Bennett, Harry Herbert (17 January 1892–04 January 1979), auto industry executive, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of Verne C. Bennett, a sign painter, and Imogene Bangs, a schoolteacher. When Bennett was two years old, his father was killed in a fight. His mother later married Robert Winslow, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, who died a few years after the marriage. At age fifteen, Bennett moved with his mother to Detroit, where he entered the Detroit Fine Arts Academy to train as a commercial artist. Conflict at home caused him to run away and join the navy in 1909....
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Bennett, Harry Herbert (1892-1979), auto industry executive
Greta de Jong
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Breech, Ernest Robert (1897-1978), automobile and aviation executive
Yanek Mieczkowski
Breech, Ernest Robert (24 February 1897–03 July 1978), automobile and aviation executive, was born in Lebanon, Missouri, the son of Joseph F. E. Breech, a blacksmith, and Martha Atchley. Ernest gained early experience with mechanics by working with his older brother Earl in his father’s blacksmith shop, which specialized in making carriages. In high school he was a stellar football, basketball, and baseball athlete and was offered a try-out with the St. Louis Browns professional baseball team. But he had his sights set on studying law and distinguished himself as a speaker, winning a medal for oratory while in high school. After graduating in 1914, Breech had to defer college because of inadequate family financing. To earn money he worked as a salesman and mechanic in an automobile agency that his father had acquired, thus gaining his first exposure to the automobile industry. He won a scholarship to Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, which he entered in 1915. Despite a strong academic record, Breech left college after his sophomore year in 1917 and moved to Chicago, where his brother Earl had found work for him in the accounting department of Fairbanks, Morse & Company, manufacturers of scales and weighing equipment. He later supplemented the income from this job by working evenings and weekends at O’Connor and Goldberg’s State Street Store, the leading ladies’ shoe store in Chicago. Also in 1917 Breech married his childhood sweetheart, Thelma Rowden, in Chicago; the couple had two sons....
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Briggs, Walter Owen (1877-1952), manufacturer and baseball executive
Harold L. Ray
Briggs, Walter Owen (27 February 1877–17 January 1952), manufacturer and baseball executive, was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the son of Rodney Davis Briggs, an engineer with the Michigan Central Railroad, and Ada Warner. When Walter was an infant the family moved to a western suburb of Detroit where the Tigers played Sunday baseball, which was forbidden in the city at that time. There he attended John Newberry Public School and played first base and catcher for the baseball team. Leaving school at age 14, Briggs worked in the car shops of the Michigan Central, earning $20 per month....
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Briscoe, Benjamin (1867-1945), automobile manufacturer
Yanek Mieczkowski
Briscoe, Benjamin (24 May 1867–27 June 1945), automobile manufacturer, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Joseph A. Briscoe, an inventor associated with Michigan’s railroad industry, and Sarah Smith. Briscoe attended Detroit public schools and after graduating from the Jones Academy found work as a clerk for the wholesale firm of Black and Owen....
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Buick, David Dunbar (1854-1929), inventor and businessman
Ronald Edsforth
Buick, David Dunbar (17 September 1854–06 March 1929), inventor and businessman, was born in Arbroath, Scotland, the son of Alexander Buick and Jane Roger. The family emigrated from Scotland to Detroit, Michigan, two years after Buick was born; his father died three years later. Buick attended elementary school, but the poverty of his single-parent family forced him to find full-time employment when he was just eleven years old. By the time he was fifteen, he had delivered newspapers, worked on a farm, and served as a machinist’s apprentice at the James Flower & Brothers Machine Shop (the same firm where ...
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Champion, Albert (1878-1927), inventor and businessman
Richard P. Scharchburg
Champion, Albert (02 April 1878–27 October 1927), inventor and businessman, was born in Paris, France, the son of Alexander Champion. Available sources reveal no other information about his family or his early life. No doubt he received an early education in Paris. When he was about twelve years old, he obtained employment as an errand boy for a bicycle manufacturer....
