveway at home.  But only about one in twenty-five or so was worth keeping.  The big percentage was of poor specimens, copralites (fish dung) or blanks.  So we changed this highly inefficient modus operandi to another system that served far better.

Father, having only his right arm, hung two leather bags from his neck, cracked open nodules as he found them, wrapped the fine ones in Saturday Evening Post leaves, and continued until both bags were full.  I, with two arms, followed the same procedure, but filled two, five-gallon pails at a time.  Then we would carry our finds to where we had parked our car and drive them back to the McKenna office, where Father would wash and identify them.  This style of collecting was hard, physical work.  We parked the car as close as we could to a collecting site, but we often had to walk between half a mile and a full mile each way.  Father's bags weighed about 35 pounds each, and my two pails, about 60 pounds each.  After they were filled, we would start walking towards the car, stopping each time my fingers got so tired that I couldn't carry the weight.  And all this, not on level, clean ground, but over steep, pebble-strewn clay hills and valleys, through marshy spots, and in, through, and out of drainage ditches.  We got pretty tough, physically, and we found thousands of specimens.  After about 80 trips, Father did a little counting and computing and came up with a total of 250 thousand nodules that we eventually cracked open.

We were the first serious collectors, and we really skimmed the cream, so to speak, from the spoil heaps.  But more and more collectors were attracted to the site, and they, too, found fine specimens and new species.

Our specimens were piling up, and Father started sorting them into collections.  He had no intention of keeping a personal collection; he hadn't the space for one, and he felt that these things belonged in museums.  He built up one especially large and fine collection and negotiated its sale to the Illinois State Museum, where it became the subject of Raymond E. Janssen's publication by the museum in 1940, entitled, "Some Fossil Plant Types of Illinois."  Janssen had been one of  Dr. Noe's students back in 1937 and was always a good friend of Father's.

In addition to Father's deep interest in the scientific aspect of our collecting, we both had a very personal interest.  We were making collections, selling them, and crediting the proceeds to McKenna as we struggled to keep that dying mill from going under.  Father assembled collections of about 125 fine specimens each, which we offered for sale to colleges and museums.  As I recall, there were about 12 or 15 of these collections.

Father also kept building and improving a very large collection of type specimens, specimens new to science, and exceptionally handsome or showy specimens.

During this 1938-1941 period, the McKenna Company was forced out of business, and Father and I spent full time salvaging all we could to stay financially alive.  The decision was finally made by the trustees to turn in the company's charter and liquidate the company's equipment, land and anything else of value.  Father stayed on to complete the liquidation, and I left to seek another job.

I had left Belden in 1929 in good standing, they had an engineering job opening, and so I commenced my second Belden career.

Father's big super-collection now filled an entire floor of McKenna's office building.  Father tried to get the Field Museum or the Illinois State Museum to buy it, but money was tight, and eventually Father donated this big collection to the Field Museum.  Father then sold his Joliet home and surplus furniture, and he and Mother moved into an apartment at 1726 North LaSalle Street in Chicago, across the street from Lincon Park.

Without a job to keep him busy, and with the fruits of his hobbies of paleontology, archaeology and paleobotany all safely installed in museums, Father had time on his hands.  So, in 1947, Father requested and received permission to curate his former fossil plant collection as a volunteer.  This proved mutually satisfactory, and in 1950 Father was appointed Curator of Fossil Plants at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.

At the museum, Father was attracted to the fossil plant deposits in the southern states by articles by E.W. Berry in several U.S. Geological Survey reports.  So, in 1951, he and Eugene S. Richardson organized four collecting trips in Tennessee and Mississippi, followed by two more trips with Dr. R.H. Whitfield.

Those specimens occur in the beige-colored clay used commercially for flower pots, kitchen ware and the like.  They are cut out in large chunks of clay with a mattock, and then each specimen is carved out in nodule form with a jacknife.  Back at the museum, the nodules are further trimmed more closely to the leaf itself.  The surfaces dry out very quickly and must be protected before they become dust and blow away.  Father modified the "developing" technique he had invented for preserving the Mazon Creek leaf forms, brushing on a dilute dextrin mixture that hardened the whole surface of the nodule, preserving and darkening the leaf impression.

