The Passionate Engineer

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"Donald Douglas [is] the cornerstone of American air power"

--Major Alexander P. de Seversky.

Donald Wills Douglas is a tall, good-looking, brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-tweedy sort of man, who acts as if he doesn't really believe in the future of aviation. He dislikes flying, and flies as rarely as possible. Prophets of "the coming Air Age" bore him. Two examples of his attitude toward aviation's future:

On one of his grudging plane trips, he landed at air-minded Oklahoma City. Up rushed a reporter. He wanted Planemaker Douglas' opinion of Oklahoma City's project: a $25,000,000 airport. Said Douglas: "If you really want to know, I think you're crazy."

Although Douglas Aircraft is his own one-man show, he now owns less than 1% of 600,000 outstanding shares--compared to the 200,000 shares he was given when the present company was incorporated in 1928. No one knows just why he dumped his stock. But some believe that at one time he actually lost faith in the potentialities of aviation.

This attitude has roots in the strange, cool personality of Donald Douglas--and illustrates exactly the present plight of the airplane industry, which is crowding the skies of the world with warplanes, and dreads the day when it must convert to making a dribble of peace planes.

Douglas himself, at 51 president of the biggest aircraft company in the world, has a very simple postwar plan. Last week he stated it: "You shut the damn shop up."

Precision Instrument. Donald Douglas thinks this way partly because he is a hardheaded manufacturer, with no room in his head for nonsense--or for dreams--but mainly because he is an engineer, with a passion for airplanes as things embodying engineering designs, and a passion for precision. Dreams may be vivid but blueprints are precise.

Douglas is a precision instrument himself, a man of almost fantastically unvarying habit, and of a simple efficiency that is metronomic in its ticktock exactitude.

Last year he made one-sixth (by weight) of all the airplanes made in the U.S. This is how he does it:

In his $150,000 white-brick, Spanish-style home near Santa Monica he wakes every morning at exactly 7:30 a.m. He has no alarm clock. Beside his bed, as poets have paper & pencil on which to catch a night thought, he has an adding machine on which he can punch out his own mathematical visions. At 8 o'clock he has his invariable breakfast of one egg, one piece of white toast, one cup of black coffee. Shortly before 9, he walks to his four-car garage, steps into his 1941 black Lincoln Zephyr, swings around a fishpond in his front yard and out through wrought-iron gates. In ten minutes, he drives to his Santa Monica factory. He steps from his car, walks an exact 24 steps into his walnut-paneled private office, sits down behind his carved walnut desk covered with his own pattern of letters, engineering reports, and half a dozen straight-stemmed pipes. On the front of the desk is the Douglas coat of arms.* On it is inscribed his Scottish forebears' motto: Jamaiz arriere (never behind).

As he works carefully and methodically through the day's problems, he puffs steadily at a pipe or an occasional cigaret. For visitors, even if it is one of his vice presidents, he has a routine. When someone enters, he takes off his spectacles, places them on his desk, snaps off the desk lamp and listens. At some point he will pick up his spectacles and snap on the light. This means the interview is over, even if the visitor is in mid-flight of an eloquent peroration.

At precisely 12:10 p.m. he walks from his office, across Ocean Park Blvd., and into his private dining room. There he has his invariable daily lunch of hamburger steak, black coffee, a chocolate sundae. Finished, he returns to his office and his work. Sample answer to a letter: "Tell him nuts." About 5:30 p.m. he leaves his office, steps into his car, drives home--again in a measured ten minutes. Dinner is at 6:30 on the dot. Dessert is always a chocolate sundae.

Bagpipes and Yachting. Donald Douglas spends almost all his evenings in his favorite chair near the fireplace in his library. The study is much the best furnished room in the house. The huge living room is bare of rugs and furniture, except for a few camp chairs. Reason: after Pearl Harbor, cautious Planemaker Douglas was sure the Japs were going to bomb the West Coast. He shipped most of the furniture in his house to Salt Lake City.

