Business & Finance: Cheese Makers & Cherry Pickers

This is no Henry Kaiser outfit. This is just a hell of a swell team and we’re cany-ing the ball. That’s all.

These modest words were spoken last week by a modest man: trim, 6-ft., ruddy-cheeked Charles Cameron West, founder-owner of Wisconsin’s booming Manitowoc Shipbuilding Co., who loves to stride around in muddy shoes, greet workmen by their first names—and build anything that goes to sea. A shipbuilder for 42 of his 65 years, Charles West never broke a Kaiser record, never stole a Kaiser headline. Yet last week he had his own claim to fame as the only inland builder of intricate, tightly packed, oceangoing submarines, was doing so well he had orders for enough of them to keep him going full blast until 1945.

With a Cornell engineering degree in his hip pocket, Charlie went to work for Chicago’s American Shipbuilding Co. in 1900, picked up tricks of the trade for two years, quit to buy an ancient, near-dormant shipyard at Manitowoc, Wis. It had been a clipper shipyard since 1847, and Charlie built one wooden ship for tradition’s sake, then switched to steel. To speed things along he rounded up a wide-awake, corner-cutting engineering staff, set up large machine shops to make boilers and engines, shape every piece of steel used in a West-built ship. Things went well until after World War I, when shipbuilding collapsed. The thing that “saved the bacon,” says Charlie, was the machine division, which promptly turned to heavy items like industrial cranes, dredges, cement and paper-mill machinery.

Soon as World War II broke on the world Charlie gleefully turned back to his first love—ships. He dickered with the Navy, in the summer of 1940 landed a $32,800,000 contract for ten submarines. Then he got to work, converted his own plant and 60 subcontractors to submarine building. Because Wisconsin winters are finger-numbing cold, he makes the submarines piecemeal indoors, assembles them in 15 sections, weighing from 38 to 68 tons each. His first submarine was launched sideways in April—eight months ahead of schedule.

The Navy was surprised, promptly gave West a huge contract for invasion barges. West drew the plans, farmed out the work, and delivered the whole fleet only eight months after the contract was signed. Watching his progress, the Navy was flabbergasted, gave him a big pat on the back, a Navy “E” and contracts for many more submarines.

On all these achievements Charles West shows the modesty and reticence which have made him the least-known big businessman in Wisconsin. And since Manitowoc is a closed corporation, nobody knows how much money he makes. But he talks plenty about his workmen and his labor policy. He has a closed shop (A.F. of L.), a 20-year-old collective-bargaining plan and 6,200 employes, who work three eight-hour shifts seven days a week. Some of them are oldtimers, have been with West since he bought the yard. But many of them are ex-dairymen, ex-farmers, ex-hired hands from nearby agricultural regions. As training West gives them an apprentice course tougher than a Navy shakedown cruise: 8,320 hours or not less than four years with a 520-hour probationary period plus 432 hours of “related instruction.” Result: custom-tailor shipbuilders. Gushed an amazed Navy inspection officer at the yards: “We lovingly call them cheese makers and cherry pickers, but lord what beautiful work they do.”