The News from Newport News

barge from Baltimore are poised under a gantry taking on black coal that is piled in tall mounds on land (regularly sprayed with water to keep down the soot). Not too inviting here. The city’s dominant feature, stretching for miles along the waterfront, is the giant Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard. It was founded by railroad baron Collis Huntington more than a hundred years ago to service the ships that unloaded at his docks. The Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding Co., as it was known then, began turning out military ships by the scores during the war years, becoming the largest individually owned yard in America, until Northrop Grumman bought it not long ago. At one of the piers, towering 20 stories above the water and looking about as big as a reclining Empire State Building, broods the newly commissioned aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, undergoing