Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  What drew me to the nightclubs was not so much drinking as loving to dance. Most everybody was doing the rumba and the tango in those days, and there was a craze for the conga, which was really for exhibitionists—normally I didn’t get involved in it. I made friends with a dance instructor named Teddy Rodriguez, whose business card said “Professor of the Dance.” He gave lessons in his apartment, which had mirrors on all the walls. We’d often go out with Teddy and I’d pick up the tab for him and his girlfriend. He was a decent fellow but sometimes talked too much. One Saturday morning I woke up at home around ten-thirty after a long night out with the crowd. When I came downstairs Mother was waiting for me, looking very stiff. She said, “You certainly ought to think about the kind of friends you’re with and how you’re spending your time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A Latin man called here about nine o’clock and said he found your wallet on the table of a nightclub. He seemed to think I was out with you last night. He made remarks about the wonderful way I danced. He told me I was beginning to get it with the hips in the rumba.” In spite of herself Mother began to laugh. Teddy had mistaken her for one of the women in our group.

  Needless to say, my nightclubbing created a stir around IBM. When I took a drink, I never tried to hide it. This was a way of saying, “I’m not going to let IBM run my life.” Of course my father saw things very differently. But instead of simply saying I should knock it off, he made his point by telling me another of his stories. This one involved J. P. Morgan and young Charles Schwab. It was 1901, right after Morgan organized U.S. Steel and talked Schwab into taking the top job. Schwab went to Paris to blow off steam, and stories about his hell-raising soon filtered back across the ocean. When he got back to New York, Morgan called him into his office and told him to stop acting like a fool.

  Schwab said, “Mr. Morgan, you’re being unfair. You know perfectly well I’m not doing anything you don’t do yourself, except that you do it behind closed doors.”

  “Mr. Schwab, that is what doors are for,” said Morgan.

  In his own life, Dad set a great example and in fact never had much to hide. But he believed that the business leader who covers his imperfections by keeping them private is better than the one who says, “This is how I am. Let it all hang out.” Dad probably would have pressed this point harder if I’d been really reckless in the way I lived. But as much as I loved a good time, I kept myself out of the gossip columns and was never involved in a scandal. I was with girls constantly, but I avoided the raciest women, partly because they scared me. A lot of cafe society women in those days ran around with so many men that they had no idea where their emotions lay. I’d already been hurt by one beautiful and well-bred girl, so I knew that women were capable of inflicting great pain even when they didn’t mean to. I hate to think what might have happened had I not known Isabel Henry before being turned loose in New York.

  I never got truly involved with anyone until I met Olive Cawley on a blind date in early 1939. A schoolmate of mine from Hun set it up for the two of us to join him and his wife on a ski weekend. They picked me up at the Plaza Hotel, where I went down the steps and saw a little Ford with a ski rack and an astonishingly lovely girl in back. Vermont was a six- or seven-hour drive, and Olive and I talked the entire way. She was such a beautiful and sunny woman. She came from a good family but didn’t have much money. I found it appealing that she was earning her own way and making her own decisions. She lived at the Barbizon Hotel and worked as a model for the John Robert Powers agency, which was the best in those days. She had been on magazine covers and in lots of ads, such as one for Lucky Strike that showed a picture of Olive holding up a leaf in a tobacco field. Her face was known; when we were out together people would often stop her on the street and say, “You look so familiar.” At one point, when we had had a falling-out, I found I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Her picture was always in some magazine to remind me. Olive had a way of doing small kindnesses that revealed her gentle and giving nature. I’d gone around with a lot of beautiful girls, but none of them had the unending generosity I found in her. She was somewhat frivolous, but so was I, and I thought about her seriously from the very start.

  When my parents heard from my sisters that I was seeing a model, they hinted that they thought I was making a mistake. But I wanted somebody who would give me sweetness, love, and support—and somebody who wasn’t going to feel upstaged if I actually managed to accomplish something in my life. When I started bringing Olive to family occasions, Mother kept her distance at first but Father unbent and welcomed her. He could be very pragmatic about matters of the heart.

