Sis-boom-bah! For Amalgamated Sponge

Everyone, particularly Davis, who represents management's view of recreation at Lockheed, seems satisfied with this state of affairs. "We would rather have 10 wives and 20 children watching a game than a thousand strangers," says Davis, who has something of the fatherly, homiletic manner of an Iowa (whence he came) high school principal. "Recreation is one of the means by which we try to build a Lockheed community, to establish ties that enable Lockheedians to work and live together more pleasurably."

This view, that the end of recreation is to create peace of mind rather than a bulging biceps or a scrapbook of press clippings, is common throughout industry, and Lockheed is a good example of how big business implements this philosophy. Lockheed, with some 75,000 employees, operates through several semiautonomous divisions. The oldest of these, Lockheed-California, has plants in and around Burbank. The recreation program there has more or less served as a model for those set up in newer Lockheed installations.

The organization of the Lockheed recreation program bears an overwhelming resemblance to that of a high school student council. The 22,000 employees of Lockheed-California are divided up into about 50 districts, from each of which is elected one representative to the council of the Lockheed Employee Recreation Club (LERC). This council, at least in a de jure sense, has final authority as to what kind of and how much recreation Lockheed will have. The elected LERC council approves the club's $200,000-a-year budget, two-thirds of which is derived from the profits of vending machines scattered through the sprawling factories. The council maintains and adds to the club-owned recreational facilities, passes along recreation suggestions from the employees and occasionally arbitrates beefs. LERC, not Lockheed, also pays the salaries of Davis and his staff of six. Davis functions more as a faculty adviser to LERC than as an employee of it, however. Everyone realizes that Davis is the liaison man between the recreation club and the Lockheed management, without whose approval there would obviously be neither club nor recreation. The LERC council, Davis and his staff operate from a 17-room clubhouse which, if Lockheed is a community, certainly functions as the civic center. No overall participation figures are kept, but a good guess is that somewhere between 50% and 75% of the 22,000 Lockheedians get involved in at least some of the fun scheduled from the clubhouse.

The athletic portion of the LERC program might be called industrial traditional. Bowling, golf, softball, basketball and tennis are the "organized" sports played after working hours (there are about 120 bowling teams and seven golf leagues). Additionally, LERC picks up the tab for a lot of recreation equipment that is used informally at the plant during lunch hours and work breaks. There are softball diamonds, lawn bowls and a putting green in the five-acre park in which the clubhouse stands. Volleyball, horseshoe and shuffleboard facilities are sprinkled liberally throughout the manufacturing area. During a year Davis and his staff distribute 11,000 decks of playing cards and a ton or so of checkers, chess and Scrabble sets. The recreation club has also set up 150 ping-pong tables in the various shops, and Lockheedians use them for about 400,000 games a year. (Ping-pong is the game among the play-at-work set. Folding tables can be put up in most production areas, and a surprising amount of boredom and tension can be worked off while whaling away at a celluloid ball for 10 minutes.)

For doing well in these various table and field events, Lockheedians are awarded some 400 trophies a year. To an outsider this may seem like a considerable amount of fancy hardware, but it actually indicates that Lockheed, as compared to other industrial sponsors, has a fairly low-pressure approach to trophies. Industry as a whole is big, big, big on trophies, probably because, lacking crowds or publicity, these baubles are the only tangible sort of recognition an industrial sportsman can get. A more typically trophy-happy firm would be IBM, where imposing awards are given for virtually every known game. The annual Trophy Dinner was long a soiree dear to the hearts of the IBM hierarchy, and the tradition continues to this day. At Trophy Dinners in branch computer shops all over the world, tons of brilliantly plated loving cups are turned over to sporting IBMers. A few years back, TV Sports Announcer Jim Simpson, fresh from covering the Melbourne Olympics, was the guest speaker at the Trophy Dinner of a Washington, D.C. IBM plant. Simpson watched and applauded politely as towering statues were handed out to winners in more or less hard sports like horseshoes and table tennis. But when a girl stepped up to claim a trophy emblematic of a second-place finish in the ladies' Chinese-checkers tournament, Simpson broke down. "My God," the shocked sportscaster gasped to his neighbor, "they only gave Herb Elliott a lousy gold medal."

In addition to being fairly subdued in the matter of trophies. Lockheed has made a relatively modest investment in large scale athletic facilities. Except for two soft-ball diamonds at LERC clubhouse park, most of the games are played at municipally owned fields and gyms, facilities which, Lockheed management willingly points out, Lockheed taxes have helped pay for. This is small potatoes—not Lockheed taxes, but owning just two soft-ball diamonds—in comparison to what some companies provide. IBM has full-scale country clubs, golf courses, softball diamonds, bowling alleys and tennis courts where IBMers fight it out for their trophies. Eastman Kodak has a multimillion-dollar recreation center in Rochester, N.Y., sort of a gigantic rumpus room that will accommodate 7,000 Kodakers at the same leisure time. Where public facilities are not available or are inadequate, corporations also are building their own parks. Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. has turned over a 366-acre park to its 11,000 employees in the St. Paul area. Among many other things, this 3M glade has a golf course, boatbuilding shed, ski run, field-archery range, skating rink, bridle trails, tenting areas and park rangers—the whole ball of leisure wax.

While Lockheed's athletic program probably rates no better than average when compared to those of similarly affluent and populous corporations, its club system—a complex of hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers and arts-and-crafters—is the pride and joy of Frank Davis and the LERC council. "Clubs, more than sports, draw the whole family into the Lockheed community," says Davis. "In the clubs mother and the children get to know Lockheed." Some 30 of these clubs with specialties ranging from scuba diving to Bible studies, boast a membership of 2,000 Lockheedians and their families. Special facilities and equipment are provided as the clubs need them. Five tons of ice are hauled in each fall for ski classes. The model railroaders are allotted a 20-by-30 room in the clubhouse where they have set up and are forever playing with toy railroad systems. The photo club has a professionally equipped darkroom, the rifle club an indoor range, the pilots a Link Trainer, the ham operators a radio station and the rock hounds a shop where they can saw and polish.

Throughout industry, the annual plant picnic and the annual Christmas party are the gala social productions of the recreation department. These peculiarly American occasions resemble political rallies planned by a Boy Scout leader. Thin-lipped personnel men laugh heartily as they splash around in the mustard with union stewards; paunchy executives play two innings of slow-pitch softball and then rush off to recuperate at their country clubs; the president kisses babies belonging to graveyard-shift workers and delivers a speech prepared by the PR boys about the glorious future awaiting those who continue to love grand old Amalgamated Sponge.

While the Lockheed Employee Recreation Club tries hard to retain these touches of Americana, the sheer quantity of Lockheedians alters the quality of the folksy image to the point where these industrial social events would touch a sardonic chord in an Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. The Lockheed Christmas party, for example, is held in the Bur-bank Civic Auditorium, and in the course of the day 11,000 toys are handed over to little Lockheedians. At one time all presents were doled out by Santa. But even with Santas working in relay teams, the line of waiting children sometimes stretched for two blocks. A few years back the traffic problem was solved by a recreational efficiency expert. Now there are signs directing Lockheed dependents to one of two lines—the traditional Santa queue or a fast, sans-Santa one.

"It was good thinking," explains Mike Varanese, the Lockheed recreation director (a director is less than manager in industrialese; Varanese is Davis' assistant). "You take some wise kid, 8 or 9 years old. He don't believe in Santa anymore. Those little babies the mothers are carrying, they don't believe in anything yet. There's no percentage in running those kinds past Santa. It's wasted on them."