Word: rubes
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...When Rube Fleet resigned in 1923, the Army was sorry to see him go. He went to work for Gallaudet Corp. (airplanes) as vice president and general manager, saw it fold up, with his active assistance, because it lacked the breath of life. Then he organized Consolidated, and settled down in Buffalo. He had a trick of picking good men. One of them was Isaac M. Laddon, onetime Army aircraft engineer who is now vice president of Consolidated and the design genius who turns out Consolidated planes. Another was Larry Bell, now head of Bell Aircraft Corp. When Fleet decided...
...also dominant in his relaxations, among them poetry. One of his favorite poets is Longfellow, whom he can spout by the yard, accurately and with feeling. If an occasional modernist happens in while Rube Fleet is declaiming his favorites, that is just too bad for the modernist. Rube Fleet knows what he likes, and likes...
...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...
Through all this humming anthill strides the well-tailored figure of the owner-manager (27% of Consolidated's stock), imposing the Fleet pattern on men and things. Rube Fleet does not expect other people to know as much as he knows, but he expects them to know the same kind of thing. Because he has a prodigious memory for figures, he thinks his executives ought to know the capabilities of the plant's fire-fighting apparatus, the floor space of their offices, the date of many an unimportant happening in the past...
...Rube Fleet sticks close to the plant, has little time for social life. Family gatherings (two sons, three daughters) are invariably dominated by the Major, who discourses on the aircraft industry, Consolidated, the course of the war. Office meetings are invariably dominated by the Major, in no uncertain terms...