The Biggest

With a notable lack of fuss, the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. last week launched Hull No. 439. To the U.S. Navy, Hull No. 439 was the aircraft carrier Midway, biggest warship in the world.

In its sleek, V-shaped hull, the 45,000-ton Midway has enough electric power to light up a city of 1,000,000, enough steel for 25,000 autos. It is wider and almost half again as heavy as the Essex class carriers, now the first line craft of the U.S. fleets. But the tin-hatted, horn-handed men who built the Midway are accustomed to superlatives. They have long bragged that: 1) Newport News is the biggest U.S. shipyard; 2) its sharp-eyed, terrier-like boss, Homer Lenoir Ferguson, 72, is by all odds the best builder of warships in the U.S., if not in the world.

Dry Land Sailor. Shipbuilder Ferguson runs his acres of ways and forests of derricks with the offhand manner of a country storekeeper. He keeps no regular office hours, usually refuses to sign papers, spends his time cruising about the yard. Says he, out of the side of his mouth: "My predecessors damn near wore themselves out signing their names."

He lays his career in shipbuilding to a fluke. At 14, a cousin suggested that they take the entrance examinations for Annapolis. Young Ferguson, who had given no thought to the Navy until then, agreed. A week later, he passed and was appointed.

When he graduated, he found that he had no love for a sailor's roving life, but he liked ships. So he settled down in the Navy's construction corps, left it after ten years to join Newport News. It had been established 19 years before by railroad-building Collis P. Huntington, whose aim was to "build good ships here, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships."

Newport News did build good ships. Its first, the tug Alvah H. Clark, still chuffs up & down the James River, helped shepherd the Midway (see cut) from the dry dock in which it was built to the outfitting pier downstream. But the yard could not show a profit until Ferguson joined the company, after Huntington died and the yard had passed to his heirs.

Near the Rocks. By 1915, when Ferguson was president, the yard was building warships so fast that 20% of the tonnage with which the U.S. entered World War I, from destroyers to battleships, came from Newport News. Yet in the postwar slump the company almost went broke. It squeaked through by making freight cars, turbines, bridges, marine paints and even street signs, till orders for ships began to trickle in again. Fortunately the well-heeled Huntingtons, who sold out only five years ago, regarded the yard more as a family institution than as a business, let Ferguson pour much of the profits back in improvements.

Thus, when World War II came, Newport News was one of the few yards ready & able to turn out big carriers. Nine of them, including the Enterprise and Hornet, slid from the ways. Helping matters were 1) an apprentice system that provided a backlog of topnotch workers, and 2) an incentive-pay plan that has kept the yard free of work stoppages.

Trouble Ahead? All this has proved very profitable for both the Navy and Newport News. Ferguson, who thinks that renegotiation is a good thing, has already turned back some $120,000,000 to the Treasury and waived the yard's claim to contract price increases of another $50,000,000. Yet Newport News still had a net profit of $4,500,000 to $5,000,000 last year.

What the yard will do when its war contracts all run out, some time in 1947, is anybody's guess. If the slump is bad enough, Ferguson expects to go back to making anything he can. But last week, 'he was too busy admiring his latest creation to worry about that.

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