Category: default || By jt3y

The weekend is a blur already. I spent Saturday screwing around with the sleek, gray Mercury, which looks like it's about to spit up an alternator after just 65,000 miles. The last Mercury used to cough out alternators at an alarming rate, too. You'd think that after 100 years of automaking, they'd be able to get little things like, say, electricity right. "Quality is Job One," eh? Well, curse you, Bill Ford Jr.!

Sunday I spent catching up on my reading. And my sleeping. I've decided that sleeping is my favorite hobby, and that like Ralph Wiggum, I'm very good at it. Go with your strengths, that's my motto.

Anyway, on Sunday I finished two books about the late nineteeth century and early twentieth. One was Vincent Curcio's enormous (700 dense pages) biography of Walter P. Chrysler, who founded --- that's right, Chevrolet. No, not really. Called Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius, the emphasis is really more on the times rather than Walter Chrysler's life.

Occasionally, Curcio detours from Chrysler's biographical details to make long excursions into American economics and the creation of the automobile industry. This helps to put Chrysler's work into context, but I suspect part of the reason that Curcio did it was because there wasn't a whole lot of source material about Walter Chrysler to draw upon. He died in 1940, and much of what was written about him before his death was vetted by the Chrysler Corporation's PR department. Then, too, he labored in the shadow of true pioneers like Henry Ford and Billy Durant, who were infinitely more colorful than Chrysler, and thus had contemporary biographers who were only too happy to leave reams of source material.

Thus, from Curcio's book, the best we can come away with is the impression that Chrysler was hard-working and hard-drinking, that he cheated on his long-suffering wife occasionally, and he had a talent for picking excellent engineers and designers. And that's about it. Walter Chrysler wasn't a radical visionary, he was a plodder; and he came to the auto industry fairly late, so he wasn't much of an innovator. These aren't bad qualities, mind you --- his methodical nature gave him the fortitude to persevere through numerous setbacks, and his late entry into the business allowed him to learn from other people's mistakes. As it was, his Chrysler Corporation, which he created from pieces of foundering Maxwell Motors, quickly leaped from the back of the pack to near-parity with General Motors and Ford, where it has stayed ever since.

And Chrysler had a Zelig-like ability to keep popping up around the big names in the industry --- perhaps he wasn't as colorful as Henry Ford or Billy Durant, but he knew them well. In fact, when Durant fell on hard times, Chrysler and other slipped him money to keep him afloat. Chrysler began his career as a railroad mechanic; and ground his way through several jobs and worked his way up to railroad management.

He made friends throughout the industry, and most importantly, kept them. When the American Locomotive Co. was looking for someone to take over their failing Pittsburgh Works, located on the North Side, an executive decided to give Chrysler a shot at turning it around. He did; and when that same executive, who also held a position on the board of directors at General Motors, needed someone to help stabilize GM, he thought of Chrysler again. Chrysler never looked back.

During his time in Pittsburgh, Chrysler and his family lived up in Bellevue Borough, where he regularly drove around the North Hills in a Stevens-Duryea touring car. According to Curcio, his neighbors on Seville Place --- now North Harrison Avenue, just off Lincoln --- remembered him fondly for years after.

Curcio also has several interesting anecdotes about the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York --- which was financed by Walter Chrysler himself, not the Chrysler Corporation --- but overall, this is not a book to be recommended to the casual reader. Also, I'd have enjoyed more images.

The other book I finished was The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson, a heavily-romanticized account of the construction of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago interwoven with the story of a serial killer named H.H. Holmes. This book is very accessible to the casual reader, even if ... ahhh ... no. I'm not going to review it, because I read it as part of a book club I belong to, and I don't want to blab all my thoughts just yet.

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Billy Durant, by the way, is the most intriguing character in the entire Chrysler book. Durant was a salesman and huckster who in the early 1900s, bought a whole bunch of small car companies (mostly using other people's money) and merged them into General Motors. He nearly gained control of Ford Motor Company, too. The people who had loaned Durant the money became alarmed at him reckless spending and pushed him out of the company.

So Durant borrowed some more money, created a car company named for French race car driver Louis Chevrolet, and used it to purchase General Motors again and install himself back as chairman. Then he began buying up a bunch of small auto parts suppliers --- including the predecessors of AC and Delco, which are still part of GM --- until he got pushed out of GM again.

Durant --- do you see a pattern here? --- borrowed some more money, purchased a bunch of small car companies, and created Durant Motors, which he intended to become as big as GM. (In fact, he tried to take control of GM a third time.) But his luck ran out --- the small companies he grabbed this time didn't have the agglomeration of talent that GM had, and Durant Motors went bankrupt during the Depression.

Rather than a biography of Chrysler, I'd love to see a book about Billy Durant --- or maybe a movie. I'm not sure who would play Durant --- Robert Preston in the movie The Music Man comes to mind.

I'm also not sure who'd go to see it; me and Durant's family, I guess.

There's more about Durant here, plus information about the short-lived Durant car. I also love the Durant song. What deathless lyrics: "I wanna drive a Durant. I wanna see if I can't ..."

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In other business, what genius decided that men should wake up early every morning and --- bleary-eyed, groggy and half hungover --- scrape their faces with sharp scraps of steel? I had to plaster practically an entire roll of toilet paper to my face.

Jimmy Johnson of "Arlo and Janis" has the same problems, I see.

Brooke McEldowney's "9 Chickweed Lane" was good on Saturday, too --- in fact, I've had the same conversation with my own grandmother (though my response was not quite as witty by half).

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I've long suspected that no one reads this Web page. Either I'm correct, or all of you folks are too polite to point out that I never answered the trivia question I posed on Wednesday. Namely, which infamous radio show was sponsored by Rexall Drug Stores?

Actually, Rexall sponsored several shows, but the only one that might be considered "infamous" was "Amos 'n Andy." By the time Rexall signed on as the sponsor in the late 1940s, "A 'n A" were already considered "politically incorrect," though they'd survive as a networked program on radio into the 1960s. This ad from 1954 --- the dawn of the civil rights movement --- is nothing short of stunning.

Yogi Berra was right; nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

And until tomorrow, good health to all from Rexall!