Signal’s Home Just a Shell of Former Self : Few Remain at Firm’s Once-Busy Headquarters
The long, sleek sign remains, high on the Torrey Pines mesa, reminding all who enter the plush, Spanish-style structure that this was once the home of Signal Cos.
It’s relatively quiet now inside the 87,000-square-foot, two-story building. Most of Signal’s former executives accepted a lucrative retirement offer rather than relocate to Morris Township, N.J., headquarters of Allied-Signal, the entity that emerged last year from the marriage of Allied Corp., the nation’s 26th-largest company, and Signal, the 61st-largest.
Portraits of past Signal executives line the wall outside the wood-paneled board room, including Samuel H. Mosher, who founded the company in Los Angeles in 1928.
Mosher’s nephew, Forrest N. Shumway, breezes quickly past the painting, as he’s done regularly since Signal moved to San Diego from Beverly Hills in 1980. Shumway--who joined his uncle’s company in 1957, becoming president in 1964 and later rising to chief executive and chairman--is one of the few vestiges from the past.
Gone are most of the 160 or so executives and support staff who relocated from Beverly Hills. They were given the option of either signing up with Allied-Signal in New Jersey, transferring to a company subsidiary elsewhere or receiving a healthy lump sum in severance--as much as nine months’ worth in some cases. None of the executives relocated back east, according to company spokesman John Bold. Many have joined other San Diego-area companies; others have simply retired, he said.
Signal’s old headquarters now resembles something of an office dormitory.
Fourteen Allied-Signal employees toil there: Nine under former Signal Executive Vice President Dan Derbes, who now heads Allied-Signal International, formed last fall to develop new foreign markets and coordinate overseas marketing and manufacturing, and six under Shumway, who remains vice chairman of Allied-Signal and chairman of the board’s executive committee.
They bump into the 55 executives who work there for Henley Group, the $3.2-billion-in-sales company that was spun off from Allied-Signal earlier this year. The number is expected to grow, according to Henley officials.
Next door, a planned 50,000-square-foot building has only a foundation; a multi-story steel crane has been silent for months, awaiting a go or no-go decision as company officials ponder the logistical fallout of the merger and the subsequent spinoff.
The building, officials have now determined, will proceed, although its use is still undecided. Henley Group now owns the entire headquarters complex and will either move some operations into the new facility or lease it out. One thing remains certain, however: Shumway will remain, together with a small staff, shuttling to the East Coast once or twice each month and overseeing the Allied-Signal West Foundation, formerly known as the Signal Cos. Charitable Foundation.
Shumway will not directly oversee Allied-Signal operations on the West Coast--Garrett in Los Angeles, Bendix in Burbank, Amex and Fluid Systems in San Diego, Ampex in Redwood City, Calif.--but having the vice chairman a commuter flight away has its advantages.
“I’ve got plenty to do,” quipped the cigar-smoking Shumway.
As head of the Signal foundation, Shumway annually doles out hundreds of thousands of dollars to charitable and other nonprofit groups, a role he seems to relish.
It was Shumway--an active director of several nonprofit boards--who insisted in 1980 that his newly relocated executives volunteer their time to dozens of San Diego cultural and social service organizations. Those groups came to depend on Signal Cos. executives’ energy and expertise; now they’re concerned that without the corporation behind the executives, the spirit of volunteerism may subside.
“The groups here are very nervous,” Shumway conceded in an interview last week. “They’re afraid they’d just be chopped off, (but) that’s not the case.”
Shumway said former Signal executives will remain active in the San Diego area and insisted that Henley Group Chairman Michael Dingman--the former Signal Cos. president--is as committed as Shumway to the concept of corporate philanthropy. “Henley will be a viable company here,” Shumway pledged. “There may be even more support than before.”
The changes at the company his uncle founded have been extreme in the past year, but Shumway insisted that he has fully accepted a new reality that has pushed him outside the day-to-day operations and finds him No. 2 man on an East Coast-based board of directors.
“It’s not difficult for me. I never thought of myself as a powerful force in the corporate world,” said Shumway, a Stanford Law School graduate. “I guess there are people who have run companies and are bothered when they no longer do that. But if I had wanted to do that, I could have moved back to New Jersey.”
