Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1928moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 7, 1929

Man of the Year:Walter P. Chrysler

Chrysler Motors




   Last July, in a matter of fact sort of way, Walter P. Chrysler
offered the public a new automobile called the Plymouth. On the
thirtieth day of that month, Dodge Bros, stockholders approved a
$160,000,000 deal which turned over their business to the
Chrysler Corp. The Dodge company included Graham Bros., big truck
concern.

   Early in August, Mr. Chrysler brought out another new car,
called the De Soto. Many a man was a little confused for the
moment as to whether the De Soto and the Plymouth were new makes
by Chrysler or new Chrysler models. But the Chrysler models --
"65," "75" and "Imperial 80" -- continued to be advertised
distinct from De Soto and Plymouth.

   In autumn came the news that Walter P. Chrysler was going to
build the world's tallest skyscraper, a 68-story colossus
towering more than 800 feet above Lexington Ave, and 42nd St.,
Manhattan.

   Almost incidentally, he brought out a new line of commercial
cars -- the Fargo "Packets" and "Clippers."

   The doings of Walter P. Chrysler, already prodigious, now
became fabulous. People said that this torpedo-headed dynamo from
Detroit with the smile like Walter Hagen's and the sensitive
sophistication in oriental rugs, was building up a facsimile and
four-square competitor of mighty General Motors Corp. and that he
was going to house it in a skyscraper where it could peer down
over New York at the General Motors building on Broadway.

   Mr. Chrysler carefully explained that his building had nothing
to do with his automobile business, that it was a separate
enterprise which he had been planning since 1924, when his
personal automobile business began to be well under way. "I like
to build things," he said. "I like to do things. I am having a
lot of fun going thoroughly into everything with the architect."

   With the arrival of a new year, however, Mr. Chrysler
certified that the major part of the fable was indeed a fact. He
announced that the name of the Chrysler Corp. was changed,
significantly, to Chrysler Motors. He said: "It welds together
the advantages resulting from the common policy of engineering,
purchasing, manufacturing and financing under one personal head."

   Thus, with a large gesture, Walter P. Chrysler ended twelve
months of extraordinary activity. From motor man with one
product, he had become one of the chief U.S. industrialists.
Undeniably, he had been the outstanding businessman of the year.

   The change from Chrysler Corp. to Chrysler Motors struck much
deeper into the automobile world than a mere matter of names. A
new competitive set-up began to appear. In 1928, as everyone
remembers, the centre-ring automobile battle was Ford v. General
Motors. The issue: Could Ford's Model "A" check the growing
threat of Chevrolet and General Motors, or would Ford have to
accept second place? In 1929, it seemed last week, the issue is
enormously complicated by the injection of Chrysler Motors. Can
Chrysler challenge General Motors?

   In products, the parallelism is nearly perfect. Each
organization can offer a car for every pocketbook. Balancing
General Motors, Chrysler has "everything except an icebox:"

CHRYSLER                           GENERAL MOTORS

Plymouth $655 up                   Chevrolet $525 up
Dodge Standard 6 $725
                                   Pontiac $745
De Soto $845
Dodge Victory 6 $845
                                   Oldsmobile $925
Chrysler 65 $1,040
                                   Oakland $1,145
                                   Buick 20 $1,195
                                   Buick 40 $1,325
                                   Buick 50 $1,525
Chrysler 75 $1,535
Dodge Senior 6 $1,575
                                   La Salle $2,420
Chrysler Imperial 80
  $2,875
                                   Cadillac (Fisher)
                                     $3,295
                                   Cadillac (Fleetwood)
                                     $4,195
Fargo Commercial Cars              General Motors Trucks,
                                     Yellow Cabs
Motor Boats                        Frigidaires
                                   Delco Lights, Electric
                                     Plants, etc.

   There are, however, some major differences between the two
units. Direction of General Motors is divided, impersonal;
Chrysler Motors, like the Ford company, is united under one
chief. (Chief Chrysler has many an able assistant. Among them:
Financial Vice President B.E. Hutchinson; Sales Vice President
(and President of De Soto) J.E. Fields; Manufacturing Vice
President K.T. Keller. These and others Mr. Chrysler has publicly
thanked for their share in developing Chrysler Motors.) General
Motors uses the financial wizards of the Raskob-du Pont type;
Chrysler relies chiefly on Walter P. Chrysler. General Motors is
close to J.P. Morgan & Co.; Chrysler is the good friend of the
Brady family and, more recently, of Dillon, Read & Co. General
Motors has issued the huge total of 43,500,000 shares of common
stock, (After the 2 1/2 for 1 split-up,authorized Dec. 10.)
Chrysler only 4,423,484. General Motors sold 1,576,708 cars from
January to October; Chrysler's 1928 output was about 500,000,
will be 700,000 in 1929. General Motors earned $289,146,201 in
the year ending Sept. 30; Chrysler, $25,049,270. General Motors
stock rose last year on the New York exchange from 130 to 224;
Chrysler from 54 3/4 to 140 1/2.

   Mr. Chrysler does not ignore the lead with which General
Motors starts the contest. But he sees no limit to the markets
over which the two motor-monsters can struggle. Last September,
he visioned a world which is learning the uses of the automobile:
"It devolves upon the United States to help to motorize the
world.... Road building is taking root in Australia, vast
Africa, Spain, South America.... Every new development,
highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it
be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in
Peru, means an added use of the automobile."

   Obliged to prophesy again last week, he announced: "Our
automobile industry will achieve another production and sales
record. I believe the figure will be approximately 4,750,000 cars
by the end of next December. (Other prophets have placed the
figure as high as 5,550,000. Output in 1927 was 3,401,326; for
eleven months of 1928, 4,124,225. Estimated 1928 production:
4,500,000.) I believe the U.S. will export, during the year,
approximately 1,000,000 automobiles."


