Plywood Palace

His interest in prefabricated housing began at the age of nine, when his uncle, Jean Valjean Willis, was caught in a prefab privy and washed down Louisiana's Teche River. Forty-four years later, in 1942, Jacques Whiffle Willis was ready to turn his interest to account. His idea: a 1 1/2-story, 6-room prefab house complete with plumbing, for $3,500. It took him four more years to work the bugs out of his plan. By last week he thought he had. From his Home-Ola Corp. plants in Chicago ten complete plywood houses were being shipped every day. By August he hopes to ship 1,500 a month.

The Home-Ola is no architectural gem. What it lacks in beauty, it makes up in strength. Cajun Jack Willis claims that Home-Ola's plywood walls have proved 20 times stouter than conventional walls, will withstand a 125 mile-an-hour wind.

Cajun Jack thinks he has licked another enemy of prefabs--depreciation. Under his "package" financing plan, the buyer pays a small amount monthly into a depreciation fund. So he has the cash for painting, etc. when he needs it; the mortgage holder has it also, if he has to take over and fix up the house. To date, Home-Ola has had little trouble with building unions about getting its houses put up, although some cities (Paterson, N.J. and Jackson, Mich.) have barred it because of zoning restrictions. The house can be erected in three days by three or four nonprofessionals. Jacques's daughter Jacqueline put up the first trial model in a week with the help of three women. Then she wrote the instruction book. Said Willis: "Anyone who can change a tire can assemble a Home-Ola."

Plenty amid Shortages. A newcomer to prefabs, Cajun Jack is no newcomer to the plywood and lumber industry. He has been in & out of it ever since he took solemn leave of the seven pigs, two mules, 37 chickens and 13 human beings with whom he had shared an abandoned boxcar on Teche Bayou and set out, at 12, to fend for himself. He became a lumber grader, a Wells-Fargo messenger, a medicine-show spieler in "Tincup, Miss.", a silo builder in Montana, a potato digger in Idaho, a sheepherder in Colorado, before he again settled down in lumber.

In 1933 Cajun Jack Willis formed his C. W. Plywood Co., devised his own weatherproof plywood. During the war, the Air Corps alone used 30 million board feet of it and, to date, Willis has sold more plywood to lumber dealers than anybody else. Some of his plywood profits, about $200,000 last year, were plowed back into Home-Ola. But his real ace in the hole is the interest he owns in two plywood companies. While shortages are squeezing other prefabricators, Home-Ola has all the basic material it needs.

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