Category: History || By jt3y

When I was growing up, one of our neighbors in the Liberty Manor section of Liberty Borough had not one, but two, Edsels. (Alert Reader Tim will know who I'm talking about, I bet.) Maybe this early exposure to abject failure explains my present warped personality, and my love for "lost causes."

Well, in case you missed the news coverage (Wired, The Detroit News, The Washington Post, etc.), yesterday was the 50th anniversary of "E-Day" ... Sept. 4, 1957, the day that Ford Motor Company unveiled its new car division, the Edsel, the worst new product introduction in American history.

Many of the feature stories that appeared yesterday commented on how "ugly" the Edsel supposedly was. The Edsel wasn't ugly at all by 1958 standards. In fact, the early reviews of the styling were overwhelmingly positive. When the car was shown to dealers for the first time in the summer of 1957, they gave it a standing ovation; reportedly some Ford executives wept for joy.

In contrast to most 1958 cars, the Edsel didn't have fins, it didn't have gaudy-looking two-tone paint, and most importantly, it wasn't larded with chrome. For a look at some truly ugly cars, try the 1958 Oldsmobiles and Buicks. Legendary General Motors styling chief Harley Earl was forced into retirement over those monstrosities; the company's products were greeted with such hoots of derision that GM went into a crash program to completely redesign its 1959 models.

But Buick survived and thrived, and Oldsmobile did, too, until recently.

The name gets a lot of blame, too. "Edsel" was the name of Henry Ford's only son. Before his death at an early age from stomach cancer, he was widely revered in Detroit for saving the Ford Motor Company from insolvency as his father became increasingly irrational. (One of the major freeways in Detroit is still named for Edsel Ford.)

Sure, "Edsel" isn't a great name for a car, but consider some of the others. "Oldsmobile" had "old" in the first three letters! "Chevrolet" is a French name that isn't pronounced the way it's spelled. "Plymouth" was named after a brand of twine used by farmers. (You can look it up.)

The Edsel tanked for other reasons --- mostly rotten quality control and a severe worldwide recession that knocked the pins out from under the car market.

Despite the folklore, the name and the styling of the Edsel were the least of the problems. They got the blame from Ford employees desperate to salvage their own reputations. As the saying goes, "Success has 1,000 fathers, but failure is an orphan."

. . .

McKeesport had an Edsel dealer, naturally. John P. Mooney Co. on Fifth Avenue at Hartman Street had been the city's Packard dealer for years until that one-time luxury make began its quick slide to oblivion in the mid-1950s.

At the time, independent car companies like Packard, Studebaker, Hudson, Nash and Willys were withering under a massive sales onslaught from the "Big 3," GM, Ford and Chrysler.

Hudson and Nash merged into American Motors and survived by refocusing their efforts on small cars ... namely, the Rambler. Willys dumped its slow-selling car line and put all of its money into four-wheel-drive Jeep trucks and what would call today the SUV.

Packard and Studebaker merged, too, but instead of finding a "niche" like AMC and Willys, they tried to go head-to-head with the "Big 3," and lost their shirts.

Many of the new Edsel dealers, like Mooney in McKeesport, had been Studebaker-Packard dealers, and were desperate to swim away from the rapidly sinking company.

The arrival of the new Edsel franchise must have seemed like salvation. Finally, they would be selling cars backed by a healthy corporation and would own a franchise which (they thought) had a long future.

By 1962, Mooney was selling Volkswagens and the Edsel was a punchline to a thousand jokes.

. . .

Edsel seemed like salvation to Ford Motor Company at first, too. For years, the industry said, Ford's primary job was making customers for General Motors.

In the 1920s, GM President Alfred P. Sloan hit on the formula that spelled the company's success for the next 50 years. Instead of competing against each other, GM's different divisions --- Chevrolet, Pontiac-Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac --- would each compete in a certain price range, with Chevy at the low end and Caddy at the top.

To save money, the divisions would share hidden components and many substructures, but outwardly, styling would be as different as possible. Chevrolet customers who wanted to move up could buy a Pontiac, but they'd still be in a GM car.

When Walter P. Chrysler took over Maxwell Motors Corp. and renamed it for himself, he copied the same formula. Soon Chrysler Corp. had the same kind of model range --- with Plymouth at the low-price end, followed by Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler and Imperial as the premium brand.

