Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  As he took the podium to speak to the auto press, Ford had more than the newest car models on his mind. Even with the family history coursing through his blood, he was as much a market guy as a car guy, and he was thinking about new markets. Social demographics were aligning for a period of tremendous growth in the automobile industry, HF2 said. There were then 76 million motor vehicles in the United States and 87 million drivers, but the inexorable trend was toward two-car families, exponentially increasing sales with the rise of incomes, the increase in women drivers (up 56 percent just since 1956), and the arrival of the largest generation of potential young drivers in history, the teenagers of the postwar baby boom, the first of whom were now turning sixteen and getting behind the wheel.

  Beyond the American market, there was a more promising world stage, despite the perils of the cold war. No country was as car-obsessed and economically sound as America, Ford said, but others would catch up someday, and not just the common market of Europe. He saw the world inevitably growing smaller and more connected: “We will re-live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America something very much like our own experience of a half-century ago, when we too were an agrarian people, isolated and parochial. The automobile will do for many other lands and peoples what it has done for us.” For the automakers of Detroit to survive and thrive, Ford said, they had to take advantage of that global transformation with trade and investment throughout the world. That much seemed clear. “I only wish,” he added, “that we could have an equally clear picture of what is going to happen in the next half century, if man is left free to pursue progress.”

  Ask not what the world can do to us, ask what we can do in the world—that was the essence of HF2’s sensibility. Even though, for the first time, half the vehicles being made in the free world were manufactured outside the United States, the battle for sales seemed to be on overseas turf, not at home. Import sales had dropped in the past two years just as domestic car sales exploded. If there was concern about the impact of foreign imports on the American car market, it was focused mostly on one country and one brand: the German Volkswagen. VW’s sales worldwide outpaced Chrysler and American Motors and trailed only GM and Ford, and its beetle-bodied little cars had been infiltrating the U.S. market slowly but surely throughout the previous decade, with a few hundred dealerships and a new plant in New Jersey. Volkswagen’s impact in America was still modest, but nonetheless significant enough that the company’s chief, Heinz Heinrich Nordhoff, had been flown in from Wolfsburg to address the Detroit Economic Club that weekend of the auto show launch. Only seventeen years had passed since Nordhoff ran the Opelwerk Brandenburg, making trucks for the Nazis. Described with understatement as a conservative, he would devote much of his speech to his distaste for government interference.

  There was no sign of Japan, the other former Axis power, in Detroit that October. Only a decade earlier, Japan’s auto industry had been dying, but it received life support when the United States turned to the Japanese for a ready supply of military vehicles during the Korean War. By 1957 Nissan and Toyota had begun importing a small number of cars into the United States. They displayed their models at an international auto show in Los Angeles the following year, then withdrew after poor road tests, and only now were inching back to America. Six months before this gathering in Detroit, there had been an international auto show in New York, and Japanese companies were there, but not talking much and providing no sales figures for their various compacts. Not that the American companies cared much about compacts now. They were back to believing that big was better. As K. T. Keller, one of the old-time car guys celebrated at the auto show that year, was fond of saying, he didn’t like any car so small he could piss over it.

  Ford asserted at his press luncheon speech that 1963 cars were far superior to the models five years earlier, and consumers were getting better value for the dollar. What they were getting is what the automakers thought they wanted: more power, more luxury, more room, even more aluminum—70 pounds on average for the 1963 cars compared with 66.5 pounds the year before. Starting in the late fifties, there had been a trend toward compacts, but that seemed over now. It was not the start of a revolution, one auto writer noted, but more a passing fancy. American Motors staked its existence on smaller and less expensive cars, but the Big Three—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—were all seeing compact sales diminish even as overall sales boomed. The only models not selling more than previous years were compacts—the Ford Falcon, Mercury Comet, Chevy Corvair, and Studebaker Lark—while the Plymouth Valiant was lagging behind expectations. Only months earlier, Ford had abandoned a subcompact car concept code-named Cardinal that had been the brainchild of Robert McNamara, the sock puller-upper, before he left the company in late 1960 for Washington. Lee Iacocca, head of the Ford Division, never liked the Cardinal and managed to get it killed. He had his own concept for the car of the sixties decade and its rising baby-boom generation, but that was still more than a year away.

  • • •

  Saturday it rained in Detroit, and there were several hundred people huddling up near the doors of Cobo Hall, the first wave of nearly seventy thousand opening-day visitors, so officials let them in an hour early, at ten instead of eleven. The press and two thousand invited guests had had their run of the auto show on Friday evening, but this was the first glimpse for the general public; a ticket cost one dollar for adults, thirty-five cents for children. Ticket sales were only part of how the AMA would recoup the millions it spent on what its managing director, Harry A. Williams, called “the most beautiful automobile show ever presented.” The rest would come from the sale of floor space to the auto companies at five dollars per square foot. With 300,000 square feet in play, that seemed sufficient.