On their earliest and most successful trip, they found such a tonnage of soft clay fossil-bearing chunks that they had to hire a big truck to take them back to Chicago.  On subsequent trips, they took the museum's truck, collected until the truck was fully loaded, and then drove back north.  This large, handsome collection is now on exhibit at the museum.

Many collectors had followed us at the strip mines and were acquiring fine specimens, but they didn't know what they were.  Expensive scientific books had been published and were available at scientific libraries, but these books were both figuratively and financially out of reach of the average, local collector.  A group of collectors belonging to the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI) often visited Father's office at the Field Museum, and the idea of a "field guide to fossil plants," similar to Roger Tory Peterson's "Field Guide to the Birds" was born.  ESCONI offered to bear the publishing expense, the museum was agreeable to the venture, and Father went to work.

In June, 1958, ESCONI published Father's first book on fossil plants, "The Wilmington Coal Flora from a Pennsylvanian Deposit in Will County, Illinois."  This book was a success, filling the need for which it was designed, and so ESCONI increased their association with the Field Museum and with Father.

Father continued to make collecting trips with Gene Richardson of the Field Museum and with his fellow collector, Dr. Whitfield.  They kept finding new species and rare specimens, and the material for a second book was accumulating.

So, in June 1963, ESCONI, again with the approval of the museum, published Father's second fossil plant book, "The Wilmington Coal Fauna and Additions to the Wilmington Coal Flora from a Pennsylvanian Deposit in Will County, Illinois."  This second book was also a financial success.  Father continued to collect occasionally, ESCONI continued their association, and other collectors began to send their collections to the museum.  Material built up for a third book, and again ESCONI offered to publish it.

Father prepared a third manuscript.  The ESCONI people phoned me and asked if I would pick up the completed manuscript and bring it to them at Downers Grove, Illinois.  I was stopped on my way to Father's office and was told I was to attend a meeting.  The museum director, his assistant, and the head of the department of Paleontology told me immediately that the museum had withdrawn its approval and that Father's third book could not be published by ESCONI.

The grounds ?  That Father was not a "scientist," that he had no formal record of university credit in paleontology.  I asked whether two years of work with Dr. Noe, then the acknowledged authority on paleobotany, did not qualify Father as a scientist.  They answered that Father had not enrolled in his classes.  They volunteered that if Father had only be allowed to audition one course in paleontology at Yale, he could have been accepted as a "scientist."  I could hardly believe my ears.  I brought up the fact that, since Dr. Noe's death, Father's collecting, preserving, describing and naming ten thousand varieties of species had made Father the top man in paleobotany.  Their answer still was, "He is not a scientist."

I reminded them, rather tactlessly, that by elevating Father to their elite group of Curators, they had tacitly admitted him to scientist status, but that fell on deaf ears.  They repeated that they had withdrawn their approval for ESCONI to publish this third book, that I was to deliver it to ESCONI, and that I was to tell Father of their decision.  I told them that I would not tell Father of their cruel decision, even if they didn't have the guts to do it themselves.  They dismissed me, and I delivered the completed manuscript to the ESCONI men.

ESCONI felt that the museum people were unreasonable, but ESCONI did not want to publish it without some sort of consent from the museum.  They continued their efforts with the museum.  A long, acrimonious and eventually bitter controversy then ensued between the museum "scientists" on the one side and Father and ESCONI on the other.  I was not privvy to this long-continuing controversy, and I know, first-hand, only a little of what went on.  First, the museum stipulated that all fauna material be extirpated, then that all fauna references in Father's Book Two be disclaimed, then that all species actually named by Father be deleted, and finally that all the material on the flora had to be reviewed and done over by a paleobotany "scientist."

To make a long story short, the museum had by then so badly emasculated the manuscript that Father and ESCONI gave up.  Hoping that the manuscript to this proposed third book on the Wilmington coal fossils might still be preserved to await a favorable climate, I secured it from ESCONI, and I still have it [as do I now - George, III].

