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Teaching Texas To Yankees
To form a strong nucleus for an organization at the Dallas plant, Chance Vought had determined, through a survey of department heads, that the transfer of 1500 persons would provide all the supervision, skill and experience needed. To Chance Vought, Joe Doaks, the drop hammer operator, was just as much an asset as the big Erie Press. But there was more than a physical aspect to his transfer. There was his financial situation to determine. There was his mental attitude to consider, and that of his family. His personality had to be evaluated, for a man must be adaptable to follow his job 1,687 miles. A man cannot have a clear attitude towards something that he does not know. Chance Vought’s first job, then, was to educate the New Englanders about Dallas. Long before the move was announced, Chance Vought had begun its research. The personnel and public relations departments collected data on Dallas real estate, schools, recreation, cultural activity, weather, taxes, transportation, cost of living, and other subjects, and had compiled this information into a booklet, “Preview to Dallas,” distributed just after the announcement of the move. Officials of the Dallas symphony were surprised when Keith Baker, Vought’s public relations manager, requested information on musical activities in Dallas. Chance Vought not only was interested in a site ideal for the production of its aircraft; it was seeking a home in which its 1500 transferred families would be happy. A room in the personnel section was taken over as a Dallas information booth. Its walls were covered with maps and photomurals of Dallas.  There Chance Vought people could browse among newspapers and magazines about Dallas, travel folders describing nearby vacation spots and menus of Dallas restaurants. Charts showing actual comparisons of the cost of living in Connecticut and in Dallas were eagerly studied by prospective transferees, who learned that the hypothetical family of four, living in an $8,000 home, could save $175 a year in living costs in Dallas, The greatest saving being in heating. As families moved to Dallas and established homes there, photographs of the home, with prices, were added to the Dallas booth’s gallery of evidence that Texas was not the wild, arid wasteland that many Chance Vought people had previously believed it to be. In this atmosphere, the real work of examining individuals recommended for transfer began. Trained interviewers had been sent to Dallas to study the city thoroughly from all angles. Stationed in the Dallas booth, they tackled the hundreds of questions flooding in from future Texans. “I like wide streets,” one man asserted. “How wide are they in Dallas?” The personnel people checked and told him. My baby takes a special formula,” another said. “I can’t go to Dallas unless I can get it there.” Vought representatives in Dallas contacted dairies and found that the formula could be had there. Another man inquired as to the temperature of White Rock Lake. His children were avid swimmers. Answers to all questions were painstakingly answered. The basic routine for interviewing employees began with a distribution of questionnaires filled out by supervisors in interviews with those employees recommended for transfer. Questionnaires asked what attitude the employee held toward moving to Dallas, how many members of his household would go with him if he went, whether or not he had a car and automobile insurance, if his whole family would ride with him, what his housing requirements were, how much furniture he would have to move, and other questions. From these questionnaires and the initial interview, the supervisor made his list of Dallas transfers. Appointments were then made for interviews in the Dallas booth. There, interviewers presented to the employee the company policies on payment of moving costs and determined whether or not the employee was financially able to move his family to Dallas. He also discussed the employee’s specific problems. The problems were many. One man, the owner of a Crosley automobile, pondered the problem of how to get his wife and five children into the tiny car for the trip south. Another, who had ten children and maintained two houses, was an artesian well-digger on the side, wondered if he could get similar supplementary employment in Texas. One employee worried how he might dispose of his 13-room house, 12 acres of land, a tractor, and a herd of 75 goats. Scheduled for a late move, he and his family managed to sell their property and to consume the goats. “I’m glad to be rid of them,” he remarked afterward. “No more goats for me.” Another employee sifted the question of whether to take his car to Texas, where, someone had told him, the sandstorms can strip a whole paint job off a car.
