Texas Wonder Boys

On the banks of the slow-flowing Ship Channel 15 miles outside Houston squats one of the most remarkable shipyards in the whole U.S.--yet most citizens have never heard of it. Its name: Brown Shipbuilding Co. Its achievement: low-cost mass production of small naval vessels in one-third Navy-schedule time. Its management: dapper, energetic Herman Brown, 50, and fast-thinking, early-rising George Brown, 44, a pair of six-foot brothers who were construction contractors only 18 months ago. Last week Brown Shipbuilding christened the destroyer escort S. S. Tomich, the eighth ship launched in eight days and a new record for the yard.

The Brown brothers started in the construction business (Colorado River Mansfield Dam and Corpus Christi Naval Air Station). In mid-1941 came a lucky accident: the Browns heard that a small Houston shipyard was going to lose its subchaser contract because of money troubles. They asked for the job and got it. Within six months the Browns bought and cleared a 156-acre tract, built a small shipyard of secondhand materials, rounded up a working force, purchased supplies and parts and launched the first subchaser. The Navy promptly gave the Browns more subchaser orders plus a contract for a medium-sized fleet of destroyer escorts--many-gunned convoy and anti-submarine craft which cost some $5,000,000. For this job the Browns designed and built a $6,000,000 shipyard, fitted it with timesaving devices like "swinging scaffolds" (which move as ship construction progresses) and prefabrication shops.

Less than ten months after the destroyer escort contract was signed, DEs were plopping into the water so fast it startled even veteran Navymen, and average building time was being slashed two-thirds. All this worked wonders in Washington where the Navy started shoveling out new Brown shipbuilding contracts so fast that the infant company's backlog is now over $300,000,000--more orders on hand than giant 38-year-old Bethlehem Steel had three years ago.

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