   Someone, talking about Walter P. Chrysler two years ago, said:
"The biggest game stays in the deep forest." The reference was to
Mr. Chrysler's relative obscurity from the public eye during they
years when he was the greatest doctor of sick automobile
companies that the industry had ever known. Sweet are the uses of
that sort of obscurity. All his life Chrysler has managed to make
himself thoroughly well known in quarters where it would do him
the most good.

   "Walt" Chrysler was a Kansas boy. Mr. Chrysler Sr. sat at the
throttle of a Union Pacific locomotive and made his home at
Ellis, Kan., where the railroad had some shops. Young Walt worked
as a chore-boy at the grocery store. He hated the little wagon he
had to deliver bundles in. When he was 17 he got into the Union
Pacific shops as an apprentice, glad of $.05 per hour pay and a
chance to learn something.

   In those days, 35 years ago, a machinist had to know not only
how to use his tools but how to make them, if necessary.
Mechanical engineering became young Walt Chrysler's life, not his
profession. After a year he was able to make the model steam
engine which he still shows to his friends. When he was earning
$.07 1/2 per hour he wanted a shotgun; so he made that, too.

   After he got his journeyman's certificate, the Ellis shopboy
set out to see what other railroad shops, and the western world
to which the railroads ran, were like. He got as far as Salt Lake
City, where he took a job in the Rio Grande & Western roundhouse.
He got married and began studying in the International
Correspondence School. Soon came his first big "break," the
blown-out cylinder head, now famed among Chrysler admirers, which
he and a helper mended in time to send the mail-train out on
schedule.

   The superintendent, one Hickey, expressed gratitude by not
forgetting. Three months later the new Colorado & Southern shop
foreman at Trinidad, Colo., was a tireless, driving, hardheaded
youngster named Walter Chrysler. Other railroads heard, needed,
beckoned. After a bit the superintendent of motive power of the
whole Chicago & Great Western system was a new man named
Chrysler. "W.P." they called him, aged 33.

   The American Locomotive Co. at Pittsburgh needed a works
manager. The Great Western's superintendent of motive power,
well-paid though he was, concluded that, without executive
experience, a mechanical man can get just so far and no further
in railroading. Moreover, building engines for sale interested
him more than buying engines and keeping them running until they
died of old age. He took the Pittsburgh job, at a big drop in
salary. The salary did not stay down long.

   During his Great Western period Mr. Chrysler lived in Oelwein,
Iowa. His mechanical curiosity was aroused by the two or three
horseless thing-a-ma-jigs that sometimes moved through the
streets, especially on Sundays, chugging and snorting and kicking
up dust with a maximum of noise and a minimum of grace. They were
called "automobiles" and Oelwein's farmers agreed contemptuously
with turn-of-the-century cartoonists that the only difference
between an automobilist and a dum-fool was that the dumfool was
prob'ly born that way and couldn't help it. Engineer Chrysler
gave little thought to Oelwein's farmers and automobilists but he
went to the Chicago automobile show of 1905 (Chicago's fifth
show.) and stood entranced in front of a beauteous white thing-a-
ma-jig with four doors, a bulbous horn and red leather
upholstery. It was the 1905 Locomobile. The salesman said it cost
$5,000 cash. Mr. Chrysler had $700 in the bank at Oelwein. He
borrowed $4,300 and shipped it home.

   Mrs. Chrysler was not very much pleased, especially when she
discovered that her husband did not mean to get some good out of
so much extravagance by driving it around Oelwein. Instead, what
did he do but take it all apart, put it together and take it all
apart again, getting all greasy and wasting his holidays and
scratching his head like a perfect crank.

   It is said that the Chrysler automobile was dreamed and
determined by that tall, husky, pensive resident of Oelwein among
the dissembled parts of his 1905 Locomobile, which broadens the
thread of romance in the Chrysler career from 1905 to 1924, when
the first Chrysler car appeared.

   The recent career of Motor-Maker Chrysler has been such a
succession of crescendoes that the long overture is in danger of
getting drowned out. Particularly in view of the present,
climactic movement of Chrysler Motors v. General motors, it is
important to recall that the Buick company, cornerstone of
General Motors, was the first automobile company Mr. Chrysler
ever took in hand. He took it in hand in 1911 and had it until
1919. He jacked up its production from 40 cars per day to 550;
established its name as a synonym for soundness; increased the
Buick profits to 50 millions per annum. During William Crapo
Durant's second regime in General Motors (1915-20), Walter P.
Chrysler's touch was felt in all General Motors shops, for he was
in charge of all General Motors production. But for his
difference -- not a quarrel -- with Mr. Durant, who later was
ousted, Walter P. Chrysler would doubtless still be the
engineering brain of this gargantuan concern.

   Into the three years, 1920-1923, Chrysler packed a decade's
experience of the one thing he thus far lacked -- automotive
finance. He overhauled the Willys-Overland company from hub-caps
to stockholders and, in the midst of that task, undertook the
same job for Maxwell. After cutting the Willys-Overland debt
from 46 million to 18, he gave Maxwell his whole attention. The
Maxwell-Chalmers merger was one step and then the Chrysler
Corporation took shape.

   It was perhaps an accident, perhaps an earned result, that
that cynosure of U.S. attention, the Prince of Wales, visiting on
Long island in the summer of 1924, was reported in the newspapers
to be using a smart, little-known roadster on his prankish
nocturnal visits; a roaster so little-known and so unusual, with
its four-wheel brakes and indirectly-lighted dashboard, that the
newspapers felt justified in mentioning its name -- Chrysler.