Salesman at Work

(See Cover)

In Burbank, Calif, one day last week, a big shark-bodied plane rose from the Lockheed Air Terminal, circled out across the San Fernando Valley and headed east over the mountains. It was a notable event and a red-letter day for Pan American Airways: that was the first of the fleet of Lockheed Constellations for Pan Am's globe-girdling routes.

To the Lockheed Aircraft Corp., it was an event, too. But in the sprawling cluster of factory buildings, still in their muddy green and yellow camouflage of war, everyone was too busy to cheer. On the long assembly lines, workers were hustling at wartime pace to turn out Constellations for others of the world's demanding airlines.

Transcontinental and Western Air wanted 36; American Overseas Airlines wanted seven; Eastern Airlines wanted 20; the great Dutch line, K.L.M., wanted four; the French wanted 13. Even the British, who have insisted that they would fly only their own planes, were now reported to be considering Constellations.

What spurred them all was "Connie's" proved performance--a much-improved performance over any existing airliner's. Connie will fly 43 passengers from New York to London at 300 miles an hour in 13 hours, faster than any other transport now in production; airlines which didn't have Constellations feared that travelers would ride on airlines which did. Lockheed's sleek new beauties had quietly started a postwar revolution in air travel.

Before long, all U.S. flag lines will be flying Constellations across the Atlantic and on to Moscow, Calcutta, Bombay. Many a foreign line will also be flying them, cobwebbing the steadily shrinking globe with faster routes. Soon there will be few places more than 40 hours from New York.

The new constellation in the firmament was the result of another astronomical phenomenon: the shooting-star career of the Lockheed Corp. itself. Thirteen years ago the company was sold for $40,000. Now it had nearly $50,000,000 in working capital. Then, it had only 15 employes. Now it has 32,000. The end of the war, Which had sent most big planemakers into reconversion on a lower key, had not knocked it off its high bracket. Its backlog of orders for planes was perhaps the greatest in the aircraft industry, a thumping $215,000,000.

Some of this was due to the fortunes of war: like other planemakers, Lockheed had grown big on war orders. The difference was that when war building ended, Lockheed was better prepared for peace than any other company. Both Lockheed's rise and its ability to keep its altitude after war's end were devoutly attributed by Lockheed men to the eccentric talents of their president, Robert Ellsworth Gross.

The Flying Man. Bob Gross, at 48, is a small (5 ft. 7 1/2 in.), well-built man with a pink face, greying brown hair and bright blue eyes. Among planemaking tycoons, predominantly an inbred and individualistic group of onetime designers and pilots, Bob Gross is a sport. He is not a pilot. He knows little about aerodynamics. As a production man and administrator he is just soso. Yet he has one talent which more than balances these apparent deficiencies.

He has a seemingly intuitive salesman's sense of knowing what planes will be wanted a few years hence, and then being ready to deliver them. On top of this, he has the knack of getting his ideas across, and a flair for picking men who can translate them into planes.

As a diligent collector of modern art, Bob Gross has developed an artistic sense which sometimes enables him to feel something wrong in a plane simply because it is esthetically unpleasant. He feels that a plane which does not look right won't fly right.

Free of the inhibitions that aerodynamic knowledge might give, he has a mystical faith in the future of aviation. He is full of such Buck Rogerish ideas as his Flying Man: "Before long we'll have people flying through the air with little motors attached to their backs controlled from a central power source. It's a damn good idea, you know."

Planes & Pictures. Once Bob Gross's dark-haired, attractive daughter, Palmer, tried to explain the complex of sense & nonsense that her father is. "I don't know why he ever was a businessman," she said. "He should have been a painter or a musician."

His home in swank Bel Air, ten miles from Burbank, would be appropriate for either. A roomy house of pink stucco (big enough to keep four servants busy), it has a large sweep of lawn in the rear and a badminton court. The decor, in subdued colors, was done by Hollywood's Dolena, the "Greek modern" furniture designed by Manhattan's Robsjohn-Gibbings. Against this background hangs Gross's collection of modern and abstract art: Klee, Kandinsky, Braque. (A Modigliani blonde over the davenport is known to his friends as "the happy midwife.") Gross began to collect pictures about the time he went into Lockheed, finds the same elements of composition in them that he finds in clean, functional plane design.

There is none of the artist in his daily routine, except in his dressing. He fancies dark blue or brown suits with white stripes an inch and a half apart, or plaids (tailored in Hollywood), bright silk ties, soft shirts with long pointed collars. He drives to his plant in a 1940 Cadillac, usually sits down behind the modern desk in his bare office about 8:30 a.m..

For several years he had abstract paintings on his office walls. But visitors looked at him so curiously when he tried to explain them, that he took them down, replaced them with a picture of a tree beside a factory window.

Wagner & Gershwin. He ticks off his appointments efficiently, keeps on working while lunching with his key men in the Lockheed dining room overlooking the flying field. On one wall of his office is a big blackboard. Often during conferences he goes to the board and illustrates his point by swiftly sketching planes, lefthanded. Usually he is through work by 6 p.m.

