Lock Step at Lockheed

Back in the early 1930s, at about the time that Lockheed Aircraft Corp. was trying to pull itself out of bankruptcy, a 21 -year-old coal miner's son named Daniel Jeremiah Haughton got his degree in accounting from the University of Alabama and headed for California.

After trying his hand at a number of jobs, he finally hired on with Lockheed in 1939 as a $275-a-month production specialist. Lockheed has since come to soar, and so has Dan Haughton. He became Lockheed's executive vice president in 1956, rose to president in 1961, last week was named to succeed Courtlandt S. Gross as chairman of the board.

Haughton, 55, is a hard-driving executive who rises at 4 o'clock every morning, works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., often comes into the office on Saturday. His successor as president is another nose-to-the-grindstone ex-accountant, Executive Vice President A. Carl Kotchian, 52, a North Dakota-born finance specialist who has followed Haughton up the corporate ladder. In fact, Lockheed's management has been in lock step for several years, with Haughton (pronounced Hawton) serving virtually as Court Gross's alter ego, and Kotchian acting as Haughton's. Not surprisingly, Haughton says that the new shifts portend "no great changes" in the company's course.

Few are needed. Under Gross, who became chairman on the death of his brother Robert in 1961, Lockheed has overcome its troubles of the 1950s, when it was beset by costly flops on a couple of aircraft (Saturn and Constitution) and crashes on others, notably the Electra. As the Defense Department's biggest single contractor five years running, Lockheed has seen its profits increase to more than $51 million (on sales of over $2 billion) last year v. $37,200,000 in 1962. Though disappointed over losing the SST competition to Boeing, the company expects continuing defense demands, diversification into such areas as oceanography, will keep it healthy.

In stepping aside, the patrician Gross, 62, has moved from California to Philadelphia, where many of his relatives and closest friends live. He will stay on as a Lockheed director, promises to remain a "working member" of the new Haughton-Kotchian team.

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