Old Plant, New Goods

Biggest defense proposal before the U. S. is the suggestion of C. I. O.'s Walter Philip Reuther to convert part of the automobile industry to the manufacture of airplanes. Last week a step which had a superficial resemblance to his proposal was actually taken.

To motorists of late Hooverian days, the Marmon Sixteen was an expensive (about $5,000) projection into the neo-technical future. But its quasi-streamlining, its 200-h.p. aluminum motor were destined to go the way of mah-jongg and disarmament. Marmon found itself long on tone but short on business, and after an abortive attempt at producing a lower-priced car, went bankrupt in 1933.

Last week airplane motor maker Curtiss-Wright, staggering under a new $63,000,000 Army order for propeller assemblies, leased from trustees roughly a third of the old Marmon plant in Indianapolis. It planned to employ 4,000 new workers (annual payroll: $6,000,000), use the 400,000 feet of floor space to turn out electric propellers.* But this plan was not really an embodiment of Reuther's proposal. The Marmon plant was no longer a motors plant -- its buildings have been leased of late years by packers, a warehouse, a bus-line garage, and a Farm Bureau cooperative.

Moreover the Marmon buildings will not be new to war-goods production: in them during World War I some of the famed Liberty airplane engines were built and the Marmon plant cited as champion producer by the Bureau of Aircraft Production.

Rare is the bank that has been sued for refusing a loan, but Minneapolis' Fed eral Reserve Bank was last week sued for $730,000 by Billings [Mont.] Utility Co.

Allegation: Because the bank refused it a $35,000 loan in 1936, it had to sell out to a competitor at an unreasonably low figure.

* Pitch of an electric propeller can be changed during flight, is to an airplane what the gear shift is to an auto. A Curtiss propeller for a 1,200-h.p. engine costs about $2,500, weighs about 400 lb., has at least 300 separate parts.

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