Rise of Consolidated

California's Consolidated Steel Corp. Ltd. this week flopped the frigate U.S.S. San Pedro into the Pacific Ocean, wrote down a fat new total of ship launchings --268. With satisfaction the 40,000 Consolidated employes (up from 800 in 1938) went to work to add a white star to their blue Maritime Commission "M" flag.

With equal satisfaction Consolidated stockholders fingered the latest financial report of young (42), blond Alden Gallup Roach, harddriving, quick-thinking Consolidated president. In the six months ending last February, the 241,617 shares of common stock earned $2.81 apiece (in 1935 the shares were valued at exactly $1 for the lot).

Skyrocket. For years Consolidated struggled along as a modest steel fabricator (one of its big jobs was making spillway gates, tunnel forms, for Boulder Dam) until the defense program handed it a sky rocket. But it was Alden Roach who touched it off, watched his company soar to its present annual rate of $250,000,000, almost 150 times the bleak 1933 low.

A graduate engineer, Alden Roach knocked about for five years learning practicalities before joining the Union Iron Works in Los Angeles in 1927. When Union merged with two other small companies to form Consolidated a year later, Alden Roach, already up & coming at 27, became manager of the industrial buildings department. Coached by President Reese Hale Taylor, he became a crack salesman, was promoted to vice president for sales and engineering. When President Taylor left to head Union Oil in 1938, Alden Roach was considered too young for the top job, but not too young to be executive vice president, to run the company and to ready it for the boom.

Inland Ships. Although Consolidated is inland and had never built ships, Alden Roach grabbed all the Navy and Maritime Commission contracts he could reach. He had a plan. Consolidated would prefabricate ships in the plant at Maywood, trans port parts 22 mi. by truck and assemble them in yards at Wilmington and Long Beach. In August 1941 Alden Roach was upped to the top. He went right on expanding the company in all directions. He cagily hired Captain Harry B. Hird, former commandant of marine construction at Pearl Harbor, had him ready to run the huge consolidated naval-craft plant at Orange, Tex.

His most serious problem was that Consolidated built hulls faster than it could get turbines to power them. He persuaded the Maritime Commission to lease the Long Beach municipal docks, and he moored completed hulls there. When the turbines arrived he devised a brand-new method to install them through the ship's sides. Another timesaver: giant "bathtubs" at Maywood give Navy self-propelled landing boats complete dock trials, uncover bugs within handy reach of a wrench. A third trick: when Kaiser's Fontana steel plant needed a blast furnace in a hurry, Alden Roach built him one (Consolidated had never touched furnaces before).

Despite all this, nonsmoking, teetotaling Alden Roach has time to play tennis on his own court beside his big white Monterrey-style home in fashionable San Marino. He collects ships' models, thinks up nicknames for his two children (currently called Punch & Judy), whirls visitors through the shipyards in a maroon Lincoln. But what he enjoys most is contemplating Consolidated's whopping backlog of $480,261,000 (including seven types of ships and 4-to-5-in. naval ack-ack guns) and thinking up tricks to chew that backlog up faster.

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