From the chair, which must never be moved an inch, he can see over the mantel a painting of his 70-ft. schooner Endymion. He usually spends his evenings alone, because his wife and daughter and young twin sons are upstairs listening to the radio. He hates radio programs, will not permit a radio downstairs. Usually he reads one of his prized books on yachting. He keeps these behind a secret panel in the study, out of reach of the family. He does not like company. He simply refuses to go out socially in the evening. Recently, he promised to take his wife to a Los Angeles performance of This Is The Army. He got one arm into the coat of his tuxedo. Then he reconsidered, stayed home.

The only time he breaks this routine is when he is aboard his Endymion. Before the war sent West Coast yachts scuttling to harbor, he spent weekends cruising along the coast, doing the cooking for his crew (mainly Douglas executives). His specialties: steak with two sauces and curried lobster or shrimp. His one musical taste is for the bagpipe, as played by himself. When he decided to learn the bagpipe some years ago, he was methodical as always. He bought a chanter (mouthpiece) and by practising finger exercises on it in his office soon became expert. Then he formed a Douglas bagpipe band, outfitted everyone with kilts, and regularly cruised in the Endymion to Catalina Island. There he led the bagpipers up & down the hills, skirling his favorite songs.

The Barbershop Backlog. Even as a boy in Brooklyn, where he was born, he had his two passions: for precision and for aircraft. His banker father wanted him to be a naval officer, but Douglas, his engineer's eyes on the Wright brothers, had other ideas. He went to Annapolis but he spent all possible time there in building model planes.

After three years he switched to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He finished the grueling four-year course in two years. While at Tech he helped design one of the first airplane wind tunnels in the U.S.--and wind tunnels are to airplane research what the Bunsen burner was to chemistry. On the strength of this he got a job with the up-&-coming Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co. By the time he was 28 he was 1) a vice president and chief engineer, and 2) unhappy. He wanted to make his own planes.

With $600 in his pocket, he quit, went to California, set up office in a Los Angeles barbershop. His backlog: one plane.

Soon after, a Douglas-designed torpedo plane turned out so well that the Navy gave him a $120,000 order. With cash borrowed from Los Angeles businessmen, he set up shop in an abandoned studio, and later bagged an Army order. It was for only four planes, but they shot him to the top of the aviation world. For those planes were the famed DWCs, which were the first to fly round the world (1924).

Then in 1932 Transcontinental & Western Airlines came to Douglas with a proposition: they needed a new two-motored passenger plane that would outfly, out-carry and "outeverything" every plane in the commercial air. Douglas had kept strictly to military craft because Uncle Sam's credit was good. Would he break this rule for T.W.A.? In a week the designs were whipped out. The plane turned the aviation world upside down, with Douglas on top. The plane was the DC-1, the first of the famed broad-winged DCs that eventually carried 95% of all U.S. air traffic, and are now as familiar in the U.S. sky as sparrows.

When war clouds rolled up in 1939, Douglas was a middling-sized company with plants at Santa Monica and El Segundo. But he had a big-company backlog of $69,000,000. Cautious Donald Douglas did not want to grow any bigger and did not intend to. All this planemaking interfered with his engineer's urge to design planes. But the Army changed his mind.

One day late in 1940, General Arnold phoned from Washington, saying: "Don, you're going to Tulsa to run a plant." "The hell I am," said Mr. Douglas.

"The hell you aren't. You're there now." From then on, the company did not expand. It exploded.

Conservative Mr. Douglas, who never wanted to get any bigger, soon found himself not only in Tulsa, but all over the globe. He says, mournfully: "We were shanghaied."

His shanghaied company now operates:

>> A $36,000,000 plant in Tulsa, employing 16,000.

>> A $45,000,000 plant in Oklahoma City, employing 20,000.

>> A $33,000,000 plant in Chicago, employing 11,000.

>> A $30,000,000 plant in Long Beach, employing 40,300.