Oddly, the Field Museum people felt that there was a lot of valuable scientific material in the manuscript, and they would like to have it rewritten in scientific jargon so that they could publish it themselves, but that it would be very expensive to do so and would have only a very limited circulation.  But, in dog-in-the-manger fashion, they still would not let ESCONI publish it, at ESCONI expense, where it would have a wide, assured circulation.

Father's personal friends among the museum curators did not dare support him openly, and the other curators kept  their distance, so the air around Father's office was distinctly chilly until the museum "retired" him soon afterwards.

Gene Richardson and Dr. Whitfield took Father collecting several times, and in 1963 Father and I drove to the strip mines, just to look around, for old times' sake, sort of like a couple of old football players revisiting the scene of their triumphs.  Everything had totally changed; the hills were overgrown with trees and weeds, most collecting areas had been fenced off and posted, and any thought of collecting was absolutely impossible.  But it was a pleasant day, we enjoyed our renewal of our old collecting companionship, and we were content to drive home.

THE McKENNA PROCESS COMPANY:  Up to this point, I have written only about Father's publicly acclaimed achievements, but Father deserves even greater admiration for his life-long stuggles to keep the McKenna Company alive as a profit producer.  All of the following early history of the McKenna Company is from Father's notes.  Let me start from the beginning.

Edward W. McKenna was Chief Engineer of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Company.  It troubled him that, when railway rails were battered and worn and no longer could remain in service, they still had about 95% of their original weight and yet had to be used in switch yards and side tracks, but were replaced in main line service by new rails.

McKenna reasoned that if the battered rail-ends were cut off and the worn head and flange-side of the head rerolled while preserving the rail height and flange track dimensions, the rerolled rail could be reinstalled in main line track right along with newly rolled rail and at a very large investment saving.  He worked out the idea in detail and secured a U.S. Patent on "the McKenna process."  He also invented meny mechanical machines required for this, worked out the process thermodynamics, the labor content, and a profitability analysis.

He resigned from the Milwaukee Road and sought to form his own McKenna Process Company.  He consulted with a railroad friend, Howard Morris [married to George, Sr.'s mother's sister, Julia A. Robertson, and General Counsel for all properties to the Wisconsin Central Railway and eventually part of the Soo Line Railway - George, III] and a wealthy man.  Seeking adequate financial banking, they aroused the interest of two Boston financiers, Harry L. Burrage, who had built up a substantial fortune from several financial ventures, and Edwin H. Abbott, who had inherited and improved a very large family fortune.

McKenna and Morris felt that all railroads would seize upon the idea of the economical savings made possible by rerolling their worn out rails, and that the potential profits of a rerolling operation would be practically unlimited.  Abbott and Burrage were sold on the possibilities and agreed to put up the money required, but they had their own way of doing that.  They incorporated the McKenna Company as a trusteeship.  Abbott, Burrage and Morris were to be the three trustees and would retain sole voting rights.  They then issued what looked like stock certificates, but which really were what are now known as "certificates of beneficial interest," entitling the owners of the certificates to share in the profits, if any.  They split up these certificates between themselves and McKenna, making McKenna about a one-fourth partner in the venture.

With vast profits expected in the future, they organized the fledgeling company on a rather grandiose basis:       McKenna was installed as Managing Director;       David Lentz, with rail mill experience, was hired as Operating Superintendent;       E.J. Tapping, an experienced railway supply sales executive, was hired as Sales Manager;       They established a Transfer Office for the trustees in Boston, Massachusetts;       The established a Sales Office in Milwaukee; and       Under the watchful eyes of McKenna and Lentz, they acquired a site in Joliet, Illinois,       near Chicago, which was then the terminus of most of the eastern and western railway       systems.

McKenna's future looked very rosy.

Lentz wanted an engineer to aid him and to replace the talents of McKenna, who had decided to retire from active business.  Morris, Father's uncle, knowing that Father was about to graduate as a mechanical engineer and enthusiastic about McKenna's future, persuaded Father to quit his railway job in St. Paul and work for McKenna in Joliet.

