Autos: The Box that Tailoring Made

The roomy Checker cab, one of the few taxis left that passengers can climb into without awkward gymnastics, is a familiar sight on many U.S. streets; of the nation’s 135,000 taxicabs, some 35,000 are Checkers. Less familiar to the public and the financial world is the firm that makes them: closemouthed Checker Motors Corp. of Kalamazoo, Mich.

Separated from the Detroit automotive world by choice and philosophy, Checker is the nation’s smallest full-scale automaker. Last year it turned out 8,000 cars and, for the first time in a decade, showed an operating profit—$559,000 on sales of $23 million. Partly responsible for the profit is the fact that Checker has been doing a tidy business in selling souped-up dressed-up versions of its spartan, boxy cabs as family cars, stationwagons and limousines. The reason for their success (they now account for 40% of production), says Checker President Morris Markin with understandable prejudice, is that riding in many low-slung conventional cars nowadays is “like sitting in a bathtub.”

Taxicab Wars. Markin, 70, is even less well known than his company—and likes it that way. Born in Smolensk, he came to the U.S. in 1913 so poor that a kindly Ellis Island janitor had to post his $25 bond. Just where he began to pick up money is his secret, but within a year he had enough to send to Russia for his parents, seven brothers and two sisters. Five years after his arrival, he and a brother started a trousers factory in Chicago. The com pany prospered (it is, in fact, still prospering), and Markin soon lent $15,000 to a financially strapped friend whose business was making bodies for taxicabs. He kept sending good money after bad, finally took over the company to protect his investment.

Markin started making cabs for a Chicago association of independent cab drivers called Checker Taxi, soon was plunged into the vicious Chicago taxicab wars of the 1920s. Drivers and thugs of Checker Taxi and of rival Yellow Taxi (owned by John Hertz, after whom Hertz Rent A Car was named) fought it out for supremacy on Chicago’s streets. Markin’s house was bombed, and he was convicted in 1923 (and later pardoned) of falsely listing the assets of his company to sell its stock. After Hertz’s retirement, Yellow and Markin’s manufacturing company merged into one corporation called Parmelee Transportation Co. Markin won control of the company.

Where Cadillacs Go. Through Parmelee and other interests, Markin today owns and operates 5,000 taxicabs in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis. He also controls General Fire and Casualty Co., which has assets of $25 million. But his chief love is still Checker Motors, which he has kept going through its leanest years by pumping in profits from Parmelee. He presides over the production of Checkers with the same loving care he once gave to a fine pair of trousers, tours his assembly line almost every day.

Markin concentrates on making his cars sturdy and reliable. Both the cabs and the passenger cars have simple, brawny lines, little chrome, no fins. They are constructed to take twice as much punishment as the ordinary car, have a simple overhead-valve, six-cylinder engine that will take them up to 25 miles on a gallon of gas and that can be fixed with readily available parts. Some of them last for as many as 400,000 miles, and most go twice as long as an ordinary car. In a throwback to his tailoring days, Markin insists on lining the inside of each auto—an area where most automakers try to cut back costs—almost completely with heavy sheet steel.

Since their introduction only three years ago, Checker’s passenger cars have become so prized by those who prefer reliability and easy maintenance to style that they are even beginning to appear where only Cadillacs once dared to tread. U.S. ambassadors in London, Moscow and 13 other countries use them, and owners include Bishop Sheen (his has green glass windows), the first Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller and scores of doctors, lawyers and bankers. The Checker, of course, is cheaper than a Cadillac: about $3,800 for an air-conditioned limousine v. $7,000. But since price is no consideration for Morris Markin, he drives between his work and his 162-acre farm in a black 1963 Cadillac. “I don’t know exactly why,” he says, “but I’ve always had General Motors cars.”