Venture for Veterans

At Camp Bliss, Tex., in 1942, two young officers met again; they had been fraternity brothers at the University of Kentucky. They decided to go into business together after the war. When Lieutenant Colonel Clarence James Bishop, 34, a mechanical engineer, got out of the Army last fall, he put in a long distance call to Captain Charles Francis Stone III, 37, onetime bank cashier, suggested that they start that company. They decided to make prefabricated houses. They also decided that all the stockholders and employes would be veterans.

When they announced their plan in Atlanta newspapers, over 800 veterans showed up, 100 agreed to invest $1,000 each and to work in the factory. In addition, each one agreed to borrow $1,750 under the G.I. Bill, thus give the new company, U.S. Homes, Inc., $275,000 in capital.

Bishop and Stone could not talk any banks into making the 100 G.I. loans. But they got the Government interested. In record time, U.S. Homes got: 1) $175,000 in loans from RFC; 2) machinery and equipment from the War Assets Administration; 3) a lease on 80,000 square feet of space in the surplus 58-acre B-29 plant at Marietta. Eighty-one more veterans were taken in on the original terms, thus bringing the company's total capital close to $500,000.

This week U.S. Homes turned out its first unit, a two-bedroom house that retails for $6,500. It was immediately sold to Stockholder William Thomas Moore, a worker in the erection department.

By midsummer, U.S. Homes expects to be turning out five houses a day. It already has orders for several hundred. Said Bishop happily: "The housing shortage should take care of our immediate future."

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