Word: opm
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...also been-on his own hook and at risk of his job-the No. 1 drumbeater for the all-out war expansionists in their fight with OPM slowpokes. In the days when OPM's Bill Knudsen assured President Roosevelt that production was 100% good, and Virginia's tart Senator Harry F. Byrd shouted that it was 100% bad, Coy knew that Byrd was closer to the truth-and said so all the way to the top. For this he went deep into the doghouse for a while, but he finally won. OPM gave way to WPB; the expansionists...
This move may sound drastic to the layman, but to the construction industry it sounds almost redundant. As early as last September, OPM worked out a policy that deprived all private construction, not within "reasonable commuting distance" of a defense plant, of priorities on all scarce materials. In October, SPAB reinforced the policy by allowing materials to be allocated only to projects "necessary for direct national defense or . . . essential to the health and safety of the people." Again & again Government men have underlined the no-building-except-for-war theme. But much nonwar building (both private and public) has gone...
Ford and Charlie Sorensen started making Pratt & Whitney airplane engines before they even had an order. When the Government finally asked Ford to put up a Pratt & Whitney plant, he figured that OPM had set its sights too low, left one end of the building open for extensions. Without any nod from Washington, he turned an engineer loose on a V12 liquid-cooled engine of his own. He started putting up Willow Run on the sole basis of a relatively small order for sub-assemblies...
Like his chief, Franklin Roosevelt, Pastor Nelson had a vast disinclination to fire anyone. There were still other sour voices in the choir-loft, bickerings among the elders. There were few new faces in WPB; most of them had come right over from SPAB and OPM. Tons of paper still needed seven signatures on each item. Jobs overlapped. In rubber, for instance: tall, bald Arthur Newhall handled the problem of rubber imports (there are virtually none). Production of synthetic rubber was technically under the command of WPB's raw materials Boss William L. ("Bill") Batt, was actually in charge...
...When Nelson took over, OPM's power section had been trying for six months to get power lines into a plant abuilding at Lake Catherine, Ark., which will turn out 65,000 tons of aluminum a year. Nelson told his man Cliff Hill to get it done. That afternoon the order went out to the Rural Electrification Administration, while private power men and Congressmen squawked...