The Making of a City
ARMOUR TECH turned out a man who built a machine that made a city.
The Queen of the lumber world of the eighties received a rude awakening. Dame Fortune had frowned on her harshly and, no longer operating forty sawmills and cutting more board feet than ever had been cut in any community extant, Muskegon, Michigan, saw lumber vanishing, sawmills closed, unkept, grass-growing streets, decayed, untenanted houses — a tawdry splendor that had lost its tinsel; a town fading into a deserted village. Hope seemed gone.
Operating for Muskegon were forces that seem romantic in our everyday life. Men of Muskegon came to the front and gathered a fund to get and aid manufacturers of fundamentals, thereby laying the foundations for the making of a city.
As Muskegon was fading into desuetude a young man was putting the finishing touches on a four-cylinder gasoline-engine in a shop in Chicago. He was nineteen years old. His engine seemed to take on life from the start; its fame spread. People began to talk about Ross W. Judson. His first Continental Motor was sold in June 1902. Muskegon men made pilgrimages to Chicago until they got the plant to move to Muskegon. Then began an industrial struggle that not only meant the success of a business, but the establishment of a city as well. In the language of one of the men still employed who started with the company in Muskegon: “When we had two motors ready to ship, we all went out with the boss for our coffee at noon, and Judson was tickled stiff. And that is the reason why we say, ‘Once a Continental workman, always a Continental.’ We men know there is work for us all the time and we can buy a home, school the kids, and put a bit away.”
Adhering to his first ideas as to gasoline engines, Ross W. Judson, President of the Continental Motors Corporation, has seen the company rise to be the largest exclusive manufacturer of gasoline motors in the world, actually employing more than six thousand workers, including almost every type of mind from the disciplinarian to the coal-passer; and has been enabled to establish the reliability and stability of the effort of Muskegon in every nook and cranny of the habitable globe. Wherever men live and want a power plant, a gasoline engine, you will find a Continental. In reaching the highmark product of three million motors for autos, trucks, tractors, farm implements, buses, pavers, concrete mixers, etc., the company has made a city.
The problem of economic life has been solved. The men at work, in the main, own their portion of the 14,000 homes of Muskegon, Michigan; peace and plenty prevail; actual content and real happiness abound. You get it from the men at work, from storekeepers, from every phase of life in Muskegon. You are told that the Continental, by buying parts at first, started four other concerns in Muskegon that are now large employers of men, and that these concerns follow the basic principle of employing steady men at all times. When work is a bit slack the men make for the future. There are no vacant homes in Muskegon. Its fifty-six thousand people maintain thirty-eight schools, with more than ten thousand pupils and nearly four hundred teachers. Fifty churches show a membership of thirty-seven per cent affiliated. Its environs are the summer playground for a large part of the Middle Western population. Muskegon jobbers do a business of more than $6,000,000 annually. Since the arrival of the Continental, there have been no bank failures, no strikes. Slack times show up no great want. Thrift and effort go hand in hand. In all this building the officers of the Continental Motors Corporation have kept aloof from paternalism.
The Continental Motors Corporation has surrounded itself with men of vision — “ It’s a hall mark.” You realize that in making a tour of the plants in Muskegon. The men voice the single idea that they are well pleased with the management; effort is made to put the men on their own without driving. A system of payment is carried out whereby the men participate in the economies that are continually going on in manufacturing. It’s a premium system and it has increased the pay of most of the skilled men in Muskegon thirty per cent in the past few years.
Examination of parts and complete motors is rigid, but by a unique shop system the larger part of the so-called “eyes” of the plant have passed away, and the honor and reliability of both men and company make for a saving in effort in which all participate. The writer actually spent four days talking to the workers of the Continental Motors Corporation, both in Muskegon and Detroit factories, and everyone voiced the same idea: that it was good business on the part of the company to coöperate with the men, and just as good for the men to reciprocate. Wandering alone in a forest of machinery costing millions of dollars, and talking to men in every kind of Continental Motor endeavor, he heard everywhere the same expression: the Continental made Muskegon, and the men made the Continental. From its inception to the present day the company has always showed progress. In peak years it has reached more than three and one-half millions, net earnings. Its net worth is near the thirty million mark.
In all its effort in making an ideal American city and solving the problem of economy of life, of effort, of stability, of increase for all, the company has always coöperated with or encouraged all other concerns in Muskegon.
One half of one per cent labor turnover for many months is the record of another factor in the making of a city that has come upward from a decayed town to fifty-six thousand people living in fourteen thousand homes. This concern, employing over six hundred day by day the year round, has had just twelve workers who have passed away in twenty-five years. The employees and company by mutual arrangement own and carry Mutual Life Insurance in which ninety-five per cent of the men are covered. No death has occurred for over a year.
Wherever man dwells, in his business relations you will find the imprint “Muskegon, Michigan,” on the ShawWalker utilities for filing and keeping records securely. You get a glimpse into the making of Muskegon when you learn that this concern started in a small room, sixteen by twenty, with just a few people animated by an Idea. The idea was to give business men a system for filing information and getting it quickly, and at the same time affording absolute security.
You begin to know why this idea of better service has been accepted by men all over the globe when you see the records showing that four per cent of the men have been at work in this concern twenty years, ten per cent fifteen years, forty per cent over five years. As one man said: “We know that we have work here as long as we are able to work—that the curse of fear has been overcome. We know just about how much we can pay for our homes, how far we can educate our children, and what we can put by for keeps. No one annoys you, harasses you, or causes you to buy hair dye. Since I have been here, going on twenty-one years, I have never known anyone to be treated unfairly.”
