GOVERNMENT: Clonk

Angered by delays to his housing program, Wilson Watkins Wyatt last week frantically unwrapped his emergency powers. He rolled them into a blackjack and laid about him. The chief casualty was Chicago’s Tucker Corp., an innocent bystander.

Tucker had been quietly minding its own business. It had its hands full trying to get into production on a bullet-shaped car, the Tucker Torpedo in Chicago’s surplus Dodge plant. Only six weeks ago, Tucker Corp. had signed a “firm” lease purchase agreement with the War Assets Administration for the plant.

But Wilson Wyatt’s National Housing Administration now decided that this 83-acre plant would be ideal for the manufacture of prefabricated houses, which were doing badly. (Production of 3,500 a month is only one-sixth of estimates.) Tucker Corp., said NHA, would have to move out so the plant could be turned over to Lustron Corp., an offshoot of the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Corp.

Enameled Hopes. Lustron, which made enameled steel fronts for gas stations before the war, had never made a house. Yet its husky, smooth-talking president, Carl Strandlund, 47, a vice president of Vitreous, had convinced NHA that he could mass-produce thousands of prefabricated houses, made chiefly of enameled steel sheets. All Lustron needed for the job, said Strandlund, was a little help, such as the Dodge plant and a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corp. of from $32 to $52 million. Lustron was willing to invest as much as $36,000 of its own money to get the RFC loan.

But when NHA asked WAA to break its agreement with Tucker Corp., WAA balked, asked: “How can anybody be expected to deal with the Government if contracts with a Government agency are revoked?” And this at a time when WAA was trying to sell 48 other surplus plants in the Chicago area. Furthermore, Tucker’s President, Preston Tucker, already had 165 men at work on a pilot model. Altogether, said Tucker, he had put $1.3 million of his own and his relatives’ money into the project. He protested that to move now would be calamitous.

Bloody Action. But NHA cried: “Houses are more important than autos!” Down clonked the Wyatt blackjack on Tucker and WAA. To WAA went a “directive” ordering it to comply with NHA wishes. (WAA appealed the order to Attorney General Tom Clark.)

When NHA asked RFC to lend Lustron $32 million, RFC also balked. RFC said that Lustron was putting up too little of its own cash. Promptly Wilson Wyatt twirled his blackjack again. He threatened to lay into RFC with another “directive.”

At week’s end, RFC was still saying no. In the uproar everyone had lost sight of the fact that NHA did not know whether people would like to live in enameled steel houses even if they are made.