Business: Indomitable Durant

William Crapo Durant* is a wiry little man, 64 years old, still indomitable in the face of physical or financial blows. He was lying abed last week in the Post Graduate Hospital, Manhattan, his scalp badly lacerated from a Florida train wreck early in the month. His physicians could not keep him quiet at home; ordered him to the hospital; permitted him to use the telephone. He learned that some of his pet stocks—among them Baldwin Locomotive, U. S. Cast Iron Pipe, and Independent Oil & Gas were being gnawed at on the Stock Exchange. To W. W. Murphy, his secretary, he quietly talked; ordered large buying orders in those securities. Their board quotations climbed at once, and next day’s newspapers headlined “Sick Man Rallies Stock Market.”

* In 1920 Mr. Durant, reared in Michigan although born in Boston, was seemingly a man beaten financially. That year he was forced out of his controlling interests in the General Motors Co. and the Chevrolet Motors Co. The former he had organized in 1908, three years after he had organized the Buick Motor Car Co. Between 1908 and 1909 he bought the Cadillac, Oakland, Oldsmobile and Northway motor companies; in 1915 got control of General Motors and also organized the Chevrolet Co. All these he lost at a swoop in 1920. But the very next year he rebounded by organizing Durant Motors. He has a large following in both the automobile and the financial field.