CZECHOSLOVAKIA: Bat'a Pantheon

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Next to Henry and Edsel Ford, the Czechoslovak family of Bat'a (pro- nounced Bahtya) continue to be the world's most vigorous "Fordizers." Fifty-seven years ago the spouse of a poor cobbler in Zlin bore Thomas Bat'a. In a heroic life of mechanized striving he made Zlin the "Shoe Capital" of Europe. Because, like Henry Ford, he profoundly mistrusted financiers, Thomas Bat'a took fanatical care to remain the First Working Partner in a partnership which embraced all his employes. No one outside the partnership may own Bat'a stock. In Zlin the Bat'a newspaper is the only newspaper. One year ago the super-paternalistic, super-mechanized Bat'a works were put to a supreme test to which last week Zlin paid triumphant tribute. Thomas Bat'a had been up half the night at Zlin working over a big shoe contract he hoped to close in Switzerland. The day dawned murky, with fog blotting out tall Bat'a chimneys. Twice the pilot of the Bat'a private plane, an ace pilot who had flown Thomas Bat'a successfully around India and back, refused to take off for Switzerland. Finally the First Working Partner climbed up beside his ace, ordered, "We must start!" The engine roared. Thundering across the perfectly smooth Bat'a airfield the plane began to lift, vanished into the fog and then inexplicably crashed. Both the pilot and Thomas Bat'a were killed. They were buried near each other in a nearby woodland cemetery. Last week at the exact moment of the crash, the House of Bat'a's 25,000 working partners gathered not to mourn but to dedicate. On a hill opposite the sprawling shoe works rises a brand new, two-story, ferroconcrete Bat'a Pantheon. Not a tomb—for the First Working Partner would never have wished that—the Pantheon is a mechanistic museum to Thomas Bat'a. Exhibits begin with the crude hand tools he used in learning his trade as a shoemaker's apprentice. Next come samples of the increasingly Fordized shoe machinery which enable Bat'a shoes to beat competitors' prices from Calcutta to Chicago. Finally the airplane in which Thomas Bat'a died hangs, carefully reconstructed, in his mechanistic Pantheon. Years before he died Thomas Bat'a, prompted by some obscure premonition, said to his Directors, "If I should die I expect you to stand by the works for one year. Then, if you are unable to continue without me, you are free to do what you like." Thomas was succeeded by his stepbrother Jan Bat'a, tall, broad and with an aggressively cleft chin. Jan last week had done more than stand by the works for one year. Battling with amazing vigor against Depression, he had actually increased the Bat'a force of working partners and had expanded the company's outlets throughout the entire Far East. "It's a shame that 30,000,000 Indians don't wear shoes!" was the way Thomas Bat'a put it before he died. Surprisingly soon afterward the steamer Morava, owned by the House of Bat'a, docked at Bombay with 1,000,000 pairs of Bat'a shoes and machinery for starting a Bat'a plant at Konnagar, Bengal, which is now in full production. The Morava sailed completely around India, stocking more than 200 shoe stores which Bat'a working partners opened and staffed within recent years.