Word: bechtel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...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...
Where the huge shipyard stands today there was only a swamp when smart Stephen D. Bechtel and natty John A. McCone took it over in the fall of 1940. Their first job was driving 60,000 pilings into the mud (a world's record for one job), but that was easy enough after their experience with Henry Kaiser on Boulder Dam and the San Francisco Bay bridge. The real problem was finding and training 40,000 workmen, less than 1% of whom had ever worked in a shipyard before...
...Bechtel & McCone like such back-patting, but they have bigger goals ahead. In the first six months of 1942, the U.S. built 228 ships and admitted 332 sinkings. So Bechtel & McCone are talking of more work, more expansion, faster production. They have plenty to work on: Calship has a backlog of 224 Liberty ships (worth about $350,000,000), almost seven times the 35 vessels the yard has delivered to date...
...Bechtel Prize in Philosophy of $100, awarded to a student in philosophy for the best essay on an approved subject, was won by Rulon S. Wells III, of Salt Lake City, Utah, a third-year graduate student, for an essay on the subject "Linguistic Particularism...