Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley Page B

broke in. “You’ll need a smart wife. It’s a hell of a handicap when you don’t have one. Champagne? Well, that runs up the cost, doesn’t it? In that case we’d better raise you to twelve instead of ten. Now get out of here and get back to Pittsburgh before Alderson finds out that I’ve wasted another two thousand of his precious dollars.”
    That next year Jesse went back to Millburgh as Vice-President for Production and Don was made General Manager of the Coglan plant. Then the rearmament program started and the Pittsburgh plant was converted to the manufacture of parts for aircraft and naval ships. There were four years when Mary said that she might as well have stayed single for all she saw of her husband. Don didn’t agree and Avery Bullard didn’t either. “I don’t know whether you know it or not, Walling, but that girl’s doing you a lot of good. You’re beginning to get ripe.”
    Don wondered if there might be a hidden meaning in Avery Bullard’s use of the word “ripe.” The year after the war he found out. He was brought back to Millburgh to head the new Design and Development department, responsible for styling and product development work for all nine factories.
    Don Walling’s return to Millburgh had not turned out to be the triumphal ascent that he expected. There had been a difficult period of personal adjustment. As general manager of the Pittsburgh plant, he had been at the top of the heap, with almost total authority. In Millburgh, he was only the junior member of the executive staff, hemmed in by the carefully guarded lines that marked the delegation of responsibility to a dozen other department heads. Even after he was given his vice-presidency, he still sat at the foot of the directors’ table, outranked by all of the others. He had anticipated his return to designing with considerable pleasure, excited by the possibilities of centralized design control over nine factories, but Grimm and Dudley had thwarted most of his first efforts. Grimm had said that since the factories were all oversold as it was, there was no need to waste the money that putting out new models would entail, and Dudley had agreed that his sales department didn’t want to extend the length of the line. Product development work had continually faced handicaps that grew out of the same situation. There was no laboratory building and experimental tests had to be made in the factories. The only way that new processes could be worked out was to stop production on a factory line and, as Shaw pointed out, and the others agreed, that would mean a cut in output and higher costs.
    Until these last few months, Don Walling had felt no serious concern about the attitude of the other vice-presidents. It was Avery Bullard’s attitude that really mattered and the president had always backed him up, ordering at least a few new patterns into the line every season, and a continuation of development work on the molding process as well as the experimentation that was underway on a new finishing method and a new dry-kiln design. Of late, however, Walling had sensed that Bullard’s support was being given with greater and greater reluctance. It seemed that there had been a progressive weakening of the president’s driving urge for constant improvement.
    In the last month, Don Walling had been called to Avery Bullard’s office only twice and neither time had he felt the energizing stimulus that contact with the president had always given him before. The last conference had been the most unsatisfactory of all. He had gone up with a layout of the new finishing process and an armful of experimental samples showing what could be done with it. Avery Bullard had hardly looked at them. He had spent all of the time discussing a memorandum from Shaw which recommended that all development effort for the rest of the year be concentrated on projects that would have a