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Chance Vought Moves In
When the confirmation of the move came in Stratford, there was little new activity, for it had been long anticipated. Plans had been months in the making. Rumors had circulated for almost a year, and newspapers had carried the story as far back as November 1947. The unusual activity accompanying the announcement of the move was taking place in Dallas. On April 18, 1948, Beisel, along with several other key members of the Chance Vought staff, was in Dallas laying the groundwork for the Texas plant. All the men rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to the big job ahead. On Monday, April 19, at 8 A.M., Offices opened at the plant. So that job seekers would not make the long trek to the plant from Dallas and be disappointed, Chance Vought placed an ad in the papers saying that it would be some time before hiring took place. Nevertheless, a horde of applicants appeared at the plant Monday morning following the move announcement. So the new office inadvertently became an employment center.
A handful of men formed the vanguard of the 1400 to come. They were housed at the Belmont Motor Hotel down the highway from the plant. At the new factory, they worked in a hectic, crowded atmosphere hemmed in by other lessees who had not yet vacated the plant. They set up shop in a portion of what is now the employment section and worked amid the pandemonium of air hoses, partitions being torn down, furniture being moved, the confusion of painting and hammering. Once a personnel man and an applicant he was interviewing, were surprised to see the wall against which their chairs stood, being carted off.
Chance Vought had always been a cohesive organization in all its departments, but during those first days in Dallas, one man likened the teamwork between the men to the heightened esprit de corps of an army under fire. An industrial engineer was working elbow-to-elbow with a personnel man. Vague as his former concept of personnel work might have been, the engineer now had occasion to understand it perfectly; and realizing the disadvantages under which his neighbor was working, he might even pinch-hit for him occasionally. The personnel man, in turn, likely did a little industrial engineering on the side. A fellow worker, who had been nothing but a phone number or a signature on a memorandum in the vastness of the Stratford plant, now emerged as a human being. The intimate understanding of many plant functions brought about an efficiency and cooperation that the men would never have believed possible. And they found that they had taken many now nonexistent services for granted. Consequently, they developed a greater appreciation of the work done by their staffs. Each man was accustomed to his private phone. Now, the small nucleus of men, along with their frequent visitors from Stratford, had to make out with one. At last, a switchboard was delivered to the plant and supervisors from Stratford gathered around to work out its complexities with the new girl hired to run it.
The senior officer in charge, John Hemmert, doubled as mail clerk, taking his turn licking envelopes and stamps. L. P. Brown, assistant purchasing manager, sorted the mail and took it to town. Groping in their desks (borrowed from the War Assets Administration) for pencils or ink, they would realize that no supply room had been set up and they would have to provide their own supplies. Long forgotten details – how to set up a correspondence procedure or how to rent a post-office box, and many other things, refreshed themselves in the minds of the men as they handled the work without experienced secretarial help. Four supervisors had put their heads together to figure out the form for the first official military letter from the Dallas plant, as their secretaries had always handled the details. Between them they, they dug up the answers.
Supervisors, who had for days been delving into their own pockets for stamp money, hailed the arrival, in late April, of an accountant with a closely-guarded petty cash box containing $250.00. For some weeks, the small metal box was Chance Vought’s vault, safe, and bankroll in one. During those early days, paychecks were airmailed from Stratford to the men in Dallas. In the middle of June when employment had climbed to more than 200 persons, a payroll supervisor was hired, and he turned out the payroll manually with the help of a borrowed calculator. Frank Reynolds, assistant divisional auditor, distributed them. After three pay periods, the payroll became mechanized, but operations had to be moved to IBM headquarters in downtown Dallas where additional payroll workers and tabulating personnel were being trained.
Gradually, the former lessees of the plant began to move out and new Chance Vought people move in. Those employed first were inventory clerks to make a record of War Assets property in the plant. Clerical workers were then hired and, because applicants were coming in increasing numbers, 18 graduates of SMU were chosen as interviewers. At breakfast, a personnel man asked one of the new Texas interviewers how he was impressed with Chance Vought as a company. “Well,” drawled the Texan, “I like your informality and your friendliness. Secondly, you-all seem to have a desirably small distinction between employees and supervisors. Lots of times, I’ll see a box being lugged down the hall and on one end is an employee and on the other end is his boss. But thirdly, you-all talk so damned fast, I can’t understand a word you day.”
