| We had
enjoyed our Summer's fling in the West, but when we arrived in Chicago
about September 23, 1946, we found ourselves homeless [after the
liquidation of the McKenna Process Company and the Joliet, Illinois
residence - GL,III] and I in need of a job. So, while we stayed
in the Palmer House, searching for an apartment, I headed for the Field
Museum, later known as the Chicago Museum of Natural History. I
had recently sold a large collection of fossil plants to the Museum and
planned to send there the fifteen or more cartons of fossils collected
recently in the West. So I was welcomed and given facilities for preparing and studying my latest finds when they arrived by freight. I spent my time at this until January 1, 1947 at this, hoping that I might eventually secure a job in Vertebrate Paleontology, but I saw no opening and switched to Paleobotany. I had with me about four hundred pages of illustrated manuscript [the basis of the two books eventually published by ESCONI Associates as well as the manuscript to which the present notes are an appendix - GL,III, ed.] on the Pennsylvanian flora and fauna of the strip coal mines west and southwest of Wilmington, Will County, Illinois. I soon realized that the Museum officials were more interested when I adopted this line. Paleobotany was a dead duck, and the Museum had no department for it. Nevertheless, I proposed to Col. C.C. Gregg, Director, that I be permitted to establish a Department of Paleobotany and be given a salary. Col. Gregg approved, and so I got the job April 1, 1947. I was given to understand that it was a probational arrangement, depending upon what I succeeded in accomplishing and how I got along with other employees. It was then that said employees began to realize that I was there not as a retired steel magnate and playboy, but as a salaried worker like themselves. And while at first, they may have resented my intrusion, they soon realized that the job given me was one that nobody else wanted or was fitted for. So I started again in business
from scratch at the age of seventy-one.
[unsigned, but in the handwriting
of] George Langford, Sr.
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