Jack Out of the Box

Even when the outlook was blackest, short, cocky William S. Jack always knew everything would turn out all right. The worst was nine months ago when the profit-probing Vinson committee rooted out the fantastic salaries and bonuses of Jack & Heintz Inc., catapulted President Jack smack into the biggest and juiciest profit scandal of the year. But last week the scandal was forgotten, and upstart J. & H. was riding high as the world's largest maker of aviation starters and automatic pilots.

The Methods. For this snappy comeback all nosegays go to production-ace Jack and his incredible business policies. J. & H.'s five plants -- four in Bedford, Ohio and one in Cleveland -- are a nifty combination of a college campus, a workman's paradise and zooming production. J. & H. has a band to rival Ohio State's, victory song and cheerleaders, boisterous parties to celebrate production records.

Every employe is called an "associate," is known only by his first name as soon as he gets on the payroll. There are no time clocks and no docking for tardiness. The associates talk and smoke whenever they like, paste Petty girls on their machines if the curves inspire them, get popular jazz over the loudspeaker system, drink free coffee or nibble free candy bars. To top it off Host Jack hands everyone vitamin pills and anti-cold tablets daily, gives free medical and dental care, hands out modest bonuses with calendar-like regularity.

The Results. Most Cleveland munitions makers think the customs and working habits at J. & H. are as preposterous as the bonuses which put the company in the national spotlight. Bill Jack has only one answer -- production. Roars he: "We're turning out more per man than anybody . . . and more stuff per square foot of plant than any other plant in the country." J. & H. started exactly two years ago with 90 employes, a handful of machines in a small Bedford factory and a newly designed aviation starter. The War Department liked it well enough to order 1,000 at $600 each. Next the Army asked J. & H. to mass-produce the famed Sperry automatic pilot. J. & H. countered with an offer to design and produce its own automatic pilot. In no time at all J. & H. had a Government O.K., was mass-producing an accurate light-weight automatic pilot costing one-third less than Sperry's. Meanwhile Jack slashed the price of starters to $350, made a deal to cut contract prices by a total of $9,500,000.

Now J. & H. has 4,000 associates, and its 1942 output will hit $40,000,000. That is not all. At Government request the company is producing flight instruments, aviation accessories and potent 400-amp. generators for planes still on the drawing boards. All this work has pushed J. & H.'s backlog to a mighty $240,000,000, got Jack predicting production of $120,000,000 next year. And at J. & H. haste does not mean waste--the delivered product is so perfect that on Nov. 12 the Air Corps discontinued separate inspections, gushed: "Testing equipment and production methods used are especially commendable. . . ."

The Man. Bill Jack quit grammar school to learn the die-cutting trade, later took turns as a magician's helper, a baseball catcher, a prize fighter. Then he became business agent for Local 83, International Association of Machinists, proved his organizing knack by boosting membership from 61 to 3,600 in four years. But he liked manufacturing better than union-eering, quickly bought, developed and resold half a dozen small companies. Most successful--outside of J. & H.--was Cleveland's Pump Engineering Service Corp., which Jack swapped for 34,666 shares of Borg-Warner Corp., just before he organized J. & H. with tall, bald Ralph Heintz, a born engineer who had some snazzy ideas about aviation starters.

A real success at 54, Jack still likes the floppy, open-collared shirts, breezy sport shoes and pungent phrases picked up in his prizefight days. A prodigious worker, he rarely sleeps more than four hours a night. The Vinson committee did change Jack's ideas about salaries. Said he of the salary-limitation order: ". . . We'll back [this] to the limit. If [President Roosevelt] says no salary at all it will be no salary. . . . There's only one thing we'll be satisfied with--that's winning the war."

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