The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  Colonel Albert Pope,21 America’s first bicycle manufacturer and one of the original pioneer automakers, had put his Pope-Toledo factory up for sale. Pope had introduced the public to self-propelled personal transportation—first in the late 1870s selling Columbia bicycles, a brand still selling today, followed in 1898 by electric Columbia cars.22 His Pope-Toledo model never caught on as he had envisioned, and in his sixties the Civil War veteran’s health had deteriorated. Willys purchased his facility in April 1909 for $285,000 ($7.4 million in 2014). Five months later, Pope died of pneumonia.23 Young Willys moved his company into the factory and continued Pope’s legacy.

  Frank Stranahan had lost the Boston Buick dealership when General Motors funding dried up and production shut down. After the bankers’ trust took over GM and operations resumed, Frank became vice president of the Massachusetts Motor Company, incorporated in November 1910 in the Bay State to sell Oakland cars (predecessor to Pontiac) made by General Motors in Pontiac, Michigan.24 He had four partners in the dealership, which opened sales rooms at 591 Boylston Street. Oaklands were powered by Champion Ignition Company spark plugs and magnetos, a rival of the Champion Spark Plug Company where Frank was also vice president. If he had overlooked such a conflict of interest, Robert would have scolded him to divest himself.

  Robert took the helm of the Champion Spark Plug Company in Toledo and settled there with his wife, Agnes. Above the laundry shop, he acted as shop foreman, managed all company correspondence, kept the financial books, and served as chief salesman. He developed the reputation of a perfectionist.25 His philosophy was to handle all details as if they mattered equally on the assumption that when a major problem arose he could treat it like another detail.

  Revenue from supplying Willys’s Overlands turned the Champion Spark Plug Company around into a moneymaker. The year 1910 concluded with the Overland Automobile Company producing a total of twenty thousand cars—twelve thousand in Toledo and eight thousand in Indianapolis.26 Buick had about the same sum—its official tally exceeded Overland’s by only one hundred.27 Both Overlands and Buicks were running on spark plugs bearing Champion’s name.

  The supreme leader in auto sales was Henry Ford’s Model T, his low-cost car for the multitudes,28 with some twenty-six thousand sold. Robert determined he had to win the Ford account.29

  Detroit and Henry Ford were a short train ride north from Toledo. When Robert had been an itinerant drummer from Boston, he had struck out trying to gain access to Ford. Now living in Toledo, he had a better chance. He joined several Masonic affiliations.30 An ardent golfer, he became a member of area country clubs and the Detroit Athletic Club. He participated in local Republican politics. Over the next year he ingratiated himself with the right people and at last made a pitch to Henry Ford.

  Robert promised he could provide better spark plugs than the existing supplier and, crucial to Henry, at a cheaper price. Henry agreed to try Robert’s Champion spark plugs. The trial worked. The Champion Spark Plug Company became the sole supplier to the Ford Motor Company—an exclusive relationship that continued for half a century.31

  The Ford and Overland accounts put the Stranahans in a position to take advantage of swelling auto sales. Robert was relieved from the need to travel constantly. He could now spend more evenings and weekends with Agnes and their children.

  In 1912, President William Howard Taft signed the law admitting the territories of New Mexico and Arizona into the union,32 finally giving America forty-eight contiguous states. The auto industry reached a sign of maturity, reflected in aftermarket sales for accessory manufacturing. Spark plugs had a short life and required frequent replacement. They became a popular consumer product.

  A common problem plaguing spark plugs was porous or cracked porcelain, which caused electricity to leak. Electricity’s natural propensity of taking the path of least resistance tended to ground the charge before reaching its designation. And the higher the engine temperature, the greater the electricity leakage. Reduced electric current weakened the spark’s power. That led to the fuel mixture failing to fully ignite, which caused the cylinder to misfire and propel the vehicle as roughly as if its wheels were square. Most cars, like Buick and Ford Model Ts, had four cylinders, but autos with spark plugs that were leaking electricity drove as though they had three cylinders, and they sucked up more gasoline.

