Land-locked Denver staged a significant "launching" last week. At the Denver railroad yard, a pretty stenographer crashed a bottle of Pike's Peak snow water against the first of eight freight cars, and the "Good Ship Mountain Maid" rumbled westward-loaded with prefabricated steel for the hulls of naval escort ships. Same day, their keels were laid at California's Mare Island Navy Yard.
Denverites had good reason to be proud: the launching meant that their subcontracting problem had been licked. Led by a former incubator manufacturer, Clyde C. Hartzell (now head of WPB's Denver contract-distribution office), a pool of eight local steel-products manufacturers and...