One man said that in his department every man owned his own home. A careful checking showed that more than a majority of the men are home owners. Good Will organizations abound. Every possible effort is made to have the company and the men so work with each other that a real relation is established without ownership. The company participates in sick benefits, also death insurance, etc. It provides dining-rooms, rest rooms, etc. No one need leave the factory without getting aid needed, and this is all done with no attempt at paternalism. It’s just done, that’s all.
Shaw-Walker products are steel and wood cabinets, safes, desks, letter-filing equipment and systems, card index equipment, bank equipment, machine-bookkeeping accessories. These are sold in every country in the world. To put it into a few words: their salesmen are trained to sell the service rather than the product.
There is always someone behind every condition, and here we find Lewis C. Walker at the head of Shaw-Walker Company. His well-known attitude — carefully checked — is put very tersely by one of the oldest inhabitants of Muskegon, who said: “Mr. Walker has been a part of every civic movement in this city the past twenty-five years, and he still found time to sell Muskegon work to every part of the world. His work in the schools alone would show the making of a city, yet the Shaw-Walker business increased daily because it is guided by deep thought and sheer ability.”
As the morning whistle blows, you can see more than a thousand parked automobiles in front of a manufacturing plant covering sixty-three acres, employing, when at top notch, twenty-six hundred. Investigation will prove to you that nearly everyone owns a car and that most of the men own their homes and have been with the company twenty years, ten years, five years.
Security has come to the city and the men from the policy, in operation during the past decades, of accuracy of effort, standardizing of parts, and waste elimination which is now featured by Secretary Hoover for the nation.
As the plank sidewalks of lumberjacks and lumber days were passing, Muskegon, by dint of forethought on the part of its forefathers, secured one of the manufacturing branches of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, who are really engaged in making what are called the necessities of the new day. These necessities are being used in every part and parcel of the entire globe, giving mental and physical recreation to the entire family.
Of the many products turned out by this company, billiard tables are the best known. It is interesting to realize that little is known of the origin of billiards. Spain, Italy, France, Germany— all are regarded as the originators of the game. One learns for instance that Catkin More, King of Ireland in the second century, left behind him fifty-five balls of brass, with pools and cues of the same material. Bouillet assures us the game came from the game of Bowls brought into France by Louis XIV, whose physician recommended this exercise. Cotton, in 1674, said, “This most gentile, cleanly, and ingenious game was first played in Italy.” In our everyday life Muskegon workmen are making more than eighty per cent of the billiard tables, cues, balls, and racks used in the world, under the ownership of a concern eighty years old, whose name is as sterling.
Fifty men interviewed at random gave as their idea that the words Balke and Collender were peculiar to billiard and pool tables and designated parts that had to be used in the construction of such tables.
Everyone employed in Muskegon by this company is American either by birth or declaration and yet every type of mind is employed. You have the disciplinarian. the doctor, the lawyer; specialists in rubber-making; stationary, electric, and chemical engineers; three generations of cabinetmakers practically working side by side; and every kind of chemist—because accuracy is the key word. The organization, the men, the material must be accurate, since the finished product goes to Patagonia, the Hebrides, the Straits Settlements, the courts of Europe, the homes of the rich, the billiard halls of the ordinary men and women of the world.
These goods are valueless without accuracy — accuracy that meets the atmospheric conditions of the climate and the peculiar temperament of the world player. You have this accuracy reflected in the people at work. You note ample, large space for each one — no bustle, rushings, turmoil. The men tell you that they become more and more interested in the work. You read your shorthand notes at night after interviewing eighty-three men and you read everywhere practically the same thought: the men and the company work together; each is doing well. The men work on the premium system that practically has increased wages; they do better work because the company studies in the various laboratories improvements that are tested, worked out, and given to the men as time savers, as well as accuracy preservers. Paternalism is unknown here; the men and the officers of the company join in safety self-help organization. Men bring their sons, whose sons in turn join the company in special undertakings. The spirit of democracy prevails; it is not made a fetish or proclaimed — it just is. The atmosphere of discipline is going hand in hand with right action and right thinking. As one man said: “I never heard of anyone being illtreated around here. We all can and do stay as long as we want and we always have a job. We don’t worry about age or new things hurting us; the company wants us and we want the job. We can make arrangements for a home and just what we want, knowing it’s coming out just right. Eighty-seven of the men who began here with the company had a loyalty dinner, and they were of the first five hundred that began the first year here.”
In the making of a city comes the assurance of progress. The BrunswickBalke-Collender Company do a business of more than $25,000,000 a year. The work is now really concerned with fundamentals: every type of mind nowadays sets apart a time for recreation, and the company makes the necessities for it. Singularly, too, the billiard table, the bowling-alley, the phonograph, the radio, the new Panatrope, all keep the family together. In many places one finds entire families enjoying public billiards, public bowling; they are thereby held together under the most favorable conditions. The company is not adverse to employing any type of mind, yet it always gets its managers, officers, and guides from the ranks. What seems to be destined for world-wide use is the new musical reproducer, the Panatrope — by the light wave method of recording vibrations, as low as 16 per second and as high as 10,000 per second are recorded. This means the artist plays naturally and that you actually hear him without seeing. Your home is in touch with the world.
In addition to giving you health, recreation, mental joy, and world knowledge, the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company have, in the making of a city, added the spirit of right thinking. There is every reason to say that revived Muskegon is built on a lasting foundation.