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by some admiral with his eyes gleaming, saying, “These fellows ought to be hung,” and so on. They were told the story big. Frank Knox said, “Well, I'll telephone the Secretary of Labor. This should be stopped.” He would telephone to me all hot and bothered. Sometimes they would come in all hot and bothered about things that we actaully hadn't heard of in the Department of Labor. Some of our conciliators out in the field knew about it, but it was so unimportant that it hadn't been made a matter to wire in or telephone in about, because it was getting straightened out. The conciliator knew that he had already in motion the activities that would straighten it out. So he didn't bother us with it.

That happened over and over again, but Nelson was always very calm. This was where his business experience stood by him. He knew that in a great big enterprise like Sears, Roebuck, which he had run, scattered all over the country, lots of things happened, and for the most part they got taken care of on the local level. In time everything moved. Nothing ever was as bad as it appeared to be when it was first reported You had to handle it calmly and then everybody along the line did his duty and you untangled whatever the problem was.

Nelson once said to me, “These labor things are like when in our business (meaning Sears, Roebuck) you get reports that there's a freight yard tangle, that a lot of care have gotten switched on to the wrong trains. The car that was meant