  From the lobby off Washington Boulevard, the auto show was organized like spokes on a wheel. At the hub was a revolving tower, thirty feet high, called a Spectro-form, a term more exotic than the tower itself, meant to convey something new. The American sensibility always leaned toward the fresh and new, but especially now: New Frontier, new president and first lady, new generation, new appliances, new communities, new houses, new cars. The Spectro-form was white, with an hourglass figure, and had an electronic sign at its waist flashing the theme of the show: America Drives Ahead.

  Displays on the spokes circling the tower—prime real estate—had been drawn by lot. Rambler took one spoke, Ford and Mercury two, and General Motors five. Chrysler and Studebaker got relegated to side areas, though Chrysler had achieved enough publicity earlier that week when Mayor Cavanagh boarded the steamship T. J. McCarthy as it plowed down the Detroit River to deliver its auto show cargo of Imperials and Valiants to Cobo, the latest shipment in the total of 2.5 million cars it had hauled to interior ports since World War II. Each exhibit space offered a different experience beyond cars. You were supposed to feel that you were in a country club, ski chalet, fraternity house, or at a country picnic. That was mere backdrop; the visitors crowded around the flashiest of the 320 vehicles on display, especially the new Buick Riviera and Corvette Stingray. This would be the tenth year for the Corvette, with its futuristic fiberglass body and compact wheel base, and Chevy was producing more of them than ever before. The Riviera, the creation of Bill Mitchell, the flamboyant GM designer, had a bit of the Rolls-Royce look. It was a stylish full-size luxury sedan that did not seem overly trendy, and over time some would place it among the most beautiful cars ever built.

  The newly crowned Miss America, Jacquelyn Jeanne Mayer of Ohio, was there for Oldsmobile, showing off the F-85 Cutlass convertible. Auto shows always had beautiful young women around, the oldest trick in advertising, but there was a twist this year, reflecting the modest hint of a new attitude, inside and out. The rise in women drivers had influenced these new cars. The seats were smoother, the steering wheels more flexible, the floors padded with vinyl mats to prevent damage from high heels. Studies showed that women now spent more time driving than preparing food. They wanted radios, whitewall tires, automatic tr
ansmission, power brakes and steering, and the safety of padded dashboards. (Seat belts were not yet mandatory nationwide. Only three states—Wisconsin, New York, and Rhode Island—required them in new cars, and only two high-performance sports cars, the Corvette and Studebaker Avanti, included them as standard equipment.)

  The sociological progression of women employed at auto shows went like this: in the early fifties they were blond bathing beauties who posed in swimsuits and high heels; in the late fifties they modeled in gowns matching the car interiors; now they were called narrators and were there to describe the cars and answer questions. Eleanor Breitmeyer, club editor of the Detroit News society page, noted that many narrators were following a fashion trend dictated not by New York but by one woman in Washington: “As a result of the First Lady’s fashion leadership, many models [were] wearing versions of Mrs. Kennedy’s bouffant hairdo and her favorite ensembles, the pillbox hat with two-piece sleeveless over blouse dress or empire-waisted evening gown.”

  The crowds at the auto show were predominantly white, but not exclusively so. African Americans in Detroit were as attached to the auto industry, and to cars, as any other group, and were enjoying car ownership at record levels. That week of the show the Michigan Chronicle claimed that “four of every five Negro urban families own a car” and that black families “spend more than a billion dollars a year on auto travel.” The statistics were loose. In the racism of that era, overt or subtle, urban blacks faced inordinate obstacles getting car loans from banks. But the point was nonetheless well taken. Black customers were a seldom mentioned but strategic market for the auto companies, even though, as the Chronicle pointed out, “there has been a bare minimum of black salesmen in show rooms and very little advertising to reach the negro car buyer.” At that time there was not a single car dealership in the United States with black ownership. Perhaps the most successful black car man in the country was Detroit’s own Ed Davis, and his struggles were symptomatic of the larger problem.

  Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Davis arrived in Detroit at age fifteen in 1926 to live with an aunt. He came north alone to receive a better education and enrolled at Cass Tech downtown. In high school he earned transportation money by working in a car repair shop. After that he set up his own car wash at a service station, then was employed at the Dodge Main foundry in Hamtramck, and eventually reached the sales floor part time at Lampkins Chrysler, out on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park. As Davis described it, his fellow salesmen, all white, would have nothing to do with him; he was allotted a lonely office on the second floor far from the main showroom. At lunchtime he had to drive six miles toward downtown to eat at the Lucy Thurman YWCA because no restaurants nearby would serve him. By 1938 he had saved enough money to open Davis Motor Sales, a used-car lot in Paradise Valley. After a few years, Studebaker, in an effort to sell more cars in Detroit, offered him a franchise at the same location. That lasted until 1956, when he dropped Studebaker because so few people were interested in it. Davis Motor Sales was still highly successful selling used cars when urban renewal swept through Paradise Valley and Black Bottom and properties around his lot were condemned for the construction of the Fisher Expressway. Early in 1962 he gave in to the inevitable and closed his business there, hoping for a better opportunity elsewhere in the city. He spent the days of the auto show lobbying car executives to crack the Big Three race barrier and make him the nation’s first black owner of one of their franchises. It would happen, but not yet.

