Our Own Hall of Fame
ROBERT INGERSOLL INGALLS
FATHER-SON BATTLE
Ingalls Started Empire Making Iron Love Seats
DAYTON DAILY NEWS MARCH 21, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
Logan county’s Robert Ingersoll Ingalls left his mark all over the country—on bridges, power houses, factories, blast furnaces and sky scrapers. But he prowled through his own plant after hours picking up stray nuts and bolts and turning off lights.
Obsessively cost-conscious and fantastically successful, Ingalls left behind America’s fourth largest shipyard and one of the country’s biggest independent steel companies when he died in 1951. That year, the combined Ingalls Industries grossed more than $200 million.
A NATIVE of Huntsville, go-getter Ingalls was graduated from Bellefontaine high school in 1898, attended Ohio Northern, spent 10 years as an accountant and then bought a small ornamental iron works in Birmingham, Ala., in 1910.
He was 28, and later became fond of say[ing] he started with “one Negro, one mule, a busted crane and the 26th St. Viaduct for a roof.”
AT FIRST the business confined itself to wrought iron love seats and the like, but Ingalls was willing to take chances. (Once he considered converting to pecan praline production to tide the business over a slack period.)
Gradually the iron works grew and expanded to become a national leader in iron and steel fabrication.
INGALLS HAD a formula for success: one-man control, sleepless supervision, low wages but high productive bonuses. A tireless dynamo who used to go down to the plant at 5 a. m. on Sundays “to see what’s gong on,” he liked to think out his business problems relaxing in a canoe.
In 1939 Ingalls took one of his chances. He opened a shipyard at Pascagoula, Miss., and when World War II came he snared $250 million in contracts.
AFTER the war, when many shipbuilders were being cautious, he bid drastically low on contracts, ending up with a $228 million backlog of orders.
But Ingalls’ savage battle with his son, Robert Jr., for control of the steel-ship empire became almost as legendary as his industrial coups. In 1948 the elder Ingalls was chairman of the board and his son was sitting in the president’s office when Bob Jr. got a divorce and remarried.
INGALLS, A stern Presbyterian, was enraged. He sacked his son and moved to acquire his stock. (At one point he hired armed guard to carry $2,120,000 in $1,000 bills to buy back Bob Jr.’s stock.) Bob Jr. refused and in a series of law suits that got as high as the U. S. Supreme court, finally kept his stock and got back into the company.
Ingalls was aboard his lavish houseboat ready to celebrate his victory when he got word of the court’s decision. He suffered stroke and two weeks later—at 68—he was dead.
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