Big Cat

Readers of the Saturday Evening Post would be greatly disappointed if Alexander Botts, the famed sales manager of the Earthworm Tractor Co., were not up to his neck in trouble. When last heard from (in Author William Hazlett Upson's latest story), Botts had bogged a scraper so deep in the Canadian muskeg that not even his mighty Earthworm tractor could pull it out. But Botts managed it; he used rockets, for a jet-assisted takeoff.

No rockets have yet been used by the Caterpillar Tractor Co. of East Peoria, Ill., which often sounds like the "Earthworm City" of Author Upson's stories (he worked there as a mechanic). But last week "Cat" was ready to bring out something almost as powerful. It was a new model diesel engine, the biggest (12 cylinders), most powerful (500 h.p.), and costliest ($14,000) Cat had ever made.

Now finishing a $50 million postwar expansion program, Cat is going to turn out the new diesel and step up production of diesel-powered Caterpillars to grade roads, dig foundations, clear jungles and move mountains all over the world. With its new production Cat hopes to boost its sales, already the highest in its history. Last year, on a gross of $218 million, Cat reported a net profit of $13.7 million, nearly 40% over 1947.

Botts in Africa. This well-fed, big-sinewed Cat had grown from a kitten bred in 1904 by Ben Holt of Stockton, Calif. Some of the farms around Stockton were marshy, and Holt spent years trying to build a tractor that wouldn't bog down in them. He designed one that would move on a track and pick it up and lay it down as it went--the first Caterpillar. As demand for the new-fangled invention spread east, Holt opened a branch plant in East Peoria. That became the main plant after the Holt Manufacturing Co. merged with its biggest competitor in 1925 and became Caterpillar Tractor Co.

Two years later Ted Farley, now Cat's vice president in charge of special projects, went to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He found some Englishmen working a cotton field with a dragline plow operated by a gasoline engine. Like Botts, he had Cat ship him a couple of its prize tractors. But by the time he got to the plantation, the Englishmen were using a German-made diesel engine--and had slashed their costs.

Farley sent Cat a cable asking what he should do, and was told to "Proceed immediately to the Daimler-Benz engine plant in Germany and look at their engines." He brought back five different models. From them and others collected from all over the world, Cat perfected its own diesel. By the late 19303, Cat's diesels had replaced their gasoline engines.

Boss in Peoria. But big Cat hit its fastest pace after 1941, when Louis Bontz Neumiller stepped into its $75,000-a-year presidency. Unlike Earthworm's whip-cracking President Gilbert Henderson, Neumiller is a surprisingly mild-looking, soft-spoken man--a moderator more than a boss. As his friend Author Upson puts it, Neumiller "just sort of grew up with the company." He started at 19, as an engineering clerk ("I always tried to get the desk nearest the boss's door"), worked up through drafting-room superintendent, parts manager, service manager, sales executive, and, after a bitter strike in 1937, became industrial relations director.

Neumiller took over the big job just when Government and Army ordnance people were suggesting that Cat convert to ordnance manufacture. But Neumiller stubbornly said he knew better; the Army would need his earth-moving equipment far more than anything else he could learn to make. He was right. Cat turned out almost $500 million worth of equipment, including bulldozers. During most of the war, bulldozers were needed so badly that they had the same Double-A priority as tanks and planes.

At war's end, Cat was ready for a still bigger dish of cream--the huge road-building and heavy construction programs which the war had deferred. Last week, with his order backlog so heavy that he has to put his customers on allocations, Neumiller was sure that 1949's sales would outstrip even 1948's alltime record--unless business goes to pot. Even then, thinks Neumiller, plenty of Cats would be needed in public works projects.

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