In the early winter of 1928-29, my uncle, Herbert Patterson who was Chief Engineer for Dodge Brothers (it was still Dodge Brothers at that time) in Detroit, gave me a job in the Blueprint Department of their office in Hamtramic. I became a cutter on a Peerless Blueprint Machine that produced a continuous sheet of prints that was about four feet wide. My job was to cut the individual prints out of the continuous flow. It wasn’t much of a problem when they were running large prints. However, when they ran real small ones it kept me jumping, until I caught on to the right way to do it.

After I had been there a while they would send me out to the Drafting Room and I would make ink tracings from the pencil drawings that the Draftsmen had made. This went on until the following summer when I was laid off because the Depression was just getting, seriously, under way.