Hutmakers Extraordinary

Pacific Huts, Inc. sounds like a strange sort of corporation. It is even stranger than it sounds. Less than a year ago it was not even a name; now its 500 Seattle employes turn out one prefabricated wooden igloo every 15 minutes for U.S. troops in Alaska, and its gross volume runs up to $6,000,000 a year. The 4 1/2-ton Pacific huts are rainproof, stormproof, termite-proof, fungus-proof, even proof against cold.

A team of five soldiers can slap together a Pacific hut--cozy, semi-permanent quarters for 16 to 18 men--in only eight hours. Pacific Huts' founders took about that much time to slap their company together last year. Its president, an ex-Buick salesman, Frank Hobbs, was then head of the Colotyle Corp. (a wallboard manufacturer now making bathroom and shower assemblies for Henry Kaiser); its vice president, George K. Comstock, owned a Seattle neon-sign business.

Last spring Hobbs and Comstock discovered that the Army was shipping heavy steel huts all the way from Quonset, R.I. to the Arctic. These huts were not too satisfactory. The partners at once thought of making plywood and Masonite huts right in Seattle. In 21 days they designed their round, spruce-ribbed hut, sold the Army an educational order for 85. The first ones turned out so well that by September they had Army encouragement to build a new plant. They raised $100,000 to buy an abandoned shipyard and an adjoining gas station, built a 100,000-sq.-ft. factory in 60 days.

The most extraordinary thing about Pacific Huts is the way its men work. Recruited from nearby Venetian-blind, box and ladder factories, they stick to their jobs like leeches, work so fast they seem to be dogtrotting. Yet their pay (which averages $1 an hour) is no match for Seattle's shipyards. Moreover, Pacific Huts' absentee rate is a minuscule 1.5%, compared to about 8% at Boeing Aircraft's vast plant half a mile down the road, and about 4% for the region.

Frank Hobbs credits his happy labor relations to two main factors: 1) he thinks 500 men are all any man can handle on a personal basis, has kept his force at that number; 2) he has his men work in competing teams on parallel production lines, so that when a man is absent he not only ruins his team's record but loses his team position (though not his job) when he returns. (Pacific Huts is a closed shop.)

One big problem really plagues Hutmakers Hobbs and Comstock. Despite more business than they can handle, their gross profit per $1,200 hut is so low (about 1.7% on sales) that they will earn nothing at all even on their tiny capital investment unless the war lasts at least two years more.

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