Aerospace: No End in Sight

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The Team. This arsenal of technical prowess is commanded by a slender wisp of a man (5 ft. 7 in., 148 Ibs.) with thinning grey hair, twinkling blue eyes, a Boston accent, and an almost embarrassing diffidence. Among strangers, Lockheed Chairman Gross will go far out of his way to avoid admitting that he heads one of the nation's largest industrial corporations. To occupational questions from fellow airline travelers, he usually responds: "I'm in manufacturing." Recently a famous European actress seated beside him at a Hollywood dinner party asked the inevitable "What do you do?" Replied Gross: "I'm an aircraft mechanic." To his relief, the actress ignored him for the rest of the evening.

At leisure, Gross enjoys the quietude of his $300,000, six-acre estate high in the Santa Monica Mountains, where his wife, the former Mrs. Alix Van Rensselaer Devereux Wanamaker, often joins him at his hobby, gardening. At work amid the thunder of aircraft at Lockheed Air Terminal, Gross operates out of a resolutely old-shoe office, with bare green walls, a few wooden and leather-covered chairs reminiscent of his Harvard undergraduate days, and a rolltop desk. One visible vanity: a different pair of Ben Franklin spectacles with frames to match each day's fastidious London suit and breast-pocket handkerchief.

Gross gets paid $127,164 a year, and his 57,669 shares of Lockheed stock (worth $3,450,000) earned him another $115,338 in dividends last year. In return, he runs an orderly administration in which, says Lockheed Director William A. M. Burden, onetime Assistant Commerce Secretary for Air, "He does not impose details, as other large aerospace companies do, but gives scope to other people."

Those "other people" emphatically include Dan Haughton, 54, Lockheed's president since 1961. He and Gross behave, says Burden, "as if they were running a small partnership." Haughton, an Alabama coal miner's son, put himself through the University of Alabama by moonlighting in the mines, graduated ('33) as an accountant, and joined Lockheed in 1939. A prodigious worker who arises at 4 o'clock every morning, rarely gets to bed before midnight, he spends at least half of his time jetting about through Lockheed's 34-state corporate domain.

While he is away from Burbank, the man who tends the headquarters shop is Executive Vice President A. Carl Kotchian, 51, a onetime Price Waterhouse accountant who is virtually Haughton's alter ego. And then there is Lockheed's biggest intangible asset, Vice President (for Advanced Projects) Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, a $114,507-a-year (including bonuses) design genius who bosses the Burbank "skunk works," where Lockheed keeps its surprises a secret. Broadnosed, with piercing blue eyes and a bubbling humor, Johnson resembles a sober W. C. Fields. He decided to become a plane builder at twelve, joined Lockheed as soon as he won a master's in aeronautics from the University of Michigan. His drawing-board magic has created 19 of Lockheed's famed planes. Among them: the Hudson bomber, P-38, P-80, Constellations, F-104, U2, and SR-71.