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About Geyser Judith Basin Times (Geyser, Mont.) 1911-1920 | View This Issue
Geyser Judith Basin Times (Geyser, Mont.), 12 Nov. 1915, located at <http://montananewspapers.org/lccn/sn85053135/1915-11-12/ed-1/seq-2/>, image provided by MONTANA NEWSPAPERS, Montana Historical Society, Helena, Montana.
• 016,,,ily. GEYSER JUDITH BASIN TIMES 11 , 40•4•1110000....... , sallip.M.141• 1 / 1 .11.1ft *NOV 4-11.001, L SYSIECII iwthi MHO .a• • 140 TT= of the WAVY 4 N the bureau_of supplies and accounts of the United States navy at Washing- ton some surprisidg changes have been made in the past year in methods of doing business. The bureau Is the business office of the navy. Also it is the butcher, the baker, the banker', the tailor and the grocer of the navy. It pays out some $145,000,000 a year. It saves Jack's money for him and the savings bank it operates has deposits aggregating $253,000. It operates two great clothing factories, one at Brooklyn and the other at Charles- ton, S. C. In another aspect It is one of the biggest purchasing agencies in the country. So remarkable have been its achievements in the twelvemonth that many requests have come to it recently from business establishments, public and private, for information as to its new methods. The spirit behind the change is that of a boyish - looking, wide-eyed, ever -smiling officer, who, just forty-tive years old—and he does not look it—holds the rank and draws the pay of a rear admiral, he being paymaster general of the navy and chief of the bureau. Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan he is to outsiders. Mr. McGowan is the form of address he insists upon within the bureau. But in the navy generally, by all ranks and all grades, he is dubbed, behind his back of course, Sammy McGowan. In the 14 months he has been paymaster general he has made over his bureau. What is more, he has secured the hearty and enthusiastic support of the entire force. That, to anyone who knows how any government organization is wedded to precedent, is amazing. Somewhat given to the making of epigrams in his instructions, oral and written, Admiral McGowan has uttered two that give a hint of the predominat- ing ideas behind his reforms. \Make it bureau with a small b and navy with a big N,\ is one, and \Remember that the stores exist for the fleet, not the fleet for the stores.\ The paymaster general and his bureau of supplies and accounts have their offices in the great pile known as the state, war and navy building, on Pennsylvania avenue, flanking the White House on the west. When the building was erected some forty years ago It was the largest office building in the world. Each corridor in It has the appear- ance of a battalion of barrooms, for each of the many corridor doors has its middle two-thirds masked by a shutter door. The rooms are all inter- communicating. The paymaster general's office is the end one in • suite of five rooms. Across the hall are seven more rooms. In the navy annex building, in a street near by, are some more offices of the bureau. When Paymaster General McGowan took over the job he inaugurated at once a clean-up campaign, Down from the walls came the dusty old pictures. Bookcases and file cases went out. Current and absolutely necessary bureau files went into one room in a set of steel vertical .containers, for general purposes, and in the purchasing end, across the hall, they likewise were reduced. Private libraries also went out. Upstairs the navy department maintains a splendid naval li- brary, and this is available for all purposes. \Abolish roll-top desks,\ was the word. Where flat -top desks were not available the department carpenters took off the roll tops. Since then standard office furniture has been adopted for the entire bureau. All intercommunicating doors in the suites were taken off the hinges. Walls were painted In light colors. Then the chief of each room or division chief was required to put his desk in the middle of the room with his force grouped about him. Now the paymaster general can stand in his room and look down the line and see exactly what is going on. But that isn't exactly the point. The object Is not to keep an eye on the people so much as it Is to convey the idea of unity. The division chief who, sequestered in his own little nest, might be tempted to write a letter to the chief next door, doesn't do It under these conditions. He says, \Say. Bill, how about so and so?