In his senior year at Yale, Father and a college friend had thought of starting a brass foundry, but they could not find the capital, and so Father went to work in St. Paul for the Chicago, Great Western Railway as a draughtsman, an essentially bottom-of-the-ladder engineering job.  Hired into the McKenna mill, again as a draughtsman and cub engineer, Father worked under, and set about learning from, Plant Superintendent Lentz.  Father was immediately introduced to McKenna's big, great problem: The Metallurgy of Steel.

E.W. Mckenna's basic idea was deceptively simple: take a worn-out, thirty-foot rail, heat it to rolling temperature, re-form the rail head geometrically to new and usable dimensions, put a slight, equalizing draft on the rail's base, roll it out to thirty-two feet, crop a foot off each battered rail end, and, behold !, you have a thirty-foot rail again, just like a new one, that you can reinstall in main line track service.  This was quite a bit too good to be true.

At this early period, the rails already in service had been made from low-carbon Bessemer steel that was soft and wore out quickly by becoming deformed at the rail head, on the top by rolling contact from the wheels and on the side of the head by cramping of the wheel flanges.  McKenna was right, that there was little wastage of the metal itself.

However, to reroll the rail, it had to be reheated to rolling temperature, and that often injured the steel.  Rolling from a lower temperature was not practical, so there was a constant battle to roll at the lowest temperature that the rolling mill could stand and thereby minimize the damage heating did to the steel.

To improve the wearing qualities of rails, the mills took to making harder, higher carbon steel made by the Open Hearth process, which (it turned out) was even more susceptible to injury from reheating, especially at the higher temperatures the McKenna mill needed to roll the rails successfully.

Rerolling had one small virtue, and that was that it culled all rails with transverse fissures [hydrogen-induced cracks - a bigger problem with Bessemer steel than with Open Hearth steel -  George, III].  Rerolled rails that passed inspection were therefore free from these dangerous defects.

No rails, newly rolled or rerolled, came out perfectly straight; the curves had to be straightenened out when the rails were cold.  The crude straightening process broke many rerolled rails.

In March 1898, Father had gone to work at the McKenna rerolling mill in Joliet, Illinois, at $60 per month.  His job was to tackle mechanical engineering problems, do any necessary drafting, and act as all-around, general helper to Mr. Lentz, was well acquainted with the metallurgical problems that constantly harassed him.

In spite of rail breakage losses, the Joliet mill generated a good return on their investment, and so the three trustees decided to open a second rerolling mill to serve the western railroads.  They selected Kansas City, Kansas, as a good railway terminus, and bought a site for the mill.  Mr. Lentz recommended that the new mill be a duplicate of the Joliet mill, and Father was selected to move there, build it, and put it into operation.

Father had Yale friends in Kansas City, who introduced him into the Kansas City social stream, and Father, as a Yale man and a noted athlete, and a good guy besides, was immediately accepted.  There he met Mother, who was very much a Society girl; they fell in love, became engaged, and set a wedding date.

With the Kansas City mill operating successfully, Father was sent back to Joliet to resume his work as understudy to Mr. Lentz.  In June, 1900, Father had a terrible accident.  He was supervising the adjustment of the guides that steered the hot rail into the rolls, when he slipped and caught his left hand in the huge herringbone gears that drove the top roll in the two-high roll stand.  He was drawn into the gears, but he managed to squirm to one end of the gears, saving his life.

His left arm was so badly crushed that no part of it could be saved, and so it was amputated at the shoulder socket.  Mother and Grandmother Langford stayed in Joliet while he recuperated, and Father felt that he should break off their engagement.  Mother would have none of that, and they were married in November. 1900 in a big, Kansas City wedding, whereupon they moved to Joliet to live.

The metallurgical problem still plagued the mills, and broken rail rejections continued high, but with two rerolling mills generating attractive profits, the trustees got ambitious again.  With one mill in the Chicago area, another in Kansas City, and business still to be had, the trustees decided that a third rerolling mill should be built in the New York City area.

They secured a site on New York Harbor called Tremley Point, and Father was again selected to build and put into operation their third mill.  So Father moved my pregnant mother to a house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I was born in October, 1901.