  The longer I worked at IBM, the more I resented my father for the cultlike atmosphere that surrounded him. I’d look at Business Machines, the IBM weekly newspaper, and there would be a big picture of Dad and a banner headline announcing something really mundane like “THOMAS J. WATSON OPENS NEW ORLEANS OFFICE.” The more successful Dad became, the more people flattered him—and he soaked it up. Everything flowed around him, he was snapping out orders, and there was always a secretary running behind him with a notebook. He would work on his editorials for Think magazine as though it were Time and he were Henry Luce and millions of people were waiting to hear what he had to say.

  My disdain came out during family dinners, which were dominated, as always, by Dad. When he held forth everyone would be very attentive except me. I’d behave in the most sullen and insulting way. I’d light a cigarette, slouch in my chair, roll my eyes, and look at the ceiling. Olive was shocked by these antics, and my sisters and brother thought I was a nuisance. Dad never gave any indication that he noticed, but I think he decided I was in need of more attention. He started giving me breaks from my sales duties, calling me away from the office to travel with him or just to consult. For example, he brought me along to watch when he went down to testify before Congress in 1940. The hearing was about “technological unemployment”—the question of whether automation was stealing jobs from workers. Father took the position that automation would expand the economy, spur consumers, and create new demand. He quoted Henry Ford to that effect.

  Dad also got me involved in the preparations for IBM Day at the 1939 World’s Fair. This was the same fair that Herbert Houston sold pavilion space for. What Dad envisioned was the biggest event in company history. He was bringing ten thousand guests into Manhattan—including all of IBM’s factory men, field service men, salesmen, and their wives—and putting them up in hotels for three days. A lot of these people had never been in the city before. There were ten chartered trains from Endicott, one from Rochester, one from Washington, and additional chartered Pullmans from all over. To announce the event, Dad took out full-page ads in the New York papers. The headlines read, “THEY ALL ARE COMING.” No one had seen anything like it since the troop movements of World War I. Of course, when it came to ceremonies Father always went flat out, but IBM Day was daring even by his standards. It cost a million dollars, about ten percent of the company’s profits for the entire year. He was operating on this grand scale because he wanted to convey the idea of IBM’s bigness.

  Dad almost had a tragedy on his hands instead of the triumph he was counting on. The night the guests were en route, we got word of a terrible accident. One of the trains loaded with IBM families had crashed into the back of another in upstate New York. It wasn’t clear how many people were hurt. Dad climbed out of bed at two in the morning, got in a car with my sister Jane, and drove up to the town of Port Jervis, where the accident had happened. They found out nobody had been killed. But four hundred of the fifteen hundred people on board were hurt, and some were hurt seriously. Dad and Jane spent all the following day in the hospital, talking to people and making sure they had the best medical care. Dad was also giving orders by phone, and executives in New York started scrambling. Extra doctors and nurses were sent up to Port Jervis. A new train was arranged for the people who hadn’t been hurt or who were well enough to continue the trip.
When they arrived in New York, IBM had a fully staffed field hospital set up for them in the Hotel New Yorker. Dad finally got back to Manhattan in the middle of the night, and the first thing he did was order flowers for all the families in the wreck. He had his executives get florists out of bed so that bouquets could be delivered to the hotel rooms before breakfast. Nobody ever forgot the way my father handled the Port Jervis wreck. I was on the sidelines, but he made a deep impression on me. I saw how far you had to go to serve the company. IBM needed that kind of personal involvement from its managers to survive.

  IBM Day came off with all the fanfare Dad had intended. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave the opening speech, and Dad had a special greeting to read from President Roosevelt. In the IBM pavilion, along with the predictable displays of electric typewriters and tabulating machines, there was an international art show, with a painting from each country in which IBM did business. The opera stars Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett sang, and the Philadelphia Orchestra played Bach, Sibelius—and the IBM Symphony. The program was carried on radio networks, where Dad paid to make sure IBM Day got broadcast. It seemed to me at the time that he’d gone completely overboard. But in fact, IBM Day was a public relations coup.

