Books: It Can Happen Here

LIFE OF AN AMERICAN WORKMAN (219 pp.)—Walter P. Chrysler, with Boyden Sparkes—Dodd, Mead ($3).

The Locomobile at Chicago’s 1908 auto show was a honey. The paint job was white, the cushions and trim were red and the top, supported by wooden bows, was sleek in tailored khaki. The powerful young fellow who had been hanging around the show for four days couldn’t keep his eyes off it, but the price was staggering: $5,000. He had only $700, and a wife and two kids back in Iowa to think about, but a bank lent him the money and Walter P. Chrysler, 33, had his first car.

Walter Chrysler, a topnotch railroad mechanic, had no idea how to drive. He hired a team of horses to haul the car home from the freight office in Oelwein, Iowa. But he spent three months taking it apart and putting it together again. By that time, he had a pretty good notion of how an automobile worked.

Not Quite Horatio. Chrysler died in 1940, but not before Satevepost Writer Boyden Sparkes had taken down his story. Life of an American Workman is one of those personal-success books that has Made in U.S.A. stamped all over it. It has the casual, conversational tone of a front-porch chat and the fascination that clings to every true story about the boy who reached the top on his own.

Walter Chrysler did not come altogether from the Horatio Alger mold. As a boy, he often sneaked off the job to smoke, drink beer and play cards. As a young railroad mechanic, he roamed from job to job, hitched rides on freight trains and occasionally panhandled when he was broke. But his curiosity about tools and machines was endless and his skill in using them not far from genius. After high school in Ellis, Kans., he started as a sweeper in the local railroad shop at 10¢ an hour. By the time he bought the Locomobile, he was superintendent of motive power for the Chicago Great Western Railway.

Chrysler quit the railroad when its president gave him a needless bawling out over a hotbox. He hired on with the American Locomotive Co., and in less than two years, at 36, he became works manager of its Allegheny plant. Then one day in 1911 a man named Nash from Flint, Mich, offered him the job of running the Buick plant. It meant less money, but Chrysler had never got automobiles out of his mind; he accepted. He scrapped Buick’s leisurely, carriage-maker methods, soon jacked production from 45 to 200 cars a day. The money took care of itself; within five years, Buick was paying him half a million a year.

Not Just Money. At 45, with more money than he had ever expected to have, Chrysler tried to retire. But he kept on getting up at 6 a.m. anyway, until one day Mrs. Chrysler said, “I wish you would go to work.” He did: for Willys-Overland at $1,000,000 a year. After that, nothing but a car of his own could satisfy him. He had a finished prototype ready by 1923: the first six-cylinder Chrysler. When the New York auto show of 1924 refused to give him display space (the Chrysler was not in production), he hired the lobby of the Hotel Commodore to show off his models. That year he sold 32,000 of them, and in 1925 the Chrysler Corp. was on its way.

Life of an American Workman is a title with point. Chrysler respected both work and workmen. He also admired brain, and his own was a superb example of native intelligence and imagination applied to practical problems. He found in manufacturing “a creative joy that only poets are supposed to know. Some day I’d like to show a poet how it feels to design and build a railroad locomotive.”