Up Brewster

Big, hoarse Frederick Riebel Jr. juggled his 275 pounds above a spade in bucolic Bucks County, Pa. last week while grinning workers watched. Professionally he scooped up a spadeful, started a housing project for Brewster Aeronautical Corp. workers. The Brewster workers thought their president did well. Brewster stockholders are also pleased with Riebel's performance. At the annual meeting, a stockholder moved a vote of confidence in present Brewster management. The chorus of "ayes" was the first time in many a bomber's moon there has been enough confidence in Brewster to shout it out.

The Dive. For a company that had never lost a nickel in the nine years since smart, shaggy-browed James Work had picked it up for $30,000, Brewster should have been sitting pretty on Dec. 7, 1941. It had 9,677 production-wise workers, a fat backlog of $242,000,000. But since that time Brewster has produced more trouble than planes. It had five changes of management (including the Navy, which ran it for a month), a rash of suits (TIME, May 10), a series of slowdowns (although Brewster has a union contract highly favorable to U.A.W.-C.I.O.). In a plane-hungry world, Brewster managed to lose $1,436,000 in 1942. Production of dive-bombers (Bermudas for the British, Buccaneers for the U.S. Navy) bogged down. Draft boards, asked to defer Brewster workers, cracked: "Brewster's not in war work."

The Navy named Henry Kaiser board chairman in March, and in the same move shoehorned into the president's chair fat, ponderous Fred Riebel Jr., 61, onetime football guard (Purdue), bicyclist, weightlifter. Riebel had spent an engineering career at Westinghouse, the Hamilton-Beach division of Scovill Manufacturing Co., and Toledo's Air-Way Electric Appliance Corp. A vice president, he retired in 1936 to devote all his time to deep-sea fishing.

Last December, the Navy jerked the fishing rod from his hands, made him a trouble shooter for the Army-Navy Munitions Board, just about the time Brewster was making trouble for Navy trouble shooters. When Riebel came in, the Brewster plane production per month could be counted on his two hamlike hands. The one thing lower than production was the workers' morale. Riebel made morale his first target.

Pull-Out. In his battered felt good-luck hat (he puts it on first thing in the morning, takes it off at bedtime), Riebel moved ponderously through the four Brewster plants (two in Long Island City, one in Newark, one in Johnsville, Pa.), shaking hands, telling everyone: "Call me Skippy." At first suspicious, workers soon got a kick out of calling the boss Skippy, got a bigger kick after he installed a huge new cafeteria in the final assembly plant at Johnsville, organized baseball teams, wangled the Government housing project for Johnsville. To get production on bombers, he balanced the flow of materials.

To get production on the Navy's top-notch Corsair fighter (designed by Vought-Sikorsky, farmed out to Brewster), he started building them in the antiquated Long Island City plant, even though part of the wall had to be torn out to get the first completed ship out.

All this paid off in production. In April, more than five times as many planes were delivered as in March. In May, production took another hop. In June, Brewster's Johnsville plant sent more planes throbbing into the lazy Bucks County air than in any other month in its history.

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