Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Across the yard is ranked another group of giants, massive of hull, with long, tapering, twin-ruddered tails. These are Consolidated's big boats-PB2Ys, four-en-gined big brothers of the two-engined PBYs. Like everything else Rube Fleet turns out, they are built to Fleet's most important hallmark: long range. These giants, designed for naval patrol, can travel 5,200 miles-possibly more-on a single load of gas. They can cruise at 170 m.p.h. on 45% of the power of their four Pratt & Whitney 1,200-h.p. engines...
...swarm of workmen in the buildings, in the yard, up the road at the largest machine shop west of the Mississippi, Rube Fleet sees enough to make an ordinary man's eyes pop ten times a day. Consolidated employs better than 30,000 workers. Six years ago, when Fleet settled down in San Diego, he approved a payroll that had only 311 names. A year ago. when he employed 9,000, he still personally checked the payroll and passed on every request for a raise. But not now. With new employes taken on at the rate...
Today, as Rube Fleet works his 15-to-18-hour day, driving, berating, wheedling for speed, more speed, the saga of Consolidated craft grows & grows. It was a PBY that found the Bismarck, called up the warships for her destruction. A B-24 crossed the Atlantic from Newfoundland in the record time of seven hours, 30 minutes. This week the Air Forces' Major Alva Harvey is back in the U.S. after a routine flight around the world in a B24. From the shores of the British Isles (and probably in the Mediterranean), patrols of 24 hours and more...
...British. But the boats are delivered by Consolidated's own Flight Operations. Flying boss of F.O. is a huge-boned, broad-faced airman named Russ Rogers, who in 1939 was flying a PBY (the Cuba) for Standard Oil Heir Richard Archbold in New Guinea when Rube Fleet decided to set up his own delivery service. Frank Learman, traffic manager of the new F.O., got him on the radio telephone, told him he was wanted...
...lost a ship in delivery. In large part, that record is due to its crack personnel, picked by Learman and Rogers. But the prime reason, as F.O. and all Consolidated knows, is that they are working for a perfectionist, and that with him it is only performance that counts. Rube Fleet's favorite aphorism is painted on the outside of the factory wall, in letters twelve feet high: NOTHING SHORT OF RIGHT IS RIGHT...