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His payroll soared from 7,589 employes in 1939 to 156,000 as of last week—a cross section of people that includes Betty Grable's sister, Carole Landis' mother, famed Dancer Ruth St. Denis. The weekly payroll is $7,300,000 in the $250,000,000 worth of plants.
In this galaxy of plants, the company turns out:
» The slim-bodied, two-motored, over 300-mile-an-hour Douglas A20, known to the British as the ground-strafing Boston and the night-flying Havoc.
» Four-motored Flying Fortresses and Liberators, under lease from Boeing and Consolidated. (Douglas makes almost as many Fortresses as does the parent Boeing company; one fifth as many Liberators as does the parent Consolidated.)
» The transport DC-3, the Army's C-47.
» The four-motored, 65,000-lb (standard gross weight) C-54, transport and cargo plane that hauls a freight car load through the skies.
» The Navy's single-motored SBD dive-bomber, which is generally credited with sinking more combatant enemy tonnage than any other weapon in the U.S. war kit.
Brains and a Skunk. Despite its explosivelike expansion, the company has avoided the production headaches of many another aircraft plant because 1) it has an immense knowledge of what not to do in building planes; 2) Douglas has always surrounded himself with top-notch engineering brains; 3) Douglas picks a man for a job, then lets him do it.
Some of the men doing the job are:
» Arthur Emmons Raymond, high-domed, lucid, 44-year-old vice president in charge of engineering. His hotel-owning family wanted him to be a hotel man. Instead he went to Boston Tech; after graduation he returned to California. In 1925, Douglas wired Boston Tech for the name of their best stress analyst. The answer came back: "Arthur E. Raymond and he works for you." Douglas found him in the shop.
» Frederick Warren Conant, 51, leather-skinned, dry-spoken vice president in charge of manufacturing. Santa Barbara-born, Cornell-educated as a civil engineer, he went to work for Douglas at 50¢ an hour.
» Ava Michael Rochlen, 52, intense, Russian-born, Hearst-while reporter, who directs Douglas' industrial and public relations. "Rocky" Rochlen came to the U.S. as an immigrant boy, learned English by reading the late Arthur Brisbane's column and by rereading English classics he had previously read in Russian. At 17 he was earning $7 a week in a New Britain, Conn, hardware factory, and carried a Socialist Party card. He was a top West Coast newspaper reporter when he joined Douglas in 1937.
"Rocky" Rochlen's biggest job is to try to "humanize" his boss. In that, he has been singularly unsuccessful. Donald Douglas does everything, even his enormous production job, in such a precise way that it never seems to be news.