Stop, Thief!

The Boeing Airplane Co. is famed around the world as the nest which hatched the Flying Fortress and the B29. But citizens of its home town, Seattle, think of it in more practical terms--it is their biggest payroll and a financial well which waters the city and a great part of the country around it. This summer, with a postwar peak of 26,000 employees working on B-50s, on doubledecked Strato-cruisers and on sub assemblies for its jet-powered B-47, it was supporting one in seven families in Seattle.

But last month the city heard that the well might soon run dry. The Air Force had decided that the Pacific Northwest might be vulnerable to bombing in event of war with Russia, and had specified that the new B-47s must be built at Boeing's branch plant in Wichita, Kans.

A Passel of Hatfields. Nobody in Seattle had to be told what the decision meant. As work on B-50s and Strato-cruisers ran out, the Boeing factories would probably become ghost shops. Last week when Air Secretary Stuart Symington dropped in on Seattle enroute to Alaska, the city's leading citizens closed in on him like a passel of Hatfields ambushing a lone McCoy.

A dozen of them took him to a private dinner and banged the table until the china rattled. Then he was led to an Olympic Hotel ballroom to face 75 more inquisitors. There were seven speeches, most of which reiterated a few pointed questions: "Do you consider Seattle defendable?" "If it isn't defendable, why isn't it?" "If it is, why is Boeing getting no new contracts for Seattle?"

Harried and flustered, Symington skittered unhappily around the painful subject, but before he left he promised an unspecified amount of additional work for the Boeing plants. He also said that Boeing's projected B-52 super-bomber might eventually be built in Seattle, but he added some big qualifications: if it was a good plane, if Alaskan defenses and the Northwest radar screen were built up. Would they be built up? Said Symington: "I am not a military man."

War Chest. That was hardly the kind of assurance Seattle was hoping for. At week's end the city's businessmen, politicos and labor leaders were trying to scrape up a $100,000 war chest in a furious campaign to keep Boeing alive in Seattle. The Aeronautical Mechanics Union Local 751 (which struck Boeing last year) was in the midst of a $25,000 advertising campaign; one ad sarcastically suggested that the Grand Coulee Dam, the Bremerton Navy Yard and the Hanford Atomic Works be moved to the Midwest too. Cried one Seattle businessman: "He just tossed us a fish. He's trying to give us a sleeping pill."

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