\ or goes over and discusses it at close range. Stationery In use was reduced to the fewest possible simple kinds. On a shelf handy to the paymaster general's hands is a book some 14 inches big by 18 inches wide. In It is all the information that once oc- cupied a big fileroom. This information pertains to the present duty and availability for sea or shore duty, as the case may be, of all of the 230 officers making up the pay corps. The pages of the book are faced with trans- parent celluloid. When a pay officer is sent on a cruise his name and the essential date are in- scribed on a typewritten slip and inserted at the bottom of the section devoted to pay officers on sea duty. Place by place the slip moves up au- tomatically, and in this way one may observe at a glance who is due for shore duty and who for sea duty as, under the law, for every two years of Chore duty a paw officer must take three years of sea duty. And thus with all records. No effort has been spared to reduce them all to the simplest and most graphic form. The messenger force was reorganized and a squad told off to act as express messengers. This insures speed in the move- ment of papers from desk to desk and to the secretary's office No paper remains more than 15 minutes awaiting transmission. One of tho very first things Paymastor General 1 $ , — s ,..... . 9.00-' 3 \ - - 0 - ,44441 tV*. lif .. •,,. , , - iii :^ Ji ii i II -...........„ I ilA JII: , ,i - .. .......,.....,..,-............:,..,., .• ....„.... . 11 III ..II111 . .. _ ..vw,.:,.:.., ...,.....$1 41% , !!!•. 4 , .0,, : itli • • • . 6 • ,. . . .,.. .. , W... , ; , ... : ,s 7 .... t7 . 1 0.4 1; , A. \ . 40,74 f . , '• ....1,.! ' , ' ,,, ..**Krketsi-?s , : , ....: '''zi;:::•:. 9 : , V; , : , ..f;:te .. . - \ PA2122.522f:R q. 4: 21W e ,71raOlt71.1r McGowan did was to put a stop to promiscuous letter writing. The true bureaucrat dearly loves to write letters. He thinks he is at his - best when he is writing letters for the chief to sign, division heads dictating many of the letters which take the bureau chief's signature. It grati- fies the soul of the bureaucrat to grow arrogant and sarcastic in such dictation. Nothing of that sort is tolerated by Admiral McGowan Ile insisted that letter writing be re- duced to a minimum and that nothing unkind or contentious be put Into a letter, especially to another co-ordinate bureau. After his first gen- eral remarks on the subject he followed it up with an \intrabureau order.\ intrabureau orders being one of his methods of reaching the person- nel of his organization. But the striking changes in the service have been worked in the detail of the machinery first of accounting and then of supplying. Aboard each one of Uncle Sam's fighting craft is a pay officer, the ship's business manager. Each ship has a base or home station at some navy yard. At each navy yard is a storehouse, presided over by a pay officer. It is the business of this store- house to provide for the ships attached to it. Then there are fuel stations—coal and oil—also under Jurisdiction of the pay corps, for the pay corps buys everything, save arms and ammuni- tion, needed by the ships and their personnel. At present there are in the custody of the store- keepers general supplies worth $22,000,000. ex- clusive of fuel; $4,000,000 worth of clothing. and $3,000,000 worth of provisions. The problem is not alone to supply immediate needs, but to be ready to supply emergency needs. Just as an army moves on its belly, so is a navy department on its supplies. When a por- tion of the fleet was dispatched the other day to Santo Domingo it required a lot of things not ordinarily carried It got away promptly because those particular things were forthcoming without delay Always the bureau is in the market buying in huge quantities on bids and under rigid specifica- tions, for delivery at the most advantageous points. Two simple record books contain all the data on current bids which have been opened. and these are always open to public inspection. But the characteristic of the purchasing system is the simple and graphic methods used in keep- ing information up to date on existing stocks of fuel and supplies and on current prices Much of this information is reduced to charts on sec- tional paper. Thus a simple chart tells in figures and lines up to within 12 hours the exact quan- tity of coal and fuel on hand at any supply sta- tion, and another gives the same information as to the amount on board any ship of the navy. The selection of the time for restocking thus is al- most automatically sug - gested. A small card -tiling case contains a remarkable ex- hibition of prices current. Charted on cards are the market price movements for seven years, week by week, of important sta- ples. For example, the butter card shows a well- defined curve for each of the seven years, indicat- ing the weeks when but- ter is high and when low. As these curves closely parallel, a glance at it shows when is the most advantageous time for buying butter in quantity and storing it. So systematized has