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Washington, D.C., circa 1928. "C&P Tel. Co." Officers of the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company. Do we have a quorum? National Photo Company glass negative. View full size.
I hate these relaxed dress codes in business environments. Look at these bums! Not a pair of spats in sight.
Five of the thirteen are wearing contacts. Two of the thirteen are wearing bow ties.
Grouch Marx said "Thirteen at a table is unlucky....especially when the hostess only has 12 chops."
By my count, if glasses, vests, and Windsor knots are the determining factors, we have a quorum!
What got me is, I see someone I know in this pic! The dude sitting second from the left resembles a body shop manager in KC named Steve Outlaw. I also noticed that the faces look a lot younger than the hands.
Chesapeake & Potomac had their own brand of glass insulators on the telegraph/telephone lines that ran along the right-of-way. I had a few glass tolls in a rich green that were picked from the C&P lines.
Here's a pic of one in the color I mentioned.
... but they're all clean. This photo must have been taken before the meeting started. I suspect the ash trays were less clean when it was over.
No good lookers? I dunno about that. The man in the middle at the head (or foot) of the table made me want to enlarge the photo. He'll do, in a corporate way.
I bet those two guys on the end later wished they'd visited the shoeshine boy before this meeting.
Otherwise, there would be no diversity at all.
We don't wan't any dissenters in here mister! We always agree on everything.
They'd better watch out for #2 on the right. He's obviously a bit unserious for this group. And the fellow second from his right seems to have a short attention span.
And not a good looker in the whole room!!
It was in the play The Wild Duck by Ibsen that I first came upon the superstition that if there are 13 people at a dinner table then one will die within the year.
They all appear to have a vested interest in the company.
And not quite there yet. When I wiki C&P Tel. Co.'s successor Verizon's board of directors, it's 7 vs. 3. Not bad, all things considered. 2 to go for parity.
No telling how many are wearing contacts, though.
At 8-5, the motion to only wear round glasses carries.
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