  The black population in Detroit had its own automobile preferences. Among the population at large, Ford trailed Chevy by a significant margin, but among black car-buyers the two were nearly even. This reflected Ford’s history. Old man Henry Ford had been a notorious anti-Semite, but his company’s standing in the black community remained strong. Ford was the first of the major auto companies to actively recruit black workers, its five-dollars-a-day motto fueling the first great migration from the South decades earlier. James Price, the first black employed at Ford, started as a tailor and eventually became general superintendent in charge of abrasives at the Rouge plant. His rise was not the norm; most blacks held down the least desirable jobs, in the foundry, where nearly 80 percent of workers were black. (Most of the other 20 percent were East Europeans known on the job as “bohunks.”) Don Marshall, who came out of the Detroit Police Department, led a personnel group in charge of recruiting black employees. They developed a symbiotic relationship with African American ministers at many of the city’s largest Baptist churches that became Ford pipelines. At the huge Second Baptist Church downtown, the oldest African American church in the Midwest, founded by a handful of former slaves and by the early sixties bursting with a membership of 4,500, a recommendation from A. A. Banks, the minister, was all it took to get a job at Ford. That connection went back to the twenties, when the church’s powerful leader, Rev. Robert Bradby, would recommend “very high-type fellows” to Ford and sermonize against attempts to unionize the auto plants and in return received money from the company. While the church’s position on unions changed over the decades as black organizers assumed key roles in the UAW, the Ford conduit persisted. Deacons at Second Baptist wore Ford pins on their suits as badges of honor. In the vernacular of the working class, black and white, there was always a possessive in the company name: you didn’t work at Ford, you worked at Ford’s. The linguistic origins evoked the direct connection between the old man and the place of business. Chrysler also enjoyed a special niche with black customers, who bought them at a far higher percentage than whites did. When Ed Davis finally broke through and got his dealership on the west side out at the corner of Dexter and Elmhurst, it was for Chrysler.

  • • •

  Early Sunday evening, the Deuce and the big wheels gathered again, this time at the Reynolds Metals building across the city line beyond Eight Mile Road in Southfield. Mayor Cavanagh was there, surrounded by the car guys and their spouses: the Roy Abernathys from American Motors, the Bunkie Knudsens and Ed Coles from General Motors, the C. E. Briggses from Chrysler, and the Eugene Bordinats from Ford. Four hundred guests enjoyed champagne and chateaubriand in a room dominated by twenty-one color television sets, all tuned to NBC.

  Detroit and its auto show were going prime time. A network crew of fifty had been in and around Cobo Hall starting the previous Saturday, when trucks began pulling in from New York with cameras, six miles of cable, and the equipment for taping and remotes. The last filming had been done before dawn, at four Saturday morning, when the exhibition hall was empty and Huntley and the Today hosts could perform their minute-and-a-half spiels on fifteen different cars without crowd interference. Late that night the finished product was hand-carried back to New York on two separate flights, and now here it was, filling up the screens at Reynolds Metals. Ford gave a cameo interview, as did Cavanagh, but aside from the cars the stars of the show were some make-believe characters called Muppets, still seven years away from Sesame Street fame. The auto show special two years earlier had been critiqued for being too dry; this one went to the other extreme. They were “clever little puppets,” noted one reviewer, “but there must be another way to add entertainment . . . with more auto-related features.”

  A sense of anxiety had started to seep in by then. The Detroit newspapers had published special sections on the auto show that morning, but the news on the front page unavoidably distracted attention from the local celebration, and by Sunday evening out at Reynolds Metals there was more talk about that news than about cars.

  “President Has Cold, Halts Trip” was the headline in the Washington Post that morning, with variations on the theme in the local papers. The stories reported that JFK had been in his hotel room at the Sheraton Blackstone Hotel in Chicago on Saturday morning, in the middle of a campaign swing, when the White House physician traveling with him recommended that he cut short his trip and return to Washington to recuperate. Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, told the traveling press that the doctor had noticed
the night before that Kennedy’s voice sounded “husky.” A larger, five-column headline dominating the page more clearly explained the “cold”: “Marine Moves in South Linked to Cuban Crisis.” Security in Washington was unusually tight. Rumors were sweeping the country about a high-stakes cold war confrontation.

  Did this mean LBJ would not make it to Detroit? A trivial question, perhaps, but one that auto show officials could not help asking. In public they insisted that Johnson was still coming, and plans remained in place. The vice president would arrive at Detroit Metropolitan at 4:30 Monday, where Henry Ford II would greet him, and the entourage would then move by car to Cobo Hall for a half-hour tour of the exhibition hall, then on to the presidential suite at the Book Cadillac to rest and clean up, and back to Cobo for the dinner speech to an audience of 2,300. But all the Deuce had to do was read the banner headline in Monday morning’s paper to understand how slim were the odds of any of that happening: “Capital Tense: Big Action on Cuba May Be Imminent.”