Business: The Engineer of Success

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By the time the foot healed he was a draftsman on Boeing's C-97, a transport version of the B-29 bomber, and was granted a deferment. Wilson took two years out to teach and study aeronautical engineering at Iowa State and Caltech but returned to Boeing in 1948. He was soon impressing top management. Company Chairman William Allen spotted him as a comer and shipped him off in 1952 to M.I.T. for a year to study industrial management as one of the university's highly regarded Sloan Fellows. In 1958, when Allen created a systems management office to coordinate work on the new ballistic missiles Boeing was building for the Air Force, he tapped Wilson to run the Minuteman portion. As project manager, Wilson set up a "management control room" to keep track of the progress of every Minuteman subcontractor. If one fell even a day behind schedule, Wilson would prod it to speed up. Five years later Allen intervened again. During a flight from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Allen leaned over his seat and asked Wilson to take a job at headquarters. Wilson turned him down, saying that he wanted to stay with the Minuteman until the first test firing because "I had never been in a program long enough to clean up my own mess." In 1964 Allen renewed his offer, and Wilson became head of corporate operations and planning. He quickly scaled the top of the corporate ladder, becoming president in 1968, just before Boeing's brush with extinction, when 747 sales collapsed and the supersonic transport was canceled. In the dark days of the early 1970s he personally sold the Defense Department on the need for four E-4 command post "doomsday" planes that would become the flying White House in case of nuclear attack. Meanwhile, Wilson was cutting the work force to the bone so that Boeing could limp along until orders picked up. Four years later when Allen retired, he was named chairman.

Wilson's private life, in contrast, is quiet. His wife Grace, whom he met as an undergraduate at Iowa State, suffers from severe arthritis. Their elder son Thornton Arnold III, 28, has been deaf since a childhood bout with spinal meningitis and is now a lawyer in the state attorney general's office. Their other son Dan works for Boeing as an engineer on the 767 program. Their daughter Sarah worked for Boeing before her marriage. In his idle hours, Wilson solves crossword puzzles and wrestles with mathematical conundrums, a kind of numerical crossword puzzle.

Wilson pays close attention to his health. He has suffered two heart attacks, the second ten years ago in a Boeing plane aboard a Northwest Orient Airlines flight to Chicago. He takes long walks, swims several times a week at a local community swimming pool and plays customer golf (handicap:

25). He can still shoot a shark's game of pool, a holdover from school days, when he hustled his pocket money in the local pool hall.

Wilson is particularly popular with the rank-and-file workers at Boeing. Around Seattle, everyone who knows him calls him T, which is how he also signs interoffice memos.