Most of his evenings are spent at home with his blond wife, a childhood sweetheart. They go out little; she has been in poor health for years. Usually he plays the piano--Wagner, "because it's loud," or Gershwin. Often he wanders out to his daughter's studio back of the big house. There, while she paints, he criticizes. Like her father, Palmer prefers abstractions. Many of her paintings are hung about the house.

Bob Gross might do some painting himself, but he has never had time. Nor has he time any more for golf or much of anything else outside his job. He and his wife entertain rarely. When they do, the guests are usually Lockheed executives, with a sprinkling of movie folk, such as Gross's old friend Walter Pidgeon.

Most nights, Bob Gross is in bed by 10 (even on New Year's Eve he turned in by then), but not to sleep. Tortured by insomnia, he seldom sleeps more than a few hours a night. He used to try to read himself to sleep with mystery stories. But he had to give that up because his eyes have become weak and he is too vain to wear glasses. When the insomnia is particularly bad he gets up, dresses and spends the night walking the streets and up & down the hills of Bel Air mulling over business problems.

Make a Million. A faintly flat "a" still marks Bob Gross as a Bostonian. His family was fairly well-to-do, but his mother, of whom he says he is still scared to death, disapproved of the local schools. So she tutored Bob at home until he was ten. Then she put him in the first grade at public school. She had taught him so well that by afternoon he had been promoted to fifth grade. He spent his last school year at fashionable St. George's School in Newport. At Harvard he turned into a joiner and a doer.

He captained the hockey and baseball teams (playing shortstop), was elected president of the student council, joined Hasty Pudding, Phoenix Club and Signet Society, among others. He developed a passion for foreign cars. He owned, in turn, a Mercedes, Voisin, Panhard-Levassor, Hispano-Suiza. After graduation, with only average grades, he put in a short tour of duty in the postwar army. Then his father's friend George Lee gave him a job in his investment banking house of Lee, Higginson & Co.

Bob Gross learned about the stock market so fast that he was soon making money in it. He also bought & sold small companies. Before he was 30, he had made $1,000,000.

Lose a Million. With some of his cash, he decided to go into the aviation business. It was not a whim: he had faith in its money-making future. He formed the Viking Flying Boat Co. to build sport-model seaplanes. The depression wiped out the market for seaplanes, along with most of Gross's million. He went to the West Coast to work for an airline. Gross was mightily impressed by the line's fast, sleek plywood Orions. They were made by Lockheed, which had been started in 1916 by two barnstorming brothers, Allan and Malcolm Loughead (pronounced Lockheed). Their planes were already famed; Wiley Post had circled the globe in a Vega, Sir Hubert Wilkins flew one over the Arctic Circle to Spitsbergen, the Lindberghs flew a later model, the Sirius, "north to the Orient." But Lockheed's till was empty. In the great pre-depression merger mania, the Loughead brothers sold out to the Detroit Aircraft Corp. Detroit Aircraft soon went broke.

One day Bob Gross got a phone call. The caller introduced himself as Carl Squier, general manager of the Lockheed Aircraft Co. Gross had never met him, but Squier, a crack salesman who made it his business to know people, had heard of Gross. Over the phone, Squier sold Gross the idea of forming a syndicate to buy the moribund Lockheed Co. He did, and they did--for $40,000.* Bob Gross got 40,000 shares of stock, still owns 36,000.

Bob Gross and gregarious, sport-jacketed Carl Squier began operations with 15 employes and only $800 in the bank.

Gross knew what the trouble had been with Lockheed. It had been making planes for the small private-plane market, instead of for the big airlines. Lockheed could not hope to buck Donald Douglas, whose DC2 dominated the two-engined field. The only hope seemed to be in the small transport field. Gross decided to gamble. He spent $139,400 on the Electra, a ten-passenger, all-metal plane for small airlines. The gamble paid off. Gross sold 40 of them the next year and put Lockheed into the black. Lockheed then tried a bigger plane, Model 14. It sold, too, and Howard Hughes dramatized the plane to the world by flying one around the globe for a new record: 91 hrs., 17 min.

The Big Time. When war was near, Salesman Gross sent Brother Courtlandt to London to sell Lockheeds to the British. The answer was no, thanks, British industry was "quite adequate." Months later, Gross learned that the British were sending a mission to the U.S. to buy planes after all; the commission would be in California within five days.

In that time, Lockheed's engineers turned out a complete wooden mockup of a reconnaissance bomber adapted from the Lockheed 14. When the British arrived at Burbank, those who liked golf were put up at the Riviera Country Club; those who liked city life were quartered in a midtown hotel. Result of these tactics: Lockheed got a $25,000,000 order for 175 military versions of the Lockheed 14, which the British called Hudsons. It was the largest single order any planemaker had ever received.

