SHIPBUILDING: Albina’s Al

In the shadow of giant Henry Kaiser’s three Columbia River shipyards, thesmall Albina Engine & Machine Works of Portland has turned out 38 sub-chasers, won three “E” pennants, chopped down absenteeism, kept its 4,500 workers happy. Its secret: slick showmanship in employe relations. Samples:

No Work, No Woo. “Vow Girls,” 350 female employes in the yard, have signed a pledge not to date any Albina man who has not perfect job attendance for the week.

Market at the Gate. When workers complained about high vegetable prices. Albina persuaded farmers to bring their produce right up to yard gates at shift-change times. Typical result: Employes bought peaches at $2 a box, which sold at $2.89 elsewhere.

Sale in Shortages. When workers ran short of alarm clocks and washing machines, Albina bought up 800 old clocks, sent as far as St. Louis for a broken-down washing machine, fixed them up and sold them at cost. Other dodges: 800 lilies were sold to workers at cost at Easter; the less pious can buy at any time special Varga-type-girl calendars. An Albina soil expert counsels 1,000 Victory gardeners. Haircut absenteeism was cut by persuading nearby barbers to sloganize “An Albina Man Is Always Next.” Albina’s own cobbler gives three-day service v. three weeks downtown. Result: absenteeism at Albina has droppedfrom 11% to 2.95%.

Idea man for these changes is an ex-baboon hunter, Alexander James Lake, 50, the yard’s cocky public-relations man. Al Lake’s tale of his life smacks of Defoe. A Chicago missionary’s son, he spent his boyhood in South Africa, was paid $1.25 bounty by the Transvaal government for each baboon tail he produced. He got a job as an electrical engineer for a Swedish company, later moved to the Mojave Desert, where he prospered writing pulp-magazine stories about the jungle. When war broke out, he got a job at Albina. He thought the yard’s morale needed pepping up, and one day told Vice President L. R. Hussa so. He got the job.

Al Lake keeps the work in the family. His present wife (he met her in a California hospital, where he was recovering from rabbit fever) is his office assistant. The moving spirit of “No Work, No Woo” is a 23-year-old brunette ex-Hollywood model, Jeannine Christiansen, a daughter by his first marriage. She is a $1.32-an-hour plate burner on the graveyard shift, and by turning down a date from a shiftless worker gave her father his catchiest anti-absenteeism campaign.