>> A $30,000,00 plant in Santa Monica, employing 44,000.

>> A $20,000,000 plant in El Segundo, employing 21,000, and more than 100 other small plants and repair stations tucked away in worldwide spots from Persia to China. The Santa Monica and half of the El Segundo plants represent Douglas Aircraft investment. Government money built the others.

His payroll soared from 7,589 employes in 1939 to 156,000 as of last week--a cross section of people that includes Betty Grable's sister, Carole Landis' mother, famed Dancer Ruth St. Denis. The weekly payroll is $7,300,000 in the $250,000,000 worth of plants.

In this galaxy of plants, the company turns out:

>> The slim-bodied, two-motored, over 300-mile-an-hour Douglas A20, known to the British as the ground-strafing Boston and the night-flying Havoc.

>> Four-motored Flying Fortresses and Liberators, under lease from Boeing and Consolidated. (Douglas makes almost as many Fortresses as does the parent Boeing company; one fifth as many Liberators as does the parent Consolidated.)

>> The transport DC-3, the Army's C-47.

>> The four-motored, 65,000-lb (standard gross weight) C-54, transport and cargo plane that hauls a freight car load through the skies.

>> The Navy's single-motored SBD dive-bomber, which is generally credited with sinking more combatant enemy tonnage than any other weapon in the U.S. war kit.

Brains and a Skunk. Despite its explosivelike expansion, the company has avoided the production headaches of many another aircraft plant because 1) it has an immense knowledge of what not to do in building planes; 2) Douglas has always surrounded himself with top-notch engineering brains; 3) Douglas picks a man for a job, then lets him do it.

Some of the men doing the job are:

>> Arthur Emmons Raymond, high-domed, lucid, 44-year-old vice president in charge of engineering. His hotel-owning family wanted him to be a hotel man. Instead he went to Boston Tech; after graduation he returned to California. In 1925, Douglas wired Boston Tech for the name of their best stress analyst. The answer came back: "Arthur E. Raymond and he works for you." Douglas found him in the shop.

>> Frederick Warren Conant, 51, leather-skinned, dry-spoken vice president in charge of manufacturing. Santa Barbara-born, Cornell-educated as a civil engineer, he went to work for Douglas at 50-c- an hour.

>> Ava Michael Rochlen, 52, intense, Russian-born, Hearst-while reporter, who directs Douglas' industrial and public relations. "Rocky" Rochlen came to the U.S. as an immigrant boy, learned English by reading the late Arthur Brisbane's column and by rereading English classics he had previously read in Russian. At 17 he was earning $7 a week in a New Britain, Conn, hardware factory, and carried a Socialist Party card. He was a top West Coast newspaper reporter when he joined Douglas in 1937.

"Rocky" Rochlen's biggest job is to try to "humanize" his boss. In that, he has been singularly unsuccessful. Donald Douglas does everything, even his enormous production job, in such a precise way that it never seems to be news.

A prime example is Douglas' handling of the manpower problem that has graveled all planemakers. The turnover of Douglas workers actually runs as high as 85% in a year, about average for the Southern California industry. But some how, through his genius for organization and efficiency, Douglas has kept production up without flagging. In the air craft industry, with its outstanding man power problems at Ford's Willow Run and Boeing's Seattle plants, this is a sensational achievement. Vice President Conant's explanation for the phenomenon: "We have had good airplanes. We didn't have to stop and swallow any debacles." Douglas has not achieved this efficiency through any special golden-rule-and-free-showers treatment of workers, though his paternalistic Welfare Department is large.

Nor does he have any exquisitely sympathetic labor relations. He operates one of the biggest and last great open shops in the U.S. Union leaders make no secret of their alarm. Douglas' attitude is direct, as usual. On his desk sits a small pottery model of a skunk, which many visitors instantly link mentally with the colloquial axiom: "Never get in a squirting match with a skunk." It is said that when visitors mention labor problems to him, he merely points at the skunk.

