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A trip South
Just after Thanksgiving in 1946, a group if gentlemen shivered through the chill Connecticut air and boarded a southbound train. Few persons knew of their trip. Even to the travelers themselves, it seemed a little fantastic. If others had known of it, they doubtless would have wondered of the logic of a plan to pry up a small portion of New England and set it down in Texas. The group was composed of Rex B. Beisel, General Manager of Chance Vought Aircraft Division of United Aircraft Corporation, and members of his staff. Specifically, they were going to look over the city of Dallas, Texas, and its people, and to inspect a surplus aircraft plant designated for allocation to Navy ownership as a possible site for depositing that section of New England they planned to uproot.
The idea was the brainchild of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and reached Beisel as a bombshell dropped into a conversation by H. M. Horner, United Aircraft’s president, as he drove with Beisel to Bridgeport. “I had a discussion about Chance Vought’s plant at the Bureau of Aeronautics the other day,” Horner had said. “The Navy felt that Vought couldn’t reach the most efficient production in that plant in the event of an emergency. They mentioned a stand-by plant in Dallas, Texas that North American had during the war. They’re asking several aircraft manufacturers to look at the plant. How would you feel about moving there?” It was a staggering thought – the moving of a factory covering more than a million and a half square feet and employing some eight thousand people half way across the country. “I won’t feel any way about a big question like that until I’ve thought it over,” was Beisel’s answer.
He thought it over. He well recognized the limitations of the plant in Stratford. The company had begun operations thirty years earlier in Long Island City, New York. Bursting at the seams, it had moved to East Hartford, Connecticut, in 1930. Nine years later, it had outgrown itself again and moved to Stratford. When, bulging with war orders, the factory outgrew the Stratford plant, it could not move. It added a wing here, a building there. During the war, as a supplier of Navy fighters, Chance Vought had to add sections often, without much time for coordinating the new wing with the whole. As mass production of planes reached astronomical proportions throughout the industry, scientific layout of plants for smooth material flow and straight-line assembly became the rule. The Chance Vought plant was not laid out for its operations. By a tremendous expenditure of energy, the Chance Vought employees had, regardless of the limitations of their plant, met the schedules and been awarded the Navy “E” for their production of the famous Navy Corsair fighter. Given a plant better suited for their needs, there was no limit to what they might have done. And now, with Chance Vought’s new jet fighter, the XF8U-1, reaching the testing stage, and with the radically advanced XF7U-1 twin jet being planned, the Bridgeport airport and its 4600 foot runways were not adequate. Nor was the densely populated Connecticut area, with its rolling hills, an ideal testing ground for jet airplanes.
There was primarily, the security consideration. Beisel well knew that the Navy’s suggestion, far from being radical, had sprung from foresight and caution. The Chance Vought plant, one of the Navy’s principal suppliers of shipboard fighters, was highly vulnerable, nestled among a myriad of other vital industries in the New England manufacturing areas. The President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training had said: “Our plans for converting our productive facilities from peace to war cannot be executed fully when war is upon us. We must consider, in peace time, the encouragement .. of dispersal of strategic industrial plants .. plants that will be most essential must be widely spaced to prevent the destruction of an entire industry in the first attack.”
Beisel decided that the plant was worth a look. A few days later, he had assembled a small but comprehensive staff to visit the Texas plant. The strictest confidence was kept, for occupancy of the Dallas plant was but a remote possibility. Yet a hint of it might have needlessly disrupted the employees’ peace of mind, production schedules and the community itself. The inspection group was made up of Graham Reid, Chance Vought’s purchasing manager, who had spent several years in Texas; George V. Anderson, the personnel manager, who went along to survey the labor supply and wage rates in the area; Raymond A. Tipple, industrial engineering manager who, with John F. Hemmert, assistant factory manager, was to study the plant from the point of view of it’s adaptability to Chance Vought’s manufacturing operation; and William H. Espey, facilities manager, who was to look over the condition of the building and adequacy of space. A representative of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, John Sartoris, also made the trip with the Chance Vought men.
The group stepped off the train into a warm, clear day – perfect flying weather, for the first of December. Mentally, the aircraft men scored one point for Dallas. They remembered many delays in test flights in the New England winters. The party divided into two teams. The purchasing manager and the personnel manager went to make contacts in town. The others rode down the Fort Worth Pike to Grand Prairie, site of the plant. They were met by Captain Leonard Dow, commanding officer of the nearby Naval Air Station. Escorted by J. D. West, RFC representative, and Howard Jones, plant engineer for Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company, which was occupying part of one of the former North American buildings, they began their survey of the plant. The confidential nature of the trip caused a tension among the visitors. There were some thirty tenants occupying the Dallas plant at the time of the Chance Vought inspection, and the aircraft men did not want their identity known. Just inside the plant, Beisel discovered he was wearing a small Corsair pin in his lapel, and quickly transferred it to his pocket. At another point in the tour, when the Hensley Field runways were in view of the visitors, Espey, caught a glimpse of a Corsair taking off. “There goes one of our planes,” he shouted proudly; and when the others wheeled on him warningly, he remembered he should claim no part of the Corsair.
