The Lustron Home by Thomas T. Fetters

Author:Thomas T. Fetters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Carl Strandlund and his wife found their house in Westerville, northeast of Columbus, to be too big for just the two of them, and soon shared it with her sister’s family, the Sandborgs, including the young 16-year-old Ron Sandborg. (Collection of Ron Sandborg.)

12

Foreclosure

It was no valentine that the RFC laid before the press when it revealed that it had ordered foreclosure proceedings started against the Lustron Corporation in the Federal District Court in Columbus. The Lustron people knew that it was the beginning of the end for the company and for Strandlund’s dream of a self-sufficient prefabricated housing factory and sales program.

The House Banking Committee was startled by the decision and voted the next day to see if the government should operate the plant to prefabricate housing for the armed forces. Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, and Harley Hise, chairman of the RFC, were invited to sit in at a closed-door meeting to discuss the idea.

Representative Albert Cole told a reporter, “This looks like an effort to put the Government into the prefabricated housing business. I don’t think the Government had any business getting into it at all.”58

The foreclosure suit was filed on February 22 against a mortgage of $36,466,273 and was assigned to United States District Judge Mell G. Underwood, who probably accepted the job as just another routine procedure. It was not to be so.

The Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Senator Burnet R. Maybank, Democrat of South Carolina, set a hearing on the foreclosure to be held in Columbus. Maybank mentioned that several companies were interested in Lustron if it was to become available, and other sources speculated that these included U.S. Steel’s Gunnison Homes subsidiary which was producing wooden prefabricated housing, and Republic Steel Corporation which had no share in this market.

Judge Underwood appointed Clyde M. Foraker of Columbus as the receiver for the Lustron Corporation on March 6 for a trial period of 30 days. Foraker quickly resigned as chief of the field division of the Internal Revenue Department to take the new assignment.59

Foraker got his teeth into the bit with no hesitation and two days later fired all but two of the Lustron top officials to save the remaining funds. The payroll as a consequence dropped from $156,037 a month to $70,723 a month. Carl Strandlund was one of those “released.” It was a staggering blow to Strandlund, but it was done. The plant limped along under Foraker’s direction producing still more Westchesters, Newports and various other parts, but the pace had fallen well off and it was a token production as everyone waited for the next shoe to fall.60

Senator Flanders proposed in March that the loans to companies like Lustron should be handled by the Housing and Home Finance Agency (H&HFA) instead of the RFC.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) accused the RFC of hostility towards the new prefab industry when they saw the number of lost and potentially lost jobs at the Columbus plant.

On April 3, the receivership operation was extended for an indefinite period by Judge Underwood who felt that Foraker was doing a satisfactory job.

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