Machine Maker for the West

During the war, California Shipbuilding Corp. built 467 ships worth some $1,000,000,000. But shortly after V-J day, Calship's payroll dropped to 800 from its wartime peak of 42,500; its 14 ways were sold for lumber. Calship President John A. McCone and Board Chairman Stephen Bechtel found themselves heading a company reportedly worth $14,000,000, most of it in cash. With nothing to make, they wanted to find a use for their cash.

They found their answer in Sunnyvale's Joshua Hendy Iron Works, largest machinery maker in the West Coast. California's famed "Six Companies," which built Boulder Dam and owned Calship, already owned a controlling interest in Hendy. They decided it was time to own it all. So they bought out the 25% interest of Hendy President Charles E. Moore, who had other business interests and no taste for the strike which had shut Hendy's San Francisco plant. As the new president of Hendy, McCone took on the job of settling the strike.

Last week he did it. (Some diehard unionists led by Sam Hendy, grandnephew of company founder Joshua Hendy, still held out.) Now McCone could talk about Hendy's future.

Things to Do. As a working member of the earth-moving Six Companies, Hendy will specialize in cranes, power shovels, dump-truck bodies, etc., will have a sizable market in the Six Companies alone. It also plans to produce any other machinery the new industrial West needs. Already Hendy has a backlog of $10,000,000. President McCone expects to boost sales to $3,000,000 a month.

These plans were a far cry from Hendy's beginnings as a mining machinery company, 90 years ago. In 1940, Hendy had only 60 employes, was so shaky that Moore and the Six Companies combine bought the whole outfit for $400,000, intending to turn a quick profit by selling its machinery on the secondhand market.

One fat Navy contract changed their minds. Before the war was over, Hendy had: 1) produced $225,000,000 worth of equipment (including engines for one-third of the Liberty ship fleet); 2) expanded to a 55-acre plant employing at its war peak 7,500 workers. Hendy's most spectacular achievement: when the Navy needed 252 rocket launchers in a hurry for the invasion of Kwajalein, Hendy produced them in 176 hours.

Man to Do Them. Quiet, levelheaded John McCone, 44, is just the man to keep Hendy on the job. His family has been in the machinery business since 1860, and McCone himself spent 15 years working for Consolidated Steel Corp. He left in J937 to join the Six Companies. During the war, he normally put in seven 15-hour days a week running Calship along with Bechtel-McCone's B-29 outfitting plant in Birmingham, Ala. His tough formula: set production goals higher than anyone thought could be met, then make sure they were met.

Last week, with Hendy's strike settled, McCone took his first vacation in about six years. Friends doubted if he could stop working. When they visited him at his five-acre estate in San Marino, they found that, sure enough, he was supervising construction of a new swimming pool.

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