Blowing in the Bess

Henry J. Kaiser realized another dream last week. At Fontana, Calif., 45 miles east of Los Angeles in the heart of the wine and walnut belt, he watched his wife pull a switch and blow in his new 1,200-ton blast furnace, named in her honor "the Bess." The blowing in of the pig-iron furnace, just eight months after Henry Kaiser broke ground for her where a pig-breeding farm had once flourished, meant that the West Coast for the first time in its history had a fully integrated steel plant.

Yet Kaiser had barely seen his steel dream fulfilled before he was dreaming new dreams. At his star-spangled blowing-in ceremony he told his guests that Fontana was still "just a seed": he wants to surround his steel mill with synthetic rubber plants, plastics production, etc. to round out a Kaiser empire that already embraces cement, magnesium, shipbuilding.

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