The Fast Times of Albert Champion
Page 44
51. Prince High School 1898 Yearbook, Diplomas of Graduation, p. 259.
52. Ibