No canned commodity: Recollections of a brief but strenuous engagement that started with the merger desires of Signa Oil and Gas Company and the Garrett Corporation;

              o .-SESP
V/
"How," asked the Wall Street Journal on December 23,
1963, "does an attractive maiden fend off the unwanted
advances of a wealthy suitor? Often by eloping with
someone else."
The maiden in the WSJ article was Garrett Corpo­ration,
a big Los Angeles maker of gas turbines and
"environmental controls," principally in the aerospace
industry. The wealthy suitor was Curtiss-Wright Corpo­ration,
which had asked for tenders of some 47% of
Garrett's stock—enough to gain working control. And
the someone else was Signal Oil and Gas Company, a
client of our Los Angeles Office.
The article told of the financial in-fighting that fol­lowed
Curtiss-Wright's advances, and it made fascinat­ing
reading. We have a sequel to tell —a story about a
few long days in October that year when a crew of Los
Angeles Office accountants strove mightily to win on
another front.
As a story it could have come from Omaha or Bir­mingham,
from Buffalo or Orange County—you don't
have to be on the staff very long before you have your
own tale of working on X assignment—Saturdays, Sun­days,
and past midnight. And though psychologists
might say you can't perform effectively beyond a cer­tain
level of fatigue, it's amazing what self-winding our
people can do to keep up a high level of performance
under do-or-die conditions.
In most cases, the heroes are unsung; but the records
are there to confound the man who comes new on the
engagement next year and tries to puzzle out—"how
in the world did those fellows get a job that size done
in such a short time?"
We recalled Signal-Garrett recently (it was an SEC
engagement and involved several accounting questions
that were batted around the Executive Office) and we
asked the men who did the work to recall "how it was."
They came back at us, despite the intervening years,
with vivid details.
Monday, 8:00 am
Rudy Greipel told us how it started, on Monday, Octo­ber
21, 1963. "I was the senior in charge of the Signal
audit. As I drove to work that morning, I was thinking
about which assistants I could release, because our in­terim
work was nearly finished, and I forgot to tune in
E. E Hutton's business news on the car radio. I realized
this as I pulled into the parking lot. Oh well, I thought,
probably nothing exciting happened over the weekend
anyway."
But it had. Ted Middendorf, driving in on the Holly­wood
freeway, heard the news that Rudy missed, and
on it, as it had been for the past month, was the offer
by Curtiss-Wright Corporation to buy Garrett stock.
But also on the news was a report of a possible merger
of Signal and Garrett.
Ted was exploring with other assistants the effects
such a merger might have on their work assignments
when Rudy got off the elevator at the eleventh floor. As
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