Ben Lehman's Mysterious Return...

Ingalls Shipbuilding in the mid-1970s -- a beehive of activity

I worked at Ingalls Shipbuilding (A Division of Litton Industries) from 1972 until 1978.  It was my first "civilian" job.  During the last three years in Pascagoula, I ran the change boards for the LHA program.  This was a program to build 5 helicopter assault ships, basically aircraft carriers designed for amphibious assaults.  It was an exciting job, always new and always challenging.

My boss at the time was a fellow named Jerry Smith.  He and I decided to move the "center of gravity" of the LHA change activity from the administration building to the waterfront.  This was a major shift in the way the change boards would operate.

Previously, the change board met once daily, at 1:00 P.M. in the administration building.  The board was made up of representatives from several departments -- engineering, material, production planning and control, quality assurance, and the program office.  We would review any proposed change with a critical eye, asking whether it was required under our contract and whether it was the best, most cost-effective way of addressing the issue that had triggered the proposed change.

This was in a time when computer-aided design was in its infancy.  Most of our drawings were still being done by human draftsmen at drafting tables on vellum using pens.  Sometimes, because hundreds of draftsmen were working in parallel, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.  A substantial part of our change "traffic" involved interferences -- cases in which two separate items, say a pipe and a vent duct, were shown in the drawings occupying the same location.  Something has to give.  Our job was to approve a proposed solution or to disapprove it with a suggested change to the approach.

The problem with the existing way the change board operated was that you had a built-in 24-hour delay any time a member of the board was asked to gather information on a proposed change.  For example, take the case in which a field engineer has investigated an interference problem.  A group of cables has already been installed through a space on the ship.  A vent duct defined by a different drawing is about to be installed when the installers note that the cables are in the way of their ductwork.  

The field engineer is called in and his proposed solution is to reconfigure the shape of the vent duct to go around the existing cable.  When this proposed change is presented to the board, several questions may arise.  "How soon can the new duct be fabricated?"  "Does the new design provide adequate headroom?"  "Do the curves in the new design meet Navy specifications?"  The production planner on the board will have to take this question to his organization to figure out the answer.  Likewise for the compliance engineer.  The odds are that it will be 24 or 48 hours before an answer can be received from the next department representative, because, remember, the board meets at 1:00 P.M. every afternoon.

Jerry and I had talked over an alternative.  What if we had some office space adjacent to the fitting out area of the shipyard directly adjacent to the location where the LHAs were being worked on?  There was a building not more than 50 feet from LHA-1 called the "Wet Dock Building."  We acquired some real estate in that building and created some offices, a reception area and a conference room.  We proposed to each department manager that their change board representative would now reside permanently in their new change board location.  In essence, the change board would now be in perpetual session.  Their representative would have the highest allegiance to change board business, after which they could tend to other departmental assignments.  To our astonishment, every department head agreed!  I think they realized that this was indeed a sensible way to expedite changes and revise the design of the ship in the best interests of both the Navy and the shipyard.

From now on, a change could be processed in an average time of 2-3 days rather than the previous average of 15-20 days from the time it was initiated until approved changes were implemented by an approved revised set of drawings.  We even had a process by which the "crafts" could begin working on some changes using a simple sketch of the revision.  This was used in cases where there was near certainty of the change being approved by the entire board.

One unexpected side effect of our new location and procedures was this -- people began to believe that we knew "stuff" about the shipyard long before anyone else.  People would hear a rumor and come to the LHA Change Board offices to find out if it was true.  I don't think we really knew any more than anyone else in the shipyard, but the myth seemed to persist that we were the clearing house of all shipyard intelligence.

Rear Admiral Ben Lehman

Jerry and I decided to conduct an experiment.  We would start an unbelievable rumor and see how long it took until it got back to us by way of the grapevine asking if we could confirm it.  The rumor we decided to test involved a former Vice President of Engineering named Ben Lehman.  Ben had been V.P. of Engineering from 1972 to 1975.  He was a Rear Admiral in the Naval Reserve, a World War II veteran, had studied naval architecture at MIT and mechanical engineering at Harvard, was a brilliant engineer and was a force to be reckoned with.  He was considered by many of his adversaries in the shipyard to have been a tyrant.  He had left the shipyard and had served as a consultant to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The story around the shipyard was that Ben had been so unpopular with the unionized workers at the Brooklyn yard that some had threatened his life and that he was forced to hire bodyguards and ride in an armored limousine!  So Jerry and I started the rumor that good ol' Ben was being considered for a job back at Ingalls Shipbuilding.  We let it slip in a conversation in one of the fabrication shops that "We had heard..."

It was only one or two days before the rumor became rampant throughout the shipyard that Ben Lehman was coming back!  Several folks came by the Change Board offices to see if we knew anything.  We admitted that we had heard something.

A few months later, the most incredible news reached us.  The shipyard had decided to hire Ben Lehman back as a consultant at the behest of the Navy.  The result was that the LHA Change Board became even more infallible in the eyes of the shipyard's rumor mongers!