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Walter P. Chrysler with his Chrysler Six.
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Walter Percy Chrysler was born in the prairie town of Wamego, Kansas on April 2, 1875. As a young boy, he admired his father and the work he did as a railroad engineer for the Kansas Pacific railroad. He loved the excitement of the roundhouse and the mightly roar of the steam locomotives that were serviced there.
Sometimes, young Walter was allowed to ride with his father in the locomotive cab as the train cut through the quiet countryside. He would pull the whistle cord announcing the passage of the train through small towns and sleeping villages.
Walter's early association with the raw power of the steam locomotive instilled in him a fascination with mechanics, but Walter's father wanted his son to enter college after high school. Much to his father's disappointment, seventeen-year-old Walter began a four-year mechanic's apprenticeship in a railroad machine shop sweeping the floor.
Walter was anxious to become a journeyman machinist and master mechanic, so he could afford to marry his high school sweetheart. To supplement his chosen career, Walter was an avid reader of Scientific American magazine, where he earned a mechanical engineering degree from International Correspondence Schools headquartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Chrysler worked for several Western railroads as a itinerant mechanic who soon developed a reputation as a gifted, problem- solving engineer. He was particularly skillful at fine-tuning the valves of the massive steam-powered locomotives. After a year of traveling as a journeyman mechanic, he landed a foreman's assistant job at the Sante Fe roundhouse in Wellington, Kansas.
After working another year there, Chrysler was able to save some money. He was homesick for his hometown, but more importantly, he was lovesick for Miss Della V. Forker, his Ellis, Kansas girlfriend whom he married on June 4, 1901.
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Della Viola Folker
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The bride's family and friends felt Della had married beneath her station in life. They preferred she marry a professional or a businessman rather than a train mechanic. Her parents did not fully appreciate what hard work and ambition lurked beneath the surface of their son-in-law.
The happy couple started married life with $60. They spent the next two years in Salt Lake City where Walter worked for the Denver and Rio Grande Railway at thirty cents an hour for a ten-hour day. He rose through the ranks from crew foreman, shop foreman, and master mechanic. As his reputation for plant efficiency grew, so did his family with two daughters and two sons. He needed to find a job that paid more.
In 1908 at the age of thirty-three, Walter Chrysler was offered the job of general works manager of the American Locomotive Company (ALC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a starting salary of $8,000 a year. In two years, he turned the ailing company around by showing a profit for the first time in years. The company's bankers took note. Chrysler was asked if he had ever thought about entering the automobile business. Of course he had.
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Chrysler was an automobile enthusiast from the beginning of the industry. In 1908, he went to the Chiciago Auto Show and fell in love with a Locomobile touring car with a $5,000 price tag. He could only justify spending $700 from a family savings account, but he had to have that car.
Chrysler borrowed $4,300 from a local banker when he found a friend who co-signed for the loan. The car was painted ivory white with red interior trim and a cushioned bench seat. The canvas top was khaki-colored.
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1908 Locomobile with equipped tool box on the running board.
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Rather than drive the car to Pittsburgh over unimproved country roads, Chrysler shipped the car home by rail. Once in town, he hired a team of horses to tow his new car home. For the next three months, Chrysler disassembled and reassembled the car no less than seven times. After he was familiar with the car's mechanical systems, he gassed it up and became a motorist. Soon after he paid back his car note, Chrysler bought a six-cylinder Stevens-Duryea.
The following year, Chrysler was summoned to New York City to discuss a business proposition. He met for lunch with Charles W. Nash, president of Buick Motor Company, who was looking for someone to become production manager at his plant to reduce costs and increase profits.
Nash asked Chrysler what ALC was paying him yearly. By then, he was pulling down $12,000 a year. Nash offered Chrysler a 50% cut in pay with yearly performance bonuses to move his family to Flint, Michigan and manage Buick Motors.
Recognizing the long term future of personal transportation, Chrysler turned his back on the railroad industry in a move that would change his life forever. After eighteen months under Chrysler's direction, the Buick line outperformed other General Motors models. Production soared from 50 cars a day to 550 cars a day. He was soon promoted to vice president and general manager of Buick Motors for the next three years earning $50,000 a year.
In 1915, original General Motors founder William "Willie" Durant bought back his company after a hostile takeover by bankers and stockholders. He traded stock from his successful startup company Chevrolet and brought the Chevy brand under the GM banner, once again becoming the president and chairman of the board.
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| William "Willie" Durant |
Chrysler turned in his resignation, but Durant recognized his value to the corporation. Durant offered Chrysler a three-year contract making him president of Buick at $10,000 a month salary with a yearly half-a-million-dollar bonus of GM stock. He would report to nobody but Durant himself.