McKenna never operated all three mills simultaneously.  They operated them one at a time, carefully securing sensible schedules from the various railroads so that a run at Joliet would be followed by a run at Kansas City, and then one at Tremley Point.  To make this idea work, the mill superintendent would move to the appropriate mill, taking along a staff of skilled specialists, and then pick up the number of common laborers needed at the operating mill.

This idea worked smoothly and profitably until the next big problem surfaced; rail length standards were increased from 30 feet to 33 feet, but all three mills had been designed and laid out for 30-foot rails.  Most of the operations and the buildings could be, and soon were, altered to handle the 33-foot rail length, but the roll stands, set 30 feet apart, could not be moved.  This dilemma was solved by redesigning the rail guides so that the rail ends could be briefly in both roll stands at the same time.

Then came another blow: the standard rail length was increased again, this time to 39 feet, and the roll stands were still only 30 feet apart.  The McKenna engineers solved this again by adjusting the rail guides, and they also adjusted the roll diameters so the second pass would be a little heavier than the first pass so that the rail would be placed in tension while being simultaneously rolled in two stands rather than in compression, which could prove disastrous.  This was a delicate dimensional problem, but they made it work.

The Joliet, Kansas City and Tremley Point mills, operating sequentially, were generating good profits, and so the trustees decided to expand yet again.  Lentz suggested a fourth mill in the Colorado area, but the trustees had greater ambitions; they wanted to build the fourth rail rerolling mill in England.  Experienced in the difficulties of operating rerolling mills in America, and very doubtful of the availability of the necessary super-skilled nucleus of experts in England, Lentz was dead set against the idea, but he was orverruled; the decision had been made.

So Lentz drew up plans for a fourth rerolling mill, based on the tried-and-true American mills, and Father did all the drafting work, putting in the many mechanical improvements that experience dictated.

Then came another blow: Morris and Burrage had gone to England, committed to a mill site, hired a sales agent, and contracted with the English engineering firm of Cammell-Laird to design, build, and put into operation a mill to reroll worn English 45-foot double-head rails.  They had done no research with any English railways as to whether there was a market for the rerolled rails.  They had simply assumed that a process that was acceptable in America would find equal favor in England.

Father was selected to go to England to monitor the English operation, so in 1904, Father, Mother, my new baby sister and I sailed for England, and we were duly installed in a house in Birkenhead, a suburb of Liverpool, the chosen mill site.  Father was given the rather intolerable order not to take part in the design and building of the English plant, but instead to observe and report back to Lentz, who had stayed in America to operate the three plants there.

Father observed at the start that Cammell-Laird had no experience at all in either the design or operation of a rail mill and that they were making one bad decision after another.  Forbidden to criticize or even to suggest, he dutifully reported back to Lentz, who in turn reported the bad engineering work back to the trustees.  Burgess and Morris sailed again to England, reviewed the problem with Cammell-Laird, were assured that the problems would all be solved, and then returned to America.

In Father's eyes, things were going from bad to worse, he reported so to Lentz constantly, and was eventualy told by the trustees to quit his complaining, that older and wiser heads had made the proper decisions and would continue to do so.  So the mill was built the Cammell-Laird way.

One other problem that had not been researched was whether a rerolled English rail could be returned to main line service.  English rails were of a design totally different from American rails.  American rails are Tee-shaped, installed in track with the wide base flat on wooden ties.  English rails were two-headed, called double-head design, with a dumbell-shaped cross section, the bottom head resting on steel chairs which in turn rested on wooden ties.  The heads of English rails wore out just like American rails, but the chairs wore crosswise grooves in the bottom head of the rail.  Father knew that rerolling would properly take care of the wear of the upper head, but he had serious doubts as to whether the cross-grooves could be rolled out, and so he reported to Lentz back in America.  Again, the trustees advised Father to quit complaining.

Came the time to make the first rerolling run.  The English sales agent had secured an order, and in came the rails.  They were badly worn, whch was no surprise, but they were 45 feet long, and that was a calamitous shock.  Another cabled report from Father drew the same answer as before, "Leave it to your betters to work it out."

With a heating furnace far too short to handle 45-foot rails, and with roll stands 36 feet apart, the Cammell-Laird solution was to cut the rails into 15 foot lengths and reroll them, not into rerolled, usable rails, but into blooms to be rolled into commercial shapes.  As this was in complete variance with the original concept of the English mill, Father so reported and received the usual answer, "Quit complaining."