  Albert Champion and Robert Stranahan, independently, experimented with how to make better spark plugs. They looked for ways to reduce the faults and increase the virtues—improvements that took them an inch, perhaps a foot, closer to the ideal, still decades away.

  “I spent a fortune on spark plug experiments at the start,” Champion later said. “My friends thought I was crazy. I said no. I knew I was right.”33 He put prototypes through long and rigorous tests before submitting patent applications.

  Robert figured out one way to reduce electric current loss. It involved inserting gaskets between the metal and porcelain parts, which provided a more secure seal and improved insulation. As a result, the modified plug fired sparks more efficiently in the piston chamber—and made starting the engine easier in cold weather or when engine parts had chilled.34 He submitted a patent application on February 1, 1912; in October, he was awarded the patent.35 He marketed his design as the Champion X. It gave him an edge in the growing spark-plug competition.

  After two years over the Snow Flake Laundry, the Champion Spark Plug Company relocated across town, into a four-story brick building on Upton Avenue. There was plenty of space for future expansion, which appeared inevitable, as accelerating demand for cars seemed boundless.

  Profits allowed the Stranahans to buy out their early partners and split the shares. To retain the stock for safekeeping, the brothers created a holding company, Madison Securities.36 Frank removed himself from his conflict of interest by selling his part of the Oakland dealership. Before he took his wife and son to live in Toledo, he dissolved the Albert Champion Company of Boston.37 Frank, once a partner with Albert, had become his adversary.

  Around that time, Robert and Frank brought their mother, Lizzie, as an equal partner in the Champion Spark Plug Company.38 This was possibly a Solomon solution to help insulate her sons from difficulties sharing power and responsibilities.39

  Brothers Frank D. Stranahan, left, and Robert, right, broke from the Albert Champion Company in Boston to found their Champion Spark Plug Company in Toledo. Photo courtesy of Ann and Stephen Stranahan.

  The Stranahans in 1912 adapted the Champion name on the globe for the Champion Spark Plug Company. A lawsuit over the name Champion was inevitable. From Motor World, March 7, 1912.

  A Solomon solution between the Stranahans and Albert Champion was out of the question. Their rivalry was turning more complicated. Magazine ads from the two companies sharing the Champion name started to look alike, and competing ads were sometimes published on facing pages.40 Albert by 1912 distinguished his products by stamping the top of the porcelain of every spark plug with his initials, AC.41 A full-page ad in Motor World to promote Robert’s Champion X featured the globe with a Mercator projection and the Champion banner diagonally across North America—art lifted from Albert Champion Company ads five years earlier, complete with the same “trade-mark” symbol.42

  Since the turn of the century, when most spark plugs had been imported from France or Germany, about two hundred domestic plug makers and assemblers had entered the fray to compete for annual sales of about 56 million spark plugs.43 The two major brands accounting for half the market carried Champion’s name.44

  The Champion Spark Plug Company held a numerical advantage in sales over the Champion Ignition Company. Albert gained extra attention due to his products being used in cars that were regularly winning races. He generously contributed spark plugs to racing teams in exchange for their testing his products under motorsport’s racking abuse. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway had introduced its five-hundred-mile endurance grind around the 2.5-mile oval on Memorial Day 1911. The famous w
inning car was Marmon, made in Indianapolis, among the growing number of independent passenger car companies running on Albert Champion’s accessories. He supplied the expanding line of General Motors cars and trucks along with more than sixty independent motor companies, among them Duesenberg, Stutz, and Pierce-Arrow—all prominent marques.

  Spark-plug manufacturers crowded into the market like prospectors flocking to the California gold rush. Many brands had reassuring names—Never-Miss, Constant, Sta-Rite,45 Shur-Fire,46 Reliance, and the American Indestructible. Others had whimsical appellations, like Rajah and Comet. Some sounded ambiguous, such as Duplex, or enigmatic, like Bougie B and S-M. The name Champion came across as simple and clean. It stood out as much for designating a winner as for the hard-earned reputation of Albert Champion, the Frenchman whose name was his destiny. In hostile business battles, however, names are a legal right rather than a birthright—as had been demonstrated by the sagas surrounding the Ransom Olds, David Buick, and Louis Chevrolet names.