the method of securing and charting this information become that it requires little labor and its cost, by comparison with the results achieved in as- sisting in intelligent buying, is remarkably low. Other charts, corrected daily, keep the bureau informed as to the amount of stocks on hand In every detail, not only at the storehouses but on the ships as well. Since the navy through its extensive wireless system is in constant com- munication with every ship afloat, the task of keeping up these charts is not so difficult as It seems. Or the bunch of cards making up a ship's corn - pony also 11 producible on the instant. Machines have reduced the amount of work In the accounting section more than 60 per cent. There are refinements of cost keeping in a mili- tary establishment that are not known in a private establishment, for all expenditures must conform to some specific item of an appropria- tion bill, and appropriations for the naval estab- lishment are found in three different appropria- tion acts. Roughly speaking, 3,000,000 separate accounts must be kept properly to meet the requirements of the law and to furnish the information as to costs, gross and detailed, needed. Imagine a ledger with 3,000,000 accounts! Here the cal -de and mechanism have come in to the extent that half the number of men needed 15 months ago are now required to do the work. In addition a great deal of new work has been taken on. The use of new card punching machines is re- sponsible for the larger economies. The machine is so arranged that it sorts the punched cards, arranges them in proper grOups, ascertains the totals of the figures indicated by the punched holes and prints on a sheet the results. It is accounting reduced to mechanism. Of course the usual machines, such as adding machines and the like, are part of the equipment. In fact the whole trend of the reforms in this section has been to reduce everything to a mechanical basis. The result is great economics in operation, in- creased efficiency, increased accuracy and in- creased speed. To the casual observer the strik- ing thing is the disappearance of books. Few indeed are the books in sight, remarkably slim the files. In other words, the accountancy sys- tem has been reduced to the simplest dimensions Ask any man, officer or civilian, in the estab- lishment how the whole organization has been made over in such a time, and he instantly will tell you that Sammy McGowan did it. And then he will grow confidential and tell you what he esteems Is the secret of the whole accomplish ment, the spirit that McGowan has put into his entire force. \We don't tolerate grouches,\ your informant will say. \We all belong to the Don't Worry club and McGowan is its president.\ Another thing this paymaster general has done is to establish in Washington, with the approval of the secretary of the navy, a school for nay'. pay officers. These officers are appointed from civil life on a competitive examination. They go Into the service equipped with a good academic education, but with no knowledge of the navy and its needs. Hence the new service school. which has in this year's class 15 young officers who are being trained in their new profession. Admiral McGowan himself is a product of civilian training. When he secured his appoint- ment in the pay corps in 1894 he was a South Carolina newspaper man who had worked his way through college and law school by running a brick yard and serving as a ticket agent at a railway station Maybe there he got the training which has made him a great business executive. The fact that he has spent most of his naval career at sea accounts for his Insistence that the fleet and not the bureau is the thing ever to be kept in mind. When he left the Atlantic fleet to go ashore as paymaster general his commanding officer, Ad- miral Badger, said of him. \He has made the pay department of the fleet a smoothly working mil- itary machine.\ That is the ideal he holds up to his bureau and 'corps: \Make It a smooth running military machine.\ .... VICW or5T GEORGC'3, GRENADA BOUT ten years ago James Gordon Bennett made a trip In his steam yacht through the West Indies, and when he reached La Guayra he cabled orders to the New York Herald to run a series of articles describing, that part of the Caribbean as a cruis- ing ground for yacht owners. Since then a good many yachtsmen have followed Mr. Bennett's lead, but few have got as much out of the trip in the way of excitement and varied ex- perience as did Frederick Fenger of Boston. Accompanied by his wife and a one- man crew, Skipper Fenger made a cruise of more than 6,000 miles in the specially designed schooner Diablesee. Storms along the gulf waters, dan- gers of starvation and hardships of long hours at the wheel were