Word: grossness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gross gets paid $127,164 a year, and his 57,669 shares of Lockheed stock (worth $3,450,000) earned him another $115,338 in dividends last year. In return, he runs an orderly administration in which, says Lockheed Director William A. M. Burden, onetime Assistant Commerce Secretary for Air, "He does not impose details, as other large aerospace companies do, but gives scope to other people...
Those "other people" emphatically include Dan Haughton, 54, Lockheed's president since 1961. He and Gross behave, says Burden, "as if they were running a small partnership." Haughton, an Alabama coal miner's son, put himself through the University of Alabama by moonlighting in the mines, graduated ('33) as an accountant, and joined Lockheed in 1939. A prodigious worker who arises at 4 o'clock every morning, rarely gets to bed before midnight, he spends at least half of his time jetting about through Lockheed's 34-state corporate domain...
...past exploits were hardly enough to save the company. What did save it was a new plane, whose basic design Bob Gross conceived while lingering over coffee one morning in the lobby of Burbank's Union Air Terminal. The plane was Lockheed's Electra 10, a twin-engine, all-metal, ten-passenger ship with the highest load/gross-weight ratio and the lowest price ($36,000) of any comparable aircraft of its time. The Electra 10 sold solidly to U.S. airlines as well as to carriers in Latin America and eight European countries (Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich...
...Luftwaffe pilots "der gabel-schwanz Teufel"-"the fork-tailed devil." Making Hudsons for the British before the U.S. entered World War II, Lockheed ran into the U.S. Neutrality Act, which forbade either U.S. or British citizens to ship or fly the planes from the U.S. to Britain. Court Gross helped devise a stratagem. Lockheed bought a wheat farm on the North Dakota-Canada border, flew its bombers there from the Burbank assembly line, hitched them to teams of horses. The horses, supposedly not subject to the laws of man, drew the planes across the boundary. Canadians unhitched the animals...
During the war, Court Gross went to Burbank as Lockheed's general manager, showed his executive ability by unscrambling the production tangles sometimes left by his brother's impulsive decisions. At war's end, Lockheed stayed aloft because it was ready not only with the four-engine Constellation, which ran away with the first round of airline orders, but with the U.S.'s first jet fighter, the F80 Shooting Star, which provided the basic design for so many later models that Lockheed engineers nicknamed it "Old Hodgepodge...