  The Stranahans were earning a fortune trading on Champion’s name. In five years, the Champion Spark Plug Company had grown by 2,000 percent.47 The prospects for future growth shined brilliantly. The Stranahans wanted their company to have exclusive rights to the name Champion. In the summer of 1916, they filed suit in US District Court in Cleveland against the Champion Ignition Company and Albert Champion for infringement of the Champion trademark and for unfair competition.48 The Champion Spark Plug Company sought an injunction to restrain the Champion Ignition Company and Albert Champion from manufacturing, selling, or advertising spark plugs as “Champion.”

  The federal case became Champion Spark Plug Co. v. Champion Ignition Co., et al.49

  Albert Champion filed a countersuit to dismiss the case.

  Both companies had deep pockets to buy the best legal advice. Only one would win the Champion name.

  In the meantime the eponymous Champion devoted his vigor to keeping up with the swelling auto industry. Manufacturing more than doubled every year, from about 210,000 vehicles produced in 1911 to some 1.6 million in 1916.50 Improvements to cars included the introduction of electric starters, which eliminated laborious and hazardous hand-crank starters, and installation of electric lights for better nighttime driving. Americans now drove the roads in 3.5 million cars. Ford’s Model Ts led the growth surge. Ford had been the innovative game changer,51 introducing the moving assembly line and then boosting wages for laborers to $5 a day ($118 in 2014).52 Ford Motor Company’s profit of $37 million in 1913 ($885 million) showed that manufacturing cars created a new source of wealth. The auto industry further boosted the related industries of steel, rubber, and gasoline.

  Flint puffed up from a rustic small town to a lively city topping fifty thousand folks. Some wanted the same urban amenities found in Detroit and Chicago. Albert Champion, Billy Durant, and Charles Stewart Mott joined a few dozen citizens to donate $500 each to found the Flint Country Club.53 The group bought a farm out of town in Atlas Valley. An architect remodeled the colonial farmhouse into a clubhouse with a broad veranda and converted farmland into a respectable eighteen-hole golf course. The clubhouse was decorated throughout with a profusion of flowers arranged in gold baskets and white French wicker furniture. Men—and women—in leisure attire stretched their legs along carefully tended fairways and manicured putting greens to play. Nothing announced the city had come up in the world more convincingly than the Flint Country Club.

  Swinging a wooden-shafted club to knock a ball down the fairway and tap it with a putter into a cup on the green scarcely appealed to Champion. His scores hovered around the rim of one hundred, in the duffer zone.54 He only just tolerated the game, an excuse for a stroll in the sun—before the advent of golf carts. The game’s salvation was an excuse to mingle outside with cohorts and engage in trade talk, which sometimes rewarded dishy gossip. Champion enjoyed playing in the company of the strong-willed Walter Chrysler. They shared a passion for cars and engines. Chrysler was a force in organizing production at Buick, GM’s biggest-selling auto.

  Champion and his wife joined the Flint Country Club for social cachet. She introduced herself by her first name, Julie, and reserved Elise, her middle name, for family and French-speaking friends. She and Albert hosted a dinner dance for 150 guests at the country club. The soirée offered a French-style seven-course menu.55 Drinks were cooled by ice molded in the form of small pink-and-white automobiles.56 Guests danced to the orchestra, which featured a xylophone player infusing the evening with the latest Chicago jazz riffs.

  Everyone knew that Julie Champion played better golf than Albert. She took home silver loving cups and displayed them in the living room for winning the coveted Dort Cup Tournament and the Flint Country Club putting championship.57

  More to Albert’s style was rigorous exercise. “To work, you must keep fit,” the former world-record-holding athlete liked to say.58 Every morning at 5:40 he rose and trundled from the bedroom down the hall to a spare room designated as a gym.59 He did sit-ups before he mounted a bicycle fixed to a steel frame, the rear wheel on a roller, for fifteen minutes of sweaty pumping.60 Then he showered, donned a suit, and ate a sensible breakfast.61 He would then commute to work in time to sit behind his desk before seven o’clock.