  On the first business day of 1940, I became the company’s top salesman when U.S. Steel Products, an account that had been thrown into my territory to make me look good, came across with a huge order. With one day’s “work” I filled my quota for the entire year. There were headlines about it in the company newspaper: Thomas J. Watson Jr., first man in the 1940 Hundred Percent Club. I felt demeaned. Everybody knew that I was the old man’s son, and that otherwise I never could have sold so much in such a short time. From then on, even though life outside of IBM seemed impossible to imagine, all I could think about was finding a way out.

  I might never have reached this turning point if there hadn’t been a war on in Europe. It seemed inevitable that America was going to get involved, and I wanted to be in the military, flying airplanes, when war came. Qualifying as an Air Corps pilot wasn’t as simple as it sounds. To begin with, I wanted to avoid flying school, because I thought the military discipline would cause me to wash out. I was no twenty-year-old kid; I was twenty-six, an experienced pilot, and not about to trade one situation in which I had to take a lot of guff for another. When I learned that Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S.

  Army Air Corps, was giving a speech to a young men’s group in New York, I went to ask him what to do. Arnold was a very direct and impatient man. At the start of the question-and-answer session I raised my hand and he said, “Yup?”

  I said, “I have about a thousand hours of civilian time, and I’d like to know how to get into the Air Corps without going to flying school.”

  “There isn’t any way. Go to the flying school. Next question.”

  But I stayed standing and said, “But, General, it seems like a waste of the government’s money to get trained all over again.”

  “It’s an entirely different kind of flying and your civilian time is no good.” He just about ordered me to sit down. Well, I did sit down and said to myself, “I’m going to get around him.”

  I had a second reason for wanting to skip flight school. Something was wrong with my eyes. I confirmed this by going privately to a doctor who put me through the Air Corps eye exam. One of the instruments was for testing muscle balance. When you looked into it, one eye saw a dot and the other eye saw a line. The idea was to superimpose one on the other by turning a knob. After I did this, the doctor shook his head. “You’ll never make it,” he said. “You’d crash an airplane right away. You have absolutely no depth perception.”

  “But Doctor,” I said, “I have over a thousand hours in the air and I’ve been flying for seven years!”

  “Well, it’s highly dangerous, highly dangerous.” He explained that I had extremely unbalanced eye muscles. My left eye looks down and my right eye looks up, with three times the amount of divergence allowed by the Air Force. But I wasn’t about to give up my flying career. Instead I bought one of those testing machines and practiced setting those dots and lines at home. I became so adept at it that once I made it into the Air Force I passed the test every year for five years.

  In the springtime I found out that the way around flight school was to join the National Guard. All they required of pilots was three hundred hours civilian time and a flight test. I signed up right away, and before the year was out I had my wings and a commission as a second lieutenant in the 102nd Observation Squadron. Weekdays I’d mark time at IBM, and every weekend I’d go out to the squadron’s airfield on Staten Island and practice.

  My father hardly talked to me about the war, but a couple of weeks after I enlisted he returned his Hitler medal. I knew he’d pinned an awful lot on the idea of World Peace Through World Trade, and the coming of war left him somewhat muted. He wasn’t a pacifist, but he was very ambivalent about whether the United States should get into the fight. That was reflected in the way he treated munitions work. Some companies, like North American Aviation, had started shipping warplanes abroad even before Hitler invaded Poland. But Dad didn’t like the idea of turning Endicott into an arms plant, and he wasn’t happy when the War Department pressed a contract on IBM, in the autumn of 1940, to manufacture machine guns. He set up a subsidiary company in Poughkeepsie, New York, for this work and kept that whole enterprise at arm’s length. Of course, when war finally came IBM went all out and Dad put our name proudly on the weapons we made.

  In September 1940, Roosevelt mobilized the National Guard and finally I had what I wanted: I was a full-fledged military pilot. My squadron soon moved to Fort McClellan near Anniston, Alabama, for training. Anniston made Endicott seem like a garden spot; it was hot, wet, and boring. But I didn’t mind because I was free from IBM, was flying every day, and I had college friends in nearby cities to see on weekends. After having toed the line at IBM for three years in New York, I indulged in some terribly immature behavior. I remember one wild night in Cincinnati, in which I was the only man in uniform at a dinner party, and it suddenly occurred to me that all these people were fiddling while Rome was burning. The host was wealthy, about my age, and he had a marvelous family in a marvelous house in a marvelous town. Somehow I had the idea that he ought to enlist.