Cammell-Laird's initial attempt to operate the mill was a complete disaster.  They had designed the mill to be electrically operated, including the roll stands.  But they had not analyzed the power requirements, which were extremely heavy during the actual passage of the rails through the rolls.  In the American mills, the surge of power required had been obtained from heavy flywheels that stored sufficient kinetic energy to complete the roll passes all by themselves, the steam engines simply providing the energy to get the flywheels back up to speed between passes.  The electric motors chosen by Cammell-Laird were far too small to stand the rolling overload, and all of them blew out.

Additional visits by Burrage and Morris and further work by Cammell-Laird failed to solve the design problems, and the English salvagers failed to convince the English railways that rerolling their used rails into blooms for commercial shapes was economically acceptable.  The trustees had poured in most of their capital, they agreed that the English rerolling mill was a complete failure, and it was abandoned.

The trustees attached no blame to Father, and he was cabled to return to America and resume his job at Joliet; and so in 1905 we all sailed home.  Shortly after arriving home came the next crisis.  Lentz, who had been out of town, came into the Joliet office, told Father that he had quit his job and that Father was now General Superintendent of the three American rerolling mills.  This netted Father a welcome salary increase but a very unwelcome increase in work and responsibility.

Improvements in the technique of straightening cold rail had decreased the percentage of scrapped rails, the three rerolling mills were solving their mechanical problems, but the metallurgy problems were still there and had no possible solution.

Then came the final, bitter blow: the railroads had had all their 30-foot and 33-foot rails rerolled, the standard length had been increased to 45 feet, and there was no economical solution to rerolling 45-foot rails in the existing three plants.

The only solution possible was to build completely new rerolling mills, the investment required was very heavy, even for a single rerolling mill, the English rerolling mill debacle had used up most of the trustees' available capital, and so McKenna was forced to go out of the business of rerolling railway rails in 1923.

Father offered the trustees a solution: build and operate a mill in Joliet to forge worn railway rail splice bars into usable bars, an idea just like McKenna's original rail rerolling invention.  Father worked with the Burlington Railway to get their views on such an idea.  The Burlington had a pile of an estimated 300 thousand worn bars, and together they and Father worked out a reworking tonnage charge that would attract the Burlington.  The trustees authorized Father to design a forging plant or bar mill and to determine the investment required as well as the possible return on investment.

Each railroad had its own design of splice bar, its length, and the number of bolt holes.  The smallest were about 18 inches long with four bolt holes, and the largest, 36 inches long with six bolt holes.  Father felt that the bar mill must be designed to handle these largest New York Central bars.  All bars by now were rolled from high carbon Open Hearth steel and presented the same metallurgical problems that beset the rail rerolling process.  That is, they had to be heated hot enough to be forged, but not so hot as to make them brittle.  The correct temperature was not only not accurately known, but such a temperature could not be accurately maintained.

Designing and building a heating furnace that could be charged continuously from one end was no problem; nor was designing and locating an oil-filled continuous quenching tank; but the forging presses were an unknown area.  So, Father made a number of trips to Pittsburgh for advice from the E.W. Bliss Company, then the leading maker of forging presses and dies.  They made two separate types of press: knuckle-jointed coining presses for small, accurately made products, and crank presses for larger items like automobile axles and connecting rods.  Bliss recommended a 2,000-ton crank press as the right machine for McKenna's proposed bar mill.  This was a massive machine with 20-inch crank shaft, 24-inch diameter crank bearing, and a structure held together by four, 9-inch diameter tie-bolts, each 20 feet long.

Father presented the investment cost of a Joliet bar mill to the trustees, together with his feeling that the outlay presented an opportunity for them to regain part of their capital losses from the English rail mill debacle.  Fortunately, the trustees had salvaged enough capital to make this Joliet bar mill possible.  The trustees accepted the resignation of President Tapping, shut down the Milwaukee sales office, elected Father President of the Illinois McKenna Process Company, and authorized Father to hire a sales manager, which Father did.