The Dallas move was the climax of many Connecticut romances, when single transferees, reluctant to leave their girl friends, decided to bring them along as wives. There were children in the midst of a school year, and there were sick mothers-in-law to be considered by some families. There was even a parrot with asthma, pet of a Chance Vought worker, who was allergic to airplane travel. One transferee demanded to know if he could fly his plane to Work in Texas. A glockenspiel player inquired if there was a glockenspiel society in Dallas. A button collector worried over how he could transport his collection to Dallas. An engineer asked for an extension of travel time to bicycle to Dallas. Sometimes, not only the employees, but also their families, came in for an interview and information. A number of persons, not content with second-hand information about their future home, looked over Dallas for themselves. Some employees went to Dallas on their vacations. Wives of others made trips there. For instance, two wives of Vought leadmen, Mrs. Albert Vecchio and Mrs. Emil Schwitzer, with Mrs. Schwitzer’s five-year-old son, Dick, made the 3500-mile trip to their prospective home and back. Dallas and its people made such an impression upon these two wives that Mrs. Schwitzer bought a home immediately and Mrs. Vecchio, returning home to find 15 Chance Vought members of her husband’s club assembled in her home, urged them all to make the transfer to Texas.
Chance Vought also sent employees to Dallas to look over the plant and, more importantly, to bring back information about Dallas that would show their fellow workers that it was a good place to live. Gradually, as Chance Vought workers moved to Dallas and wrote letters back to their Chance Vought friends, the task of the interviewers in informing workers about Dallas became easier. Interviewers said that veterans posed the fewest problems. Accustomed to moving, they took the Dallas transfer in stride with few questions. It was the function of the interviewers to give the prospective transferees the information they should have and determine their fitness for the move. They were not there to sell people on Texas. In many cases, they had to talk employees out of going when they felt that the move would not be in the employee’s best interest. Some had lived in Texas and needed no information to know that the move was for them. One employee suffering from sinus trouble begged to be scheduled early in the move to a warm, dry climate. Another function of the interviewer was to encourage families to go together. In addition to the economy effected by avoiding the maintenance of two homes by a family, the company knew that pulling up stakes is a hard adjustment at best and a harder one for families that are separated from one another. Thus, “split moves” of families were authorized in only unusual cases. After the interviewer had determined the employee’s willingness and ability to move to Dallas, he submitted a report to the supervisor. He then sent the employee to the household move coordinator to arrange for moving his household effects and to the transportation section for travel reservations for himself and his family. Interviews were held approximately two months prior to the departure date that a supervisor had recommended for an employee. To make sure no new problems arose in the interim, and to brief employees for their trip, there was a second interview two weeks before moving day. Here financial arrangements were worked out as to how much travel allowance the employee and his family would have, how much subsistence while house hunting, and how he would get it. These were questions answered in the second interview.
Knowing the proclivity to forget to put out the cat, wind the alarm and leave a note for the milkman, the interviewers gave moving employees a final checkout on their last day in Stratford. Had all final arrangements for disposal of houses and shipment of furniture and tool chests been made? Had water, gas, telephone and electricity been turned off? Had newspapers and milk deliveries been stopped? Was there anything the employee wanted to know about what to do upon arriving in Dallas? Like the machinery lists, there were lists of employees, and like the equipment, the employee lists were reduced to IBM cards, key-punched with name, move month, number in family, and transportation and housing requirements. The cards were filed by departure dates. But, more often than the equipment cards, there had to be changes, for human beings have failings that machines do not have: they get sick, their cars break down, and they have involved personal business. Originally, schedules received from department heads specified the transfer of too many employees per month to accomplish the ideal gradual absorption of new families into Dallas. New policy limits were set up. It was specified that only families whose income was $300 or more per month were eligible to move, for below that level, families found the economic load of a move too heavy. Again, some single men transferred were drafted, so men eligible for the draft were thenceforth not considered for transfer. Schedules were also revamped to fit housing estimates. To prevent a great drain on rental property in Dallas, only sixty families a month, who wanted rentals, were scheduled to move, these being divided between departments. But with insufficient knowledge as to whether a family, which had intended to rent, would ultimately decide to buy, a limitation of 160 families a month, with no limit on single persons.
Though the move extended over 14 months, the bulk of personnel transfers came in six months from October through March, when more than 1000 persons moved. At the end of March, the personnel move was virtually completed, with only some 40 employees left to migrate. Personnel interviewers in the Dallas booth had done everything possible for the transferee’s guidance, even to telling them the shortest and best driving routes. Chance Vought personnel, in moving to Dallas, covered a total of seven million miles. That the Chance Vought people enjoyed the trip and the peace of mind that the company’s vigilance over their move had given them was apparent to the interviewers. As the caravan of aircraft workers swarmed southward, a flood of postcards came back to the Dallas booth thanking the interviewers for their help, giving them information about the trip and the city of Dallas.
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