  I stepped outside to get some air and noticed a garden hose hooked up to the side of the house. I’ve loved hoses ever since I was little, and this seemed like the perfect way to express what I thought of these self-satisfied people. I turned it on, went back into the dining room, and sprayed the entire dinner party. Two big guys came to life and started after me, but I ran back out and dove into the pool. They’d have thrown me in, anyway. For years after that people would come up to me and say, “Aren’t you the guy that hosed down the dinner party at So-and-so’s house?” And I’d say, “Gee, I don’t think so.”

  On some level, I think I must have understood it was high time to grow up. Whenever Olive visited for the weekend my behavior improved. We had terrific fun together, and I could sense a depth of emotion in her that more and more made me want to forget the pranks and get serious. We were both still seeing other people, but as war came nearer, marriage seemed more and more appealing. I knew she dreamed of starting a family, and the thought that I might get killed made me want one too. So in November 1941, I visited New York, took her dancing on Starlight Roof at the Waldorf, and asked her to marry me. I had a diamond ring in my pocket. Earlier that day I’d gone to the jeweler Harry Winston in my rumpled uniform, with a plea of poverty, and he gave me a pretty good deal. That was one big difference between me and Dad—he’d have taken out a loan to buy a nice engagement ring, but I preferred to take the cash I had on hand and bargain for one. Olive and I had a big engagement party in Locust Valley, at the home of her aunt Olive Shea, who was married to Ed Shea, the head of the Ethyl Corporation. We scheduled our wedding for the day after Christmas.

  I always thought it would be Hitler who’d bring u
s into the war, but the Japanese beat him to the punch. I was in a car on my way back to the base with my squadron mate John Gwynne and his wife when the news of Pearl Harbor came over the radio. We thought it couldn’t be true, but several stations were broadcasting the same report. For a while we sat quietly and finally someone said, “This means major changes in our lives.” We knew we’d never stay in Anniston; probably they’d retrain the squadron and send us out to fly bombers.

  At the base everyone was very grim. Many people thought the Japanese were going to attack the West Coast any minute. Within a week we got orders transferring the squadron to California. When I heard that, I didn’t waste any time. I called Olive and said, “You have to come down here so we can get married right away.” At first she cried and said her dress wasn’t ready, but she rose to the occasion. She spent that afternoon in stores and got on a train with her mother that night. I called my family and they followed the next day. I asked my father to be best man, which wasn’t the conventional thing to do. I could have gotten Gwynne or one of my college friends, but these were men he hardly knew. At that point, Dad was very much on my mind. Underneath all my resentment and underneath all the he-bores-me, he-embarrasses-me-with-his-folderol-about-IBM-Day attitude—underneath all that was a great love and respect. I couldn’t have resented him as much as I did unless it was based on some much deeper emotion. The war was upon us and I thought I might be killed. In that moment of great drama, I put all my resentment aside. That’s why I invited him to be my best man.

  The only place for everyone to stay in Anniston was a cheap hotel near the base that literally had spittoons in the lobby. I couldn’t get away from the base at all, so Olive had to buy her own wedding ring. At the post chapel they were banging out a wedding every fifteen minutes. We nearly missed our slot when the sentries wouldn’t let Olive onto the base—I’d forgotten to give them her name at the gate. By the time she finally got in, everybody was upset. We rushed up the aisle together—the whole wedding party in a bunch—and Olive and I were married. I knew she was disappointed, getting married in such rough circumstances, and I was determined that our honeymoon would show some imagination, even though I only had two days’ leave. I’d found a brick cottage in Anniston that had ivy-covered trellises, rented it, and stocked it with food and champagne. Dad came through with one of his thoughtful gestures. There was no florist in Anniston, so he called one in Atlanta, and when I carried Olive over the threshold, the cottage was filled with roses.