Denver Launching

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 15 smaller machine shops landed a $56,000,000 hull subcontract two months ago. They did so well on their first job that this week they landed a second. Now the pool is working on fittings and hulls for 27 ships, expects it will tax every machine shop in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico to turn them out.

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