Under Chrysler's leadership, Buick became GM's strongest brand and the most successful automobile brand in the country, but Durant and Chrysler had different management styles which led Chrysler to resign after his three-year contract ran out. Durant bought out Chrysler's GM stock for ten million dollars making him one of the richest men in the country. Their parting was amicable.
Within the year, Walter Chrysler assumed directorship of the Willys-Overland Motor Company of Toledo, Ohio, for a one million dollar a year salary. Two years later, he left Willys-Overland over disagreements with the company's owner.
In 1921, Chrysler bought controlling interest in the struggling Maxwell Motor Company. Over the next several years, he phased out the Maxwell brand which was drowning in debt. Chrysler and several engineers he hired away from Studebaker Motors developed a high compression, six-cylinder engine. With auto bodies built by the Fisher Brothers, the new car was named the Chrysler Six and took the automobile world by storm in 1924.
The basic model included at no extra cost to the buyer, the first high-compression, inline six-cylinder engine with a top speed of 70 mph; the first replaceable oil and air filters to extend engine life; full pressure lubrication from an external oil pump; a fluid drive transmission for smooth shifting and greater performance; four-wheel hydraulic brakes for improved stopping distance; the first emergency brake as standard equipment in a low-priced automobile; and the first fuel and temperature gauges on the dashboard. The Chrysler Six sold 32,000 units for under $2,000 each in its first year of production.
In 1925, the Maxwell Motor Corporation was reorganized into the Chrysler Corporation. The old Chalmers engine plant was purchased and renovated for production of Chrysler's new engine, but it soon became clear that the new corporation still had trouble keeping up with demand.
In 1928, Chrysler purchased the Dodge Brothers' state-of-the-art factory complex and its extensive inventory from Dillon, Read & Company for $170,000,000, much of it in Chrysler stock. That same year, he created the Plymouth brand as Chrysler's low-priced competition for Ford and Chevy. In what seemed like overnight success, Chrysler Corporation became one of Detroit's Big Three automakers.
Also in 1928, Chrysler's adult sons showed no interest in the automobile business, so their father created a separate real estate venture to be managed by them. Between 1928 and 1930, he personally supervised the construction of the seventy-seven story Chrysler Building in New York City, which remains one of the world's great art deco monuments.
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| Model of Chrysler Building | |
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For his skillful piloting of the Chrysler Corporation into one of America's Big Three automakers and his undertaking of the construction of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, Walter P. Chrysler was honored as Time magazine's 1928 Man of the Year. In 1935, he stepped down from the presidency of Chrysler but continued on the board of directors.
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On May 26, 1938, sixty-three-year-old Walter Chrysler suffered a stroke at this Long Island, New York estate. While he recovered at home, his beloved wife Della died just over two months later from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty-eight on August 8th. Walter Chrysler survived for two more years before dying from a second stroke on August 18, 1940 at the age of sixty-five.
A notice was posted at all Chrysler plants on Wednesday, August 21st, that all machinery would be shut down at 10:00 am and workers were to spend fifteen minutes in silence as a tribute to Chrysler while his funeral services were being held at All Saints' Church in Great Neck, Long Island, New York City.
All Chrysler Corporation vice presidents and directors were named honorary pallbearers. Speaking at the funeral service, manufacturer and Detroit Tiger owner Walter O. Briggs said, "Walter P. Chrysler symbolized the vision and courage which made America great."
President of Chrysler Corporation of Canada John D. Mansfield said, "Walter P. Chrysler was one of the great industrialists of modern times. His death has taken from the world one of its giants."
Richard T. Frankensteen, director of the United Auto Workers (UAW) spoke for the rank and file, "Chrysler's passing is cause on the part of Chrysler workers for deep regret. Despite temporary disagreements, Walter P. Chrysler was a man sincerely desirous of working to improve the lot of his workers with his general principles of fair dealing with labor."
After Chrysler settled a contract dispute with the UAW's sit-down strike in 1937, he summed up his pride and appreciation in the local Detroit newspapers for his workforce. "There is more to industry than money and machines. There are men. I have worked too many years on account of my own family to be forgetful that it is their women and children that men keep on working. How could I be unmindful of that obligation when I am so proud of what we have accomplished together?"
Walter Chrysler identified with is workforce because of his years of personal struggles as an underpaid mechanic and machinist. With all of his triumphs, he was at his core a simple man of simple tastes who was happiest when he was out in his factories rubbing elbows with the men who stood where he once labored.
Walter and Della were interred in their family masoleum in Sleepy Hollow, Tarryton, New York. They were survived by daughters Thelma and Bernice, and sons Walter Jr. and John.
Henry Ford had a different approach to the United Auto Workers and labor relations.