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Chapin, Roy Dikeman (1880-1936), auto industry pioneer and secretary of commerce
George S. May
Chapin, Roy Dikeman (23 February 1880–10 February 1936), auto industry pioneer and secretary of commerce, was born in Lansing, Michigan, the son of Edward Cornelius Chapin, a successful local attorney, and Ella King. In 1899 Chapin enrolled in the University of Michigan, but he left in the spring of 1901 to take a position with the Olds Motor Works in Detroit. Chapin worked as a photographer, helped out in the factory in May during a machinists’ strike, and served as a test driver. It was in the latter capacity that Chapin drove an Oldsmobile runabout from Detroit to New York in seven and a half days in 1901, arriving in time to display it at the National Automobile Show. This trip, the one event for which Chapin is best remembered, promoted sales of the frail, 600-pound car while providing a boost to Chapin’s career....
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Cheney, Benjamin Pierce (1815-1895), transportation executive
Edward L. Lach, Jr.
Cheney, Benjamin Pierce (12 August 1815–23 July 1895), transportation executive, was born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, the son of Jesse Cheney, a blacksmith, and Alice Steele. Born into an impoverished family, he attended local common schools until the age of ten and then went to work in his father’s shop. After nearly two years working with his father, he relocated to Francistown, New Hampshire, where he took a job in a tavern and later worked in a local store....
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Chevrolet, Louis (1878-1941), mechanic, race car driver, and engine designer
Ronald Edsforth
Chevrolet, Louis (25 December 1878–06 June 1941), mechanic, race car driver, and engine designer, was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, the son of Joseph Felicien Chevrolet, a clockmaker, and Angelina Marie (maiden name unknown). Louis Chevrolet’s family moved to Beaune, France, when he was six years old. From his father Louis acquired basic mechanical skills and an appreciation for the importance of precision in machine parts manufacture. While still teenagers, Louis and his two brothers, Arthur and Gaston, established a bicycle making shop. They used the brand name “Frontenac” for their bicycles, a name Louis later applied to automobiles he manufactured....
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Chrysler, Walter Percy (1875-1940), automobile manufacturer
Ronald Edsforth
Chrysler, Walter Percy (02 April 1875–18 August 1940), automobile manufacturer, was born in Wamego, Kansas, the son of Henry Chrysler, a railroad engineer, and Anna Maria Breyman. Chrysler’s life was bound up with the creation of modern America’s transportation system. He grew up in Ellis, Kansas, a railroad shop town, at a time when the townspeople still worried about Native American raiders. As a boy, Chrysler developed an abiding fascination with machines while watching the mechanics in the local railroad repair shops and occasionally accompanying his father in the engineer’s cab of a Union Pacific locomotive. He developed an aggressive, quick-tempered personality playing with other working-class boys in the railroad yards and streets of Ellis. For most of his life, Chrysler remained outspoken and excitable, but he was also intelligent, hard working, and capable of intense concentration. These qualities enabled him to rise through the ranks of the railroad industry and then become one of the founders of America’s automobile industry....
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Coffin, Howard Earle (1873-1937), automotive engineer and airline pioneer
George S. May
Coffin, Howard Earle (06 September 1873–21 November 1937), automotive engineer and airline pioneer, was born near West Milton, Ohio, the son of Julius Vestal Coffin and Sarah Elma Jones, farmers. In 1893 Coffin enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where his mother ran a boardinghouse, but dropped out in 1896 to take a job with the Ann Arbor post office. He was allowed to conduct experiments at the university’s engineering shops, however, and built a one-cylinder gasoline engine and a steam-powered car, which he drove on his mail route....
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Cole, Edward Nicholas (1909-1977), automobile manufacturing executive
Bruce E. Seely
Cole, Edward Nicholas (17 September 1909–02 May 1977), automobile manufacturing executive, was born in Marne, Michigan, the son of Franklin Benjamin Cole and Lucy C. Blasen, farmers. Growing up in rural Michigan, Cole exhibited a mechanical bent, building radios and rebuilding cars. After two years of prelaw at Grand Rapids Junior College, he transferred to the General Motors Institute in 1930, graduating with an engineering degree in 1933. At the depths of the depression, Cadillac—a division of General Motors—hired the young engineer as a lab assistant. Cole celebrated by marrying his childhood sweetheart, Esther Engman; they had two children. As General Motors earned a profit every year of the depression, Cole advanced within the Cadillac division to lab technician, technician and designer, engineer, and, eventually chief design engineer. He earned a reputation as an enthusiastic engineer, fascinated by engines, intent on reducing engine noise and improving cooling. Friends remember Cole leaving parties during those years to tinker under the hood....