  Driving to or from golfing could prove hazardous. One sunny afternoon at the end of May 1916 he had a narrow escape from a head-on collision while driving home from the Flint Country Club with Elise in the passenger seat of their Cadillac.62 He came up behind a horse-drawn buggy in the road ahead and steered into the oncoming lane to pass as a roadster carrying three men approached from the opposite direction. Champion veered off the road into a ditch, which caused the car to flip over. The roadster had nowhere to go and crashed into the ditch. Elise suffered cuts to her head and face. Albert’s right arm and right leg (his good one) were bruised. Both cars needed repairs for shattered windshields and bashed in radiators. The roadster’s driver and passengers were unharmed. Elise was taken to the hospital for treatment and released. Champion had barely avoided another disaster.

  The next day he was on the job when the astonishing news flashed around the auto world that Billy Durant had taken over General Motors as president. Champion’s company was poised to grow with GM more than he could have ever dreamed.

  After Durant had been forced out as the chief executive of GM, he had founded the Chevrolet Motor Company and developed a mid-priced passenger car retailing for up to $1,500. In a demonstration of creativity and tenacity, he had put together a nationwide organization. He had set up Chevrolet assembly plants in Michigan, New York City, St. Louis, Toledo, and Canada, along with wholesale offices around the United States and in Canada.63 In 1915 about sixteen thousand Chevrolet cars—running on Champion Ignition Company accessories—were sold.64 Chevrolet sales generated revenue of $11.7 million ($276 million in 2014) and a net profit of $1.3 million ($30.6 million). GM stock had returned to the New York Stock Exchange in the summer of 1911.65 Durant had increased the value of Chevrolet Motor Company shares on the stock exchange and offered to trade five shares of Chevrolet stock for one GM share.66 His strategy was for the Chevrolet Motor Company to amass enough GM shares to take over. Durant’s tactic looked reckless, Sisyphean. Then he formed a strategic alliance with Pierre S. du Pont that changed the math.

  Pierre S. du Pont, president of the DuPont Corporation of Wilmington, Delaware, directed the family business of making gunpowder and explosives.67 The DuPont Corporation was exploiting the Great War, which had erupted in August 1914 on the continent. German troops had stormed through Belgium into northern France and destroyed everything in their path, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee to southern England and Holland. England declared war against Germany and allied with France and Belgium. DuPont was selling TNT and gunpowder to the governments and armies of both sides, which were slaughtering masses of troops with modern machine guns and cannons.

  On the recommendation of his treasurer, John Jakob Raskob, Pierre
du Pont had purchased a two thousand shares of General Motors stock.68 Raskob, a streetwise bookkeeper from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and a shrewd student of Wall Street,69 looked ahead to when the war would someday end and the DuPont Corporation would have tens of millions of ready cash to invest (billions in 2014).70 Raskob considered GM a good investment, despite Wall Street’s worry that autos were risky business.71 Over the next year, Pierre du Pont bolstered his shares of GM and Chevrolet until they made up more than half of his personal investment portfolio.72

  The tally of Durant’s GM shares of stock and thousands more owned by Pierre du Pont were augmented by holdings of The Man’s cronies. Members of the Flint business community put their faith in him and traded GM stock for Chevrolet stock. Company owners like Albert Champion and Charles Stewart Mott, whom Durant had brought to GM, bought GM and Chevrolet shares. Durant maneuvered in the background as the Chevrolet Motor Company accrued 450,000 of GM’s 825,589 outstanding shares.73 And Durant also controlled the Chevrolet Motor Company’s shares.74 Still a vice president of GM, he attended the board meeting at a hotel in New York City on September 16, 1915. The date coincided with GM’s seventh anniversary. The date also was two weeks from when GM was scheduled to pay the final $2.5 million of the $15 million loan it had received from the bankers’ trust.75 The bankers were unaware of the shift in the balance of power until Durant announced to them, “I’m in control of General Motors today.”76