His strategy in labor relations is very simple, as always. After six years of in tensive effort, less than 15% of his 156,000 employes are union-organized. A main reason is that he always keeps the union off balance, "scooping" it again & again.

The union never gets a chance to announce good news. Example: after long union agitation for pay raises for the Southern California aircraft industry, the War Labor Board decided to grant the increases. Douglas Aircraft somehow got an advance tip, and rushed through the presses a special four-page edition of the company house organ, telling all the workers how the company had won them a raise. The U.A.W.-C.I.O., caught flatfooted, limped to press a day later. Its claim for credit for the raise fell flat.

Another, even greater, factor is the large labor turnover. The union proselytizes twelve men to get one more or less permanent member -- and sooner or later he quits too.

The Black Future. For the job of running his company, Donald Douglas collects $120,000 salary a year, which he spends sparingly. Dividend-wise, the returns have not been rich, although the company has not lost a dime since it started. The best year was 1941, when net profits were a fat $18,177,000 after taxes on its gross of $41,877,000.

After the company wound up its foreign orders in 1942, the net profits dropped sharply to $11,055,000. This year they will be still lower, with the percentage of profit to gross, which was a firm 8% in 1938, now dropping below 3%. Compared to a 1938 net profit of $2,147,000, these figures are high. But despite its present position with an annual business of $1,000,000,000 and a backlog of over $2,500,000,000 (fourth largest of any U.S. company), the company had been able to pile up only $36,000,000 in net working capital, and contingency reserves of only $6,875,000. This is enough to meet one week's present payroll. And this may be one reason why the future of aviation looks black to Douglas--as, it must be said, it does to many other aviation men.

For the plight of Douglas is the plight of the entire industry, despite its $20,000.000,000 annual business and its 2,000,000 employes. There is hardly an aircraft company which has enough cash reserves to meet its present payroll for more than a few weeks at the most, if contracts should be canceled. The eleven biggest manufacturers, the bulk of the industry, have only $138.000.000 in current assets over current liabilities--as compared to $650,000,000 for General Motors.

What will happen to the tremendous Douglas plant, the acres upon acres of machines, the 156,000 employes, when peace comes? A tiny part of this empire will be used to convert military to commercial transports. But for the rest, the Douglas answer, that "You shut the damn shop up," is inadequate. For the thousands who would thus become un employed--plus the rest of the industry's two million--might set a whole cycle of postwar depression in motion.

But already, to make sure that Douglas is not caught with its payrolls up when contracts go down, supple-fingered girls are riffling through the work cards, neatly tabbing them, ready for the torrential layoffs. The problem, Douglas feels, is not to keep the swollen aircraft industry operating at wartime levels, even if it were possible, but to get the millions of workers back into peacetime jobs.

In general, Douglas' attitude thus implies a deep pessimism toward aviation's future. But this pessimism is a curious blend of his financial caution and his own passionate preference for aircraft engineering, as against just making planes.

This pessimism is directed mainly at the immediate future. The question: What ceiling in the postwar sky? Donald Douglas would probably answer: Zero. But he would be thinking of the first few years, not of the Great Hereafter. He has a busy postwar planning department which concentrates on designs for new and better commercial transports.

But all this is small fry. All U.S. plane companies, thus busily spewing out planes, are thus industriously digging their own financial graves. By the end of this year 15,000 transport planes, many of them readily convertible to peacetime transports, will be in the air. This is some 30 times as many planes as were needed to handle prewar U.S. air travel. And bigger, better ones will be coming off the production lines shortly. No one knows how many commercial planes the postwar world can support. But can it be more than 30 times what it was? Thinking thus, many airplane makers are convinced that they can survive only if the Federal Government steps in and underwrites the industry until the glut of war planes is removed.

*"Arms--Quarterly; first and fourth, argent, a human heart ensigned by an imperial crown proper, on a chief azure three mullets argent; second and third, argent, a cross counter-embattled sable. Crest--a salamander in flames proper."--Debrett's.

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