But until World War II, Henry Ford was in charge at Ford Motor Company, and he wouldn't hear of any of this. In fact, he wouldn't discontinue the Model T until the car was totally obsolete and losing customers to Chevy and Plymouth.

Ford did purchase the Lincoln Motor Car Company and made it a luxury division. And in 1939, it introduced the Mercury as an upscale Ford. But Mercury was frankly only a very small step up from Ford, and there was still a huge price gap between the most expensive Mercury and the cheapest Lincoln.

Consequently, Ford customers who wanted to move up didn't buy a Lincoln. They bought a Dodge or an Oldsmobile.

Henry Ford's penury and refusal to introduce modern technologies nearly caused the company's collapse during World War II, just when the Army and Navy needed its production capacity. Henry's grandson was brought home from the war to salvage what was left.

By the mid-1950s, Ford Motor Company was finally making money again, and was ready to plug the price gap. The decision was made to move the Mercury upmarket to the Buick price range, and introduce a new lower-middle-priced car. That car became the Edsel.

. . .

A variety of factors plagued the Edsel's debut. First, the car didn't live up to its hype. Ford put on an expensive, extensive publicity blitz for Edsel for a year before the car's debut. When it turned out to be just another average-looking car, people were disappointed.

Second, any new product is likely to have problems. Unfortunately, in Edsel's case, the excitement and hype meant that all of the early quality control problems were magnified.

It didn't help that relatively small numbers of Edsels were being built on assembly lines that were handling much larger numbers of Fords and Mercurys. Stories spread of Edsels going out the door with the wrong parts attached, or missing key pieces altogether.

Finally, the most severe recession of the postwar years caused widespread layoffs and tightened the credit supply. The new-car market collapsed, and practically everyone's sales went down --- except AMC and Volkswagen, because they were selling economy cars. (Rambler sales nearly doubled from 1957 to 1958.)

. . .

Under those circumstances, the Edsel's 1958 production run of 63,000 isn't so bad. The new division nearly tied Chrysler and was ahead of Lincoln, Studebaker, DeSoto and many other established makes.

By then, however, Ford President Robert McNamara (who later became defense secretary and led the escalation of the Vietnam War) had decided to kill the Edsel.

The practical, frugal McNamara didn't like fancy cars. The Edsel project had been proposed before he had taken over the company, by executives who he eventually forced out of Ford Motor Company, and he was against it from the very start.

Instead of upscale cars, McNamara believed compacts were the wave of the future, and if Ford was going to bring out a line of small cars, it needed the money and resources that were committed to the Edsel. The new brand was expendable.

In late 1958, McNamara forced Edsel Division to merge with Mercury and Lincoln, and the brand was de-emphasized. In November 1959, he finally killed it altogether. (The announcement leaked out in the Ford Foundation's annual report.)

In 1960, the year that McNamara was named defense secretary, Ford introduced its compact car, the Falcon. It was a roaring success, and a slightly upscale version called the Comet was introduced. It, too, was successful, with 116,000 sold in the first, abbreviated model year.

Ironically, the Comet was originally supposed to be sold as an Edsel; the earliest cars even carried Edsel serial numbers. If Edsel had hung on for another few months, the Comet might have saved the division, but it didn't happen.

. . .

So, in about 1,400 words, that's the story of the Edsel. If you're inclined to learn more, I highly recommend Thomas Bonsall's book Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel, which is one of the best books I've ever read about the automotive industry in the 1950s. In fact, it's one of the best books I've ever read about business, period --- and it's got a lot of photos.

As for John P. Mooney Co., it eventually moved to Long Run Road (Route 48) and enjoyed two decades of success as a Volkswagen dealer. The building is presently the home of Bob Massie Toyota.

Other than those two Edsels I used to see in Liberty Borough, I don't know of any other restored Edsels in McKeesport or its suburbs. But I'm willing to bet there are a few.

After all, if you live the Mon Valley, you have to be willing to love the unlovable, to find virtue where other people only find things to mock --- and to root for the underdog. Luckily, the Edsel story has a happy ending; the cars are highly collectible today.

Edsel: The official car of the Mon-Yough area? No, but it could be, kids, it could be.