Word: lustron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Boss Wyatt was the one who put the pot on the fire. He wanted RFC to lend up to $90,000,000 to eleven companies, some of which had never built houses, to build prefabricated houses and housing parts. Biggest loan would go to Chicago's Lustron Corp., along with a lease on Chicago's RFC-owned Dodge-Chrysler plant (TIME, Nov. 11). RFC's roly-poly George Allen said flatly: no. Most of the companies were putting up negligible security, might make as much as 14,000% profit if the loans went through...
...really brought to a sizzling boil by Preston Tucker, a small-time promoter with big ideas of making autos in the Chicago plant. He had agreed in September to lease it from the War Assets Administration. But NHA had ordered the plant to go to Lustron. In a frantic effort to block this, Tucker came up with a dark tale. His story: a lawyer approached him, just before the National Housing Administration ordered the plant turned over to Lustron, and promised to block the deal if Tucker 1) gave him $400,000 in stock in his company and 2) hired...
...high dudgeon, Wyatt denied that NHA was involved in any such skullduggery. True, there had been a phone call to NHA from "a lawyer" who represented himself as acting for Tucker. The lawyer had asked NHA to hold up the Lustron deal. But the delay was routine. When the lawyer had called back and said "the deal was off," the plant had been ordered turned over to Lustron...
Enameled Hopes. Lustron, which made enameled steel fronts for gas stations before the war, had never made a house. Yet its husky, smooth-talking president, Carl Strandlund, 47, a vice president of Vitreous, had convinced NHA that he could mass-produce thousands of prefabricated houses, made chiefly of enameled steel sheets. All Lustron needed for the job, said Strandlund, was a little help, such as the Dodge plant and a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corp. of from $32 to $52 million. Lustron was willing to invest as much as $36,000 of its own money...
When NHA asked RFC to lend Lustron $32 million, RFC also balked. RFC said that Lustron was putting up too little of its own cash. Promptly Wilson Wyatt twirled his blackjack again. He threatened to lay into RFC with another "directive...