From that date forward, Rentschler made it a point to visit the Bureau from week to week to keep us advised of progress. His first surprise was the news that he had collected a small group of men, mostly drawn from Wright Aero, as the nucleus of his organization; and he had shown rare judgment in picking the ablest of them. There was Don Brown from the shop, Andy Willgoos and George Mead from engineering, Jack Borrup and Charles Marks on the tooling side, and so on, to include upwards of a dozen really competent men. The impact on Wright Aero would prove severe and replacements would be hard to find. George Mead arrived in Washington early in June on a day when my wife and I had planned to run over to Annapolis for the June Week exercises—we had first met there and loved the little town. Going back and forth in the car, George and I first discussed the design principles for the new engine. Of course the enclosed valve gear and rotary induction of the R-1454 were musts, but we rejected that engine’s arrangement of accessories on the front end; we would tuck ours on the rear out of the salt spray. We would split the crankshaft in two pieces, as George had done on an earlier engine, and would divide the crankcase similarly. As we talked, George sketched the ideas on the back of an envelope and captioned them in his precise printed letters. Later, we found some of our principles had already been used in the British Bristol Jupiter, but for the moment we glowed with the enthusiasm of creators of a new art. Later, as the summer wore on and our engine problems eased up, storm clouds appeared in another quarter. The Engine Section had as one of its problems the Packard installation in the rigid airship _Shenandoah_. Lighter-than-air had always been the admiral’s pet hobby and we had spent a lot of effort on two jobs: preventing the cooling water from freezing, and recovering water from the engine exhaust to compensate for the expenditure of fuel. This, in turn, avoided the need for valving precious helium gas—a critical factor in lighter-than-air. The chief engineer of the _Shenandoah_, Edgar W. Sheppard, was an extremely able young lieutenant, who had served as my Number Two at Great Lakes, and who now spent considerable time with us. From him I learned disturbing things about the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, headquarters for the rigids _Shenandoah_ and _Los Angeles_.