|
|
Packing Up
Moving vans are intrinsically unpredictable. This axiom is brought about by the fact that to maintain favorable rates, they must sometimes travel circuitous routes to get complete loads, and to provide cargo for their return trips. In planning Chance Vought’s household move, Graham Reid, the firm’s purchasing manager, foresaw that an impossible situation would come about if the household goods of 1500 persons moving from Stratford to Dallas should wander so erratically over the United States. In arranging the household move, he envisioned a direct transfer of the employees’ goods from Stratford to Dallas over the shortest possible route, with no deviation. It was necessary, also, that there be no delay in picking up the employee’s furniture. There must be a definite coordination in the moving date of the employee and the moving date of his belongings. In his quest for ideal household move arrangements; Reid traveled to the headquarters of the leading van companies that could serve the Stratford-Dallas route. He examined their dispatching, loading and maintenance systems, and inquired into their experience in making large-scale moves. His study revealed that Aero-Mayflower vans, which had considerable experience in moving large groups of industrial personnel, were best suited to Chance Vought’s purposes. Wide as their experience had been, it had not encompassed a move of the scope and character of Chance Vought’s. A new moving system had to be tailor-made. To handle the move, they hired special loaders and added twenty new vans to their fleet. They sent men to set up an organization in Bridgeport. To provide speedy, direct service for Chance Vought transferees, the moving company set aside a fleet of trucks exclusively for Chance Vought’s move.  Collecting a vanload of two or three employees’ household goods, the vans went directly to Dallas, returning immediately to Stratford with no return load. The large volume of furniture moved made this arrangement possible at a favorable rate authorized by the Interstate Commerce commission. Realizing the unprecedented magnitude of the move, Chance Vought had arranged for a representative of the moving company to work full-time in its purchasing department as household move coordinator. When employees made their decision to move to Dallas, they reported to this coordinator’s office to discuss their specific move problems. The coordinator then scheduled a representative of the moving company to call at the employee’s home to inventory his household effects and determine the amount of van space required for his goods, and to see what special containers were needed for glassware and other articles.
Some things, such as pets, could not go along in the van. Chance Vought employees had numerous pets. Most of these went by automobile with the owners. Where owners had no cars, however, and insisted on taking their pets along, the animals were sent by airfreight. A project engineer had a sizeable menagerie. There was Natasha, a six-year-old Persian, whom the family had raised from a kitten. “Tige”, a tabby cat, tipping the scale at 17 pounds, had been born in the family closet. And there was “Chris”, part Shepherd and part Airedale, a Christmas present from the engineer’s wife. The three pets submitted docilely to being crated up and loaded aboard a plane. Not so docile was an industrial engineer’s collie, which chewed through her crate on the airport runway and escaped, eluding a posse of Stratford policemen, Chance Vought guards and American Airlines personnel. Three days later, a woman with a bowl of warm milk lured the collie into the hands of the law, and “Sheba” finally was shipped to her owner.
Eventually, the menagerie that entered Dallas caused a permanent impression on the city. Motor courts established a rate of $2 per day for dogs. Chance Vought, naturally, had to limit shipment of pets, but where they were not actually able to ship animals for the owners, the household move coordinator gave employees the benefit of his experience in moving all varieties of objects – animal, vegetable and mineral. He advised the owners of a pet canary, for example, that they should encase the bird in a paper sack to avoid drafts on the auto trip down. And he told an amateur ichthyologist to rent a special traveling tank with temperature control features to transport his 126 tropical fish to Dallas. When one employee appeared concerned over the fact that that his gladioli were about to bloom, the household move section suggested that he have a neighbor tend the plants and mail him the bulbs later. There was a definite limit to the amount of equipment an employee could ship at company expense. One employee who listed among the effects to be transferred exceeded that limit, for instance, a boat, a canoe, an airplane, an extra automobile, and a motorcycle. Another had a machine shop complete with miller, drill press and lathe, as well as a canoe, a motorcycle and a dog. Some had two trailers. The company would move only one. The household move office shipped one deluxe trailer with a television set. These were only a few of the unorthodox problems that arose, in the day’s work of a factory which, in normal times, wrestled only with more tractable problems of aircraft design and manufacture.
With hundreds of persons to move, the household move coordinator had a limited amount of time for questions and conferences. Therefore, he tried to keep the transferees informed through printed instructions. The purchasing department, under whose jurisdiction he fell, issued a booklet of instructions to all migrating employees, instructing them on the insuring of their household goods, how to have their appliances serviced by movers, telling them what the movers would pack and what they should pack themselves. The specially trained movers, however, left little for the transferee to do. They packed books, pots, pans, dishes, pictures, perfumes and even the family’s personal clothing. Just about all that was left for the employee to do was to take down his draperies and curtains. Employees were informed as to the expected arrival date of their household goods in Dallas, and usually, if the family had housing there, the furniture could be moved in at the same time that the family arrived. If housing was yet to be obtained, furniture was stored for a maximum of two months.
Now that everything was in order for the movement of employees’ belongings, the actual movement of the people themselves took place. The majority of the families drove their cars to Dallas and of the remainder, about an equal number came by train and plane. In January 1949, for example, one of the heaviest months of the move, 86 persons flew, 79 took the train, and 323 drove. A reservations clerk in the purchasing department made train, plane and hotel reservations for the travelers. In the first eight months of the move, with two other reservations clerks, she started 2600 persons on their way, in addition to making numerous reservations for commuters back and forth from Stratford to Dallas. The job of the reservations group was made increasingly complex by the fact that travel arrangements were made a month in advance to insure space availability. So they frequently had to be changed because of plant operation changes, or such personal complications as disposal of a house. One man broke out with the mumps two days before he was scheduled to move to Texas.
Statistics at the first of May, 1949 showed that 979 employees drove their own cars, bringing with them 1310 dependents; 194 employees, with 235 dependents, came by rail; and air passengers numbered 129 transferees with 142 dependents. In addition, persons commuting on company business had made 662 trips. Of these, 460 went by commercial airliner, 31 by company plane, and 171 by train. Once a man had been scheduled to leave on a certain date, it was important that space on the carriers be available. Graham Reed and Ed Beatty, therefore, had kept in constant contact with airline and train reservation sections, which gave their fullest cooperation in keeping space open for the horde of Vought people bound for Texas. Getting the employees and their household goods on the road was a big job. “I wouldn’t exactly say we were overburdened, though,” Ed Beatty said later. “The way we looked at it, we could either make a big fuss over the job and make something hard out of it, or we could just do the job, and not take time to think about how big it was. We tried to do the latter. One thing though, this move has been a liberal education for all of us.”
|
