Piety & Profits

During the late 1920s a former iron molder, garage grease boy, machinist and farm hand named Robert Gilmour Le-Tourneau was making a modest living around Stockton, Calif., leveling farm lands and digging excavations with some machinery he had put together. One night he attended a meeting of the Young People's Mission in Stockton. Full of inspiration, he went home to his drafting board, in no time had turned out a design for a power control unit which would co-ordinate the functions of his digging machine.

By 1932 his three-year-old firm of R. G. LeTourneau, Inc. was headed for the rocks after losing money on two big excavation contracts. His backers advised him to give up contracting, concentrate on manufacturing his dirt-moving machinery. He did. Three years later his profits had jumped 1,026% to $586,378 and he had put up another plant in Peoria, Ill., to be near big Caterpillar Tractor Co. which powered his machinery.

Last year Excavator LeTourneau's depression-reared company turned in a record net of $1,816,471 on $7,731,325 gross sales. It has twelve competitors, but is undisputed No. 1 U. S. earth-scraper manufacturer, makes over half of such equipment, from heavy rooters that will rip up anything but solid rock to one-man, self-propelling Carryall scrapers that will "dig a nice trench." It also has a company union. There are 50 basic LeTourneau patents, but the chief reason for the company's phenomenal success is the power control unit designed by Founder LeTourneau when he went home from revival meeting.

For all these blessings President "Bob"' LeTourneau thanks God. Last year he thanked Him 500 times before evangelist congregations to whom he preached free of charge. Weekly one of a coterie of ministers performs the same function for him in his Peoria plant's lunchroom for minor executives. To meet his preaching schedule he travels in his own eight-passenger Lockheed plane--big enough to carry a soprano known as "The Gospel Nightingale" and the (Negro) Carolina Gospel Quartet. Dirt-mover LeTourneau calls his church the Christian Missionary Alliance, and has preaching engagements for the next 14 months.

LeTourneau's dual occupation seems natural enough to him. Born to devout parents in Richford, Vt., he had three maternal uncles who were ministers, two missionary sisters. At 51 he is a bald, rugged six-footer who looks not unlike Presidential Aspirant Robert Alphonso Taft. He has frequent fits of temper, but he neither smokes, drinks nor swears, likes to lend his loud, bass voice to a revival audience and shout: "Gone, gone, gone, gone. Yes my sins are gone."

Of 450,000 shares of the LeTourneau company outstanding, 67.5% are owned by the LeTourneau Foundation, which he set up in 1935 to promote evangelical Christianity. With a net worth of over $11,500,000, it annually gives away some $300,000 for the cause, carries ten full-time evangelists on its payroll.

Recently Bob LeTourneau opened a $2,000,000 branch plant at Toccoa, Ga., to turn out his newly designed Tournapulls (self-propelled scrapers). Last week at his Peoria plant he dedicated a new wing "to the service of God." Principal speaker at the ceremonies: Herbert Hoover. LeTourneau contribution to the Finnish Relief Fund: $6,000. For World War II Earth Man LeTourneau has had French and English orders for 300 scrapers (60 are already in bombproof shelters at French airports, ready to level the fields after bombings). Pleased with his success, shrewd Evangelist LeTourneau says: "The more time I spent in serving God, the more the business grew . . . Amen, Brother."

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