By spring, Lockheed landed another $65,000,000 order for Hudsons. Said Gross: "That really put us in business." When war came, Lockheed, like other plane companies, did not merely expand, it exploded.

The Job. Lockheed's payroll, which had risen to 2,500 workers in 1939, skyrocketed to a peak of 90,000. Its planemaking spread the plants over 7,688,000 sq. ft. of floor space (v. 59,600 sq. ft. in 1932). Still there was not enough to take care of the flood of war orders. The assembly line for the Lightning (P-38), a flashy two-engined fighter designed for the Royal Air Force, finally ran right out of the shops in a weird S curve. Eventually 30% of Lockheed's production was being done outside.

In addition to making its own planes, Lockheed took on a contract for B-17s, and totted up a breath-taking figure for the war years. In all, it turned out $2 billion worth of planes: 2,600 Venturas, a patrol bomber for the Navy; 2,700 Flying Fortresses; 2,900 Hudsons (1,298 for the British); and 9,000 Lightnings (four of the first ten aces in the U.S. armed forces flew Lightnings) for the U.S. Army, which took over the British contract. The 19,278 planes Lockheed produced were 6% of U.S. plane production during the war.

The Team. Bob Gross quarterbacked the job, and now gets $112,500 a year for continuing to do it. But he had and has a crack team to help him. The first string:

P: Courtlandt Sherrington Gross, 41, younger brother and Lockheed's $60,750-a-year vice president and general manager. Lockheed's executives got their strategy and pep talks from Bob Gross, their tactics from Court.

P: Cyril Chappellet, 40, the $58,500-a-year vice president in charge of administration.

P: Hall L. Hibbard, 42, the $58,500-a-year vice president and chief engineer. Witty, brilliant, he designed the Electra, Hudson, P-38 and Constellation.

P: Carl B. Squier, 52, the $58,500-a-year vice president in charge of sales and service. An Army pilot in World War I and later a barnstormer, Squier is the only top executive at Lockheed who can fly an airplane.

P: Charles Abner Barker Jr., 52, the $81,000-a-year vice president and treasurer.

Sometimes one of the players on the team has to pick up one of Bob Gross's fumbles. For example, when the prototype of one of their planes was ready to fly, the engineers estimated that it would take at least seven months to make enough blueprints to get the plane into production. Bob argued: "If you can build one plane from these drawings, why can't you build 50 from them? Let's do it." A few weeks later, plane production was so snarled up from lack of blueprints that a hurry-up call was sent for Court. When he heard what had happened, he just sighed--and straightened out the tangle.

Yet it was Bob Gross who got Lockheed to perform something like production miracles because he could airily wave away engineers who said that miracles couldn't be done. Back in 1942, he cannily realized that the jet plane was just over the horizon. The Army turned down his offer to build one, figuring that it would be developed too late for World War II. Gross ordered development work, anyhow.

Later, the Army changed its mind and asked for the prototype of a new jet fighter, to be built in 180 days. Lockheed turned out the prototype of the 550-m.p.h. Shooting Star in 143 days. When V-J day came, this was a nice reconversion cushion. The Army kept it in production; it was the only jet fighter being made.

In the same way, Bob Gross took on the job of building the Constellation. Howard Hughes and T.W.A. President Jack Frye wanted a transport plane which would fly farther, faster and carry a bigger load than anything in the air. When Consolidated Aircraft turned down the job, Lockheed accepted it. Then the Army ordered Lockheed to build it for the Air Forces; T.W.A. would have to wait. Thus, when the Army canceled its contracts after V-J day, Lockheed had the plane ready for the airlines.

On & On. Lockheed is well aware that if its foresight had not been generously mixed with luck, i.e., having the Constellation and P-80 Shooting Star in production at war's end, it would not be sitting on top of the heap now. But Bob Gross sees no reason why it should not stay there. Net profits last year were some $4,500,000, and he expects, barring some calamity, that they may run as high this year from Constellations, P-80 Shooting Stars and planes for the Navy.

What Bob Gross has to do now is to get ready to make planes which he can sell a year from now. He intends to spend some $10,000,000 on plane research. He expects to make a small feeder plane, the Saturn, along with something which Lockheed has steered away from before--a small, light plane for private flyers. Within six months he expects to start turning out a two-passenger ship with a pusher propeller behind the tail.

In the big-plane race, the other planemakers are already creeping up on him. Douglas and Boeing expect to be turning out ships to compete with the Constellation later this year. This still gives Bob Gross nearly a year's start. By that time, he hopes to have what the airlines will want next.

Soon, the door of a closely guarded hangar at Lockheed will slide open. Out of its shell will come Lockheed's newest bird, the huge, double-decked Constitution, which will carry 128 passengers. If it lives up to Bob Gross's hopes, it will make the Connie a wallflower.

* The company's founder, Allan Loughead, considered bidding for his old company. But he could raise only $50,000 and thought any bid that low would be an insult. While he was still trying to raise $100,000, Gross bought the company.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.