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Cord, Errett Lobban (1894-1974), automaker and financier
Yanek Mieczkowski
Cord, Errett Lobban (20 July 1894–02 January 1974), automaker and financier, was born in Warrensburg, Missouri, the son of Charles W. Cord, a storekeeper, and Ida Lobban. Throughout his life Cord was known simply by his initials, “E. L.” In the early 1900s his family moved to Los Angeles, where Cord attended high school but left before finishing his final year. As a teenager he showed a passion for automobiles, rebuilding old cars and racing them on dirt tracks in California and Oregon. Cord operated a garage and a trucking firm in California, the latter in Death Valley. He also established the short-lived Cord Auto Washing Company, worked as a truck driver, and sold and raced cars in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1914 Cord married Helen Marie Frische of Cincinnati. They had two sons....
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Couzens, James (1872-1936), businessman, mayor of Detroit, and U.S. senator
Melvin G. Holli
Couzens, James (26 August 1872–22 October 1936), businessman, mayor of Detroit, and U.S. senator, was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, the son of James J. Couzens and Emma Clift, an immigrant couple from England. Raised in a stern Presbyterian household and a lower-income family that lived on the “muddiest” street in town, young Couzens’s education was capped by two years of bookkeeping study at Chatham’s Canada Business College. He worked as a newsboy and then stirring smelly, boiling vats for his father, who had parlayed his skills as a soapmaker and salesman into ownership of a small soap-making factory. Displaying an assertive independence, which contemporaries noted that he had inherited from his stern-willed father, young Couzens set off for Detroit to test his mettle in the larger world and in 1890 was taken on as a railroad car–checker for the Michigan Central. Five years later he became an assistant bookkeeper for Alex Malcomson’s coal business, which brought him into contact with a mechanical tinkerer and automobile pioneer named ...
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Couzens, James (1872-1936)
In
James Couzens. [left to right] C. C. Dill, Owen Young, and James Couzens, before the Senate Interstate Commerce Commission. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-98142).
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Curtice, Harlow Herbert (1893-1962), automotive executive
Richard P. Scharchburg
Curtice, Harlow Herbert (15 August 1893–03 November 1962), automotive executive, was born in Petrieville, Michigan, the son of Marion Joel Curtice, a fruit commission merchant, and Mary Ellen Eckhart. His early schooling was in the Eaton Rapids public schools, where he was remembered as a serious, freckle-faced boy nicknamed “Red,” who “blushed easily and often.” While working as a clerk at the Horner Woolen Mills in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, he completed a two-year business course at Ferris Institute in Big Rapids....
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Curtice, Harlow Herbert (1893-1962)
In
Harlow H. Curtice. Left foreground, with GM employees celebrating the manufacture of the company's twenty-five-millionth car. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-111972).
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Dodge, Horace Elgin
See Dodge, John Francis
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Dodge, John Francis (1864-1920), automobile manufacturers
Yanek Mieczkowski
Dodge, John Francis (25 October 1864–14 January 1920), and Horace Elgin Dodge (17 May 1868–10 December 1920), automobile manufacturers, were born in Niles, Michigan, the sons of Daniel Rugg Dodge and Maria Casto. Daniel Dodge operated a foundry and machine shop near the St. Joseph River, and as children John and Horace worked there, becoming familiar with marine engines and learning mechanical skills that later built their reputation and fortune in the automobile business. From early childhood the two brothers forged a close relationship that endured throughout their lives. John was very outgoing, while Horace was a more private individual....
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Donner, Frederic Garrett (1902-1987), automobile industry executive
Yanek Mieczkowski
Donner, Frederic Garrett (04 October 1902–28 February 1987), automobile industry executive, was born in Three Oaks, Michigan, the son of Frank Donner, an accountant for the Warren Featherbone Company, which manufactured corset stays and buggy whips, and Cornelia Zimmerman. During high school Donner worked in a bank and a drug store. He enrolled at the University of Michigan and compiled a sterling academic record, benefiting from his contact with his economics professor, William Paton. In 1923 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics. After graduating, Donner worked for three years for a Chicago accounting firm, Rackitt Benington Leclear....