The Bliss Company delivered the big crank press to Joliet and designed the dies and die shoe required.  The first forging dies were designed of a barely machinable steel alloy and were the same shape from end to end. They did not work successfully; used splice bars wore out unevenly, with the heaviest wear at the center where the two rails abutted.  The next heaviest wear was at the two ends of the bar, and the lightest wear was at the two half-way points between center and end.  Also, the bars had developed incipient cracks at the center, near the bar's contact with the rail head at the point of heaviest load.  The center cracks were machined out with a grinding wheel, and that further increased the center wear of the bar.

Father then designed dies that were shaped so that the forging pressure would be the same at each point along the length of the bar.  This was the correct solution, of course, but is was difficult to machine these complicated die cavities.  The next problem was the bolt holes.  Forging the bars distorted the holes, and almost closed up most of them.  Punching new holes in the hot bars just as they came from the forging press proved impractical because the bars cooled too fast and could not be oil quenched at sufficiently high temperature to obtain the correct properties.  Next, presses were set up to punch the bolt holes cold, but the unsymmetrical holes tended to break the expensive punches, and so that method had to be abandoned.  Father solved the bolt-hole problem by incorporating pins of the same shape as the original bolt holes and placing them, loosely held, in the upper half of the die.  The pins would prevent the holes from being closed in while the rest of the splice bar was being forged.  These pins were made of a special, expensive tool steel alloy capable of high strength and wear resistance.  [See also these two innovations, for which George, Sr. had models made: US Patent No. 1,890,687; and US Patent No. 2,034,046 - and here is a pair of McKenna's splice-bar specimens - George, III]

All of these ideas were new and patentable.  Working with a Chicago firm of patent lawyers, Father secured a total of 75 patents in his name that covered the methods, means and products, all intended to build a wall of patent protection around the infant McKenna bar reforming business.  This steady stream of patents being issued to a man named George Langford of Joliet, Illinois, caught the attention of David Wohlhampton, patent attorney for the Rail Joint Company of New York City.  He recognized that Father was doing for McKenna exactly what he (Wohlhampton) had done for the Rail Joint Company, who had a wall of patents protecting their highly successful specialized railway crossing connecting assemblies.  He suggested to the Rail Joint Company executives that perhaps they should add a reforming bar mill to their crossing-assembly plant near New York City.  They requested a license under Father's McKenna patents, and as a New York Mill would be far enough from Joliet they would not be directly competitive, McKenna worked out a tonnage royalty agreement and granted them a license. The Rail Joint Company had licensees under their patents in Alabama and Colorado, and aided Father in granting them McKenna patent licenses.  They all started paying royalties, as substantial addition to McKenna profits.  This led to licenses in Texas, Pennsylvania and Canada and eventually to a too close plant in Aurora, Illinois.

Most of these licensees did not have organized cost systems, did not know what to charge their railroad customers, and asked Father's advice.  Father wrote that McKenna had no cost system either, but that a $20 per ton charge was acceptable to the railroads and profitable to McKenna, so that this $20 per ton charge became the norm for the bar reforging industry.  And the royalty payments to McKenna grew to very substantial proportions.

While Father was working out claims for his bar patent applications, he applied in jest for a patent on the first tool invented by Man, 250 thousand years ago.  The staid old Patent Office was amused by this and duly published the application along with their other patent applications in their Patent Office Gazette of May 1937.  The head patent examiner took the trouble to point out that although the invention of the first flint tool was patentable, the patent could not be granted for two reasons: first, because Father was filing as the inventor's attorney, and the law required that the inventor file it himself; and second, that the 250 thousand year delay in filing precluded granting the patent.  Father's archaeological friends got a big kick out of this episode.

Meanwhile, two of Father's most trusted aides at Joliet aburptly left McKenna, found financial backing, and set up a reforging plant in Joliet.  Father, in rather desperate need of help to operate the Joliet bar mill, asked me to leave my job with the Belden Company in Chicago and come to work with him in Joliet as Bar Mill Superintendent, engineer and general assistant to him.  I had worked at McKenna before, knew all the key men and their specialties, and they liked the idea, so I moved to Joliet to help Father in late 1929.