safely surmounted; suspicions of being Ger- man spies were finally routed; mu- tiny on board was quelled, when for a few days added help was taken on board, and at last, in June, 1916, the little 21 -ton schooner returned home. Nothing very exciting happened in the first part of the trip except the desertion of the \crew who feared to cross the gulf stream. Captain and Mrs. Fenger managed to reach Bimini, and continued to Nassau, where a new crew, in the person of one \Jamaica Fred,\ was shipped, and he stuck to the end. Ran Against a Revolution. \I hoped to reach St. Thomas in ten days,\ said Captain Fenger, \but first we ran into head winds and then a calm. We were in a dead beat for three and one-half weeks, except for two nights. Off the coast of Haiti we ran into a bard blow, in which our jibs were torn off while we were tak- ing in sail. We hove to under a fore- sail, and the next morning ran in un- der the island at Port de Pail. \There we found a revolution going on. Officers boarded us, headed by the harbor master. \We anchored with all our chains out, and the officers took all our pa- pers ashore. I was considerably wor- ried, fearing that they would seize the schooner. An American 80 -foot schooner yacht a year before had been fired on in the same locality.\ They got away from Port de Paix all right, however, and made their 'A heavy, and our mainsail was ripped along the foot. We put In a reef and kept on, from seven o'clock till about 10 p. m. \Then without any warning, the mainsail suddenly blew itself all to shreds. There wasn't enough left to make a patch. We set our storm try -sail and kept on running. I had just turned in from my watch, when Fred yelled: 'Now de for's'le done gone.' It, too, was almost a com- plete wreck, and we were beating about in considerable distress.. There wasn't any fear about it, just excite- ment. \All quieted finally, however, and we got along somehow to Chateau Belaire, and from there to St. George's, Grenada, which we reached on July 6, 1914. \We lay there for five months, and a new set of sails was sent dovin to us from the states. Dodging a Waterspout. \Our course was then made to St. Lucia, on the sailing route to Bar- bados. As we were sailing in the outside harbor a waterspout suddenly appeared off our bow, and we sported for several minutes trying to dodge It. A schooner of twice our tonnage, which we had passed during the night, lost all her headsaila in a blow which followed, but we managed to hold. \We docked at Barbados, and got in some Christmas nuts and raisins, theri cleared for Tobago, from which the name 'tobacco' comes. We spent Christmas in Scarborough. We had a bamboo tree for a Christmas tree. \From Dominica we continued to Guadalupe, and anchored one moon- light night off the shore, about two miles from Point a Pitre. The next morning we sailed into the harbor, and as we were entering we noticed a signal at the customs office. It con- sisted of a black ball over an Ameri- can flag upside down, and, though we couldn't find any meaning in inter- national code, we knew it was a warning to keep away. We kept on ashore, however, and the harbor mas- ter immediately came out, with a number of army officers, to make things look powerful. They demand- ed our passports. But we had left the United States befote the war, and had thought nothing of getting OTREET SCENE IN BARBADOS way, in heavy weather, along the coast of Haiti and San Domingo and across to Maraguez, Porto Rico. Then they beat their way to St. Thomas, but before reaching that island they ran entirely out of food and water. Sails Blown to Shreds. 'From St. Thomas we sailed to the Virgin islands,\ continued Captain Fenger, \and ran across to St.. Eusta- tius, where the harbor master, whom I knew, warned us that the weather was growing suspicious and that the early season had come when hurri- canes might be expected in the north- ern islands. We stayed two hours, and then set out for Dominica, and thence to St. Lucia. Just as we were under the lee of Martinique, the weather suddenly became extremely passports. I had a letter to the Brit- ish consul, which they took. They would not give me clearance, but I sailed without it for Antigua. \Thence to Barbuda we went, an island. recently taken over by the British government. It was stocked by the Coddington family of Eng- land about two centuries ago with wild deer, and the deer abound there now. Four hundred natives still live in a wailed town under a sort of feud- al system, and the island is governed by two white men, an overseer and his assistant. About 150 wrecks are scattered along i's shores.\ From Barbuda the Diablease azi1041 to St. Kitts and Nevis, then to St. Eustatius again, and from there heir e, without further remarkable incident. • •