The visitors were not talkative. Little was said, but much was noticed. Now and then, a couple of them would go into a brief huddle. “The Chance Vought people didn’t give out; they just took in,” West reminisced later. “Somehow, I felt all through the trip that they were more interested than a lot of the talkative ones we’d taken through, who had told us all they were going to change and add.”
Meanwhile, Graham Reid, armed with a letter of introduction from a New York banker, went to call on a Dallas banker for help in getting facts about the city. “This is too big for one man to handle,” the banker said reaching for his hat. “Let me take you down the street, and we’ll see what the Chamber of Commerce has to say. They know how to keep a thing like this confidential.” The banker dropped everything to assist Reid in his fact-finding. Going out of one’s way to be helpful was, the New Englanders found, a characteristic of Texans, and one which greatly lightened the load on Chance Vought in compiling the initial surveys which led to the ultimate decision to move.
Reid and the Dallas banker had a talk with J. Ben Critz, vice-president and general manager of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce. Critz thought that it was a pretty big thing too, and called in Andrew W. DeShong, the Chamber’s industrial manager, who later joined Chance Vought as assistant to the general manager, and B. F. McLain, then president of the Chamber of Commerce. Other Dallas business men – Edgar Flippin, president of the First National Bank; and C. A. Jay, general manager of the Dallas Industrial Service, were called in on special problems, and all pledged their help and confidence.
That night, there was much to discuss when the Chance Vought men got together. Two who had studied the city, its labor supply, its housing, and other facilities, were happy with their first glimpse of the city and its businessmen. Those who had visited the plant had seen its layout, its flexibility, its spaciousness, its adjacent railroad siding, the flat surrounding country that was perfect for testing jet planes, a vast improvement for aircraft production over the scrambled Stratford plant. Its excellent air conditioning unit had also impressed them. With their production of Metalite, a new lightweight construction material, expanding, they foresaw that this feature of the Dallas facility would save them a good deal of money that they would inevitably have to spend to air condition the Stratford plant to adapt it to Metalite manufacture.
There were two main buildings to the plant: The “A” building, occupied largely by the Texas Engineering and Manufacturing Company and the “B” building, which was the logical one for Chance Vought’s operations. They were blackout-type buildings with all steel construction and steel frame trusses, representing a great improvement over the Stratford plant, in which the wooden portions of the construction were in need of repair.
Yet, this was not a question to be determined by first impressions. As everyone had conceded, it was a big thing. Good as the plant and the location looked to them in general, they knew that a detailed study was necessary. Each day, Beisel would assign every man to investigate some phase of a problem. They would scatter dig up the facts, and return to Beisel’s room for a conference in the evening. Beisel was accustomed to putting things together and making them come out to produce a desirable result. Therefore, when one of his men would come back from a survey with a troublesome obstacle, Beisel would offer the cheerful challenge: “There ought to be some way around it. It’s our job to find a way out.”
The Vought men were unanimously enthusiastic about Dallas and the new plant, which seemed made-to-order for Vought’s operations. In the drive of this enthusiasm, they did, eventually, come up with the answers, which they ultimately built into a move plan that was almost as perfect and predictable in its working as the mechanism of one of Vought’s planes.
At the end of the weeks survey, there was still much information to be gathered. To maintain the secrecy under which the initial trip had been conducted, Beisel arranged for DeShong to forward additional facts concerning Dallas and the plant to Reid’s home, so that no news would leak out in Stratford; for the possibility of the move was still remote.
The Texans urged the Chance Vought men to come back. They liked the Yankees, and felt that Vought would fit in well with the pattern of industrial growth they had outlined for Dallas. They determined among themselves to go all out to bring this plant to their city. The New Englanders were impressed with the efforts of these men, and also with the natural friendliness of the bellhops, clerks, and others in Dallas who did not know of their plan for the bringing of a big aircraft firm to Texas.
The weather cooperated to the fullest. For seven days, it had been sparkling autumn weather, and the New England topcoats had remained in the hotel closet. “Why,” Ben Critz told the Stratfordites, “we have this weather until it becomes monotonous.”
As DeShong drove home from the station, reflecting that Chance Vought and Texas got along well together, he noticed that the sky was darkening ominously in the North. Presently, a “blue norther” had enveloped Dallas, but the visitors were well on their way. DeShong took this as a good omen. Even the weather had held back from spoiling the ideal situation of Chance Vought’s move into the stand-by plant.
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