During the early, cramped days of Chance Vought’s life in Texas, there were hundreds of visitors, from junk-peddlers to generals, and a flood of correspondence for the few Chance Vought men to handle. Harassed and overworked as they were, the pioneers in Chance Vought’s move had fun getting the new plant started. L. P. Brown, the assistant purchasing agent, complained after things had settled down that it was humdrum to revert to doing just one man’s job.
 Increasing numbers of persons streamed down from Stratford and a reservations clerk came in to handle their travel and hotel accommodations. Reversing the trek from Connecticut to Texas, a group of Grand Prairie business men chartered a Pullman car to Stratford just after the move had started, to acquaint Chance Vought with Grand Prairie and the state of Texas, and to extend a welcome – and 10-gallon hats – to the future Texans. A few months later, a group of Dallas business men were guests of H. M. Horner in Connecticut on a tour of all the United Aircraft plants. DeShong, too, traveled to Connecticut to talk to prospective transferees about Texas.
Transferred personnel began moving to Texas and the Chance Vought housing section, set up in March to work with these early families, established patterns for housing techniques and for determining housing needs. Equipment, too, began to arrive in Dallas. Material handlers for the receiving department were hired. Machines for the training center arrived and Hemmert began the work of coordinating the establishment of Chance Vought units with the space vacated by other plant lessees. The office established downtown in July served as a combination reception center for transferred employees and an employment office. By midsummer, the Dallas organization had grown from a small chaotic group to a well-staffed, well-organized unit, expanding in an orderly manner.
After the activities in Dallas had been touched off and the men there briefed on what to do when material, equipment and personnel began moving in; Beisel went back to Stratford. There the first shipments of machinery were being readied and interviews of personnel proposed for transfer were beginning. To effect complete teamwork, Chance Vought needed a central coordinator to iron our interdepartmental conflicts and to draw together loose ends that the unusual activity of moving was bound to unravel. Early in the transfer, Fred Detwieler, former divisional controller of Sikorsky Aircraft, another of United Aircraft’s divisions was brought in as assistant general manager and move coordinator. Years before, Pratt and Whitney Aircraft had established a subsidiary in Kansas City, Missouri, and Detweiler had seen that project through from its initial construction, tooling and staffing. He had wound up that facility after its wartime usefulness was over. The new coordinator, then, was amply aware of the job encountered in setting up a new facility and tapering off an old one. Detweiler set up an organization of move men, one in each department. This group brought up problems of their departments in weekly move meetings presided over by the coordinator and, with all departments present, conflicts were ironed out quickly and finally. A weekly move report prepared by the public relations department summarized the amount of work accomplished by each section and helped the entire organization to keep the overall picture in mind. In addition, Hemmert, the senior officer in Dallas, sent reports periodically listing details of the progress there.
Just after the move was announced, the Stratford town fathers organized a committee to find a new tenant for the Chance Vought plant. Keith Baker, Vought’s public relations manager, served on this board. Two thousand prospectuses of the plant were prepared for distribution to prospective tenants. Espey, too, assisted in this effort by showing interested persons through the plant. When Baker and Espey had moved to Dallas, the task of assisting the Navy in efforts to find a new use for the Stratford plant fell to Detweiler. Also confronting Detweiler as move coordinator was the attempt to relocate employees who could not go along to Texas. Many industries around the Stratford area, called Chance Vought to inquire when a certain type of personnel would be released. Vought kept a record of these phone calls and referred the released employees to the inquirers when the time came. Other divisions of United Aircraft also placed many of the persons remaining in Connecticut and the gradual nature of the move permitted hundreds more to be absorbed into other businesses.
So Detweiler took up the task of weaving together the strands of activity that went to make up the Chance Vought move to Texas. As big as the job was, he was grateful for one thing: that the plans, made during the year and a half that the move had been under consideration, had been so well laid out that the real job of coordinating consisted mostly of individual problems and of adjusting schedules to fit changes coming up as the move progressed. So logical was the basic move plan and its details so skillfully worked out that its general form could be followed without deviation from the beginning of the move to the end, to the dismantling of machinery, shipping it to Texas, transferring personnel and their households, rehabilitation of the Dallas plant, employing and training new workers and finally, through the production of airplanes, which continued uninterrupted in Connecticut and in Texas all throughout the transfer.
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