Hey Ron, thats fine...I've been doing some more research, but the reason why they say "ironically" is because White..as in the Mr White...his full name escapes me..was the one who financed the start of The Cleveland Tractor Co...which was previously the Cleveland motor plough company or something..Then his own company ended up buying it back.!
Anyway some would say that Cat bought just about anything that was worthwhile over the years. Despite all the years I ran and worked on Cat engines I never knew they owned 67% of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries since the end of WWII, until I bought my first Cat Skid Steer.
What really amazes me is how these old machines got half way around the world, worked, were repaired and maintained, often under attrocious conditions and all before anybody dreamed of "global logistics" etc.
I really liked the old US built stuff because of the documentation. The english stuff I often worked on had like 4 different books or even five for one machine..and the author assumed you had encyclopediac knowledge of the other 4 books (as well as several engineering degrees) when you were reading the 5th...whereas the american stuff was often written from ground up for numbskulls like me and it told you everything..when, what, how and why and what spanner to use. The guys that wrote those workshop manuals really understood their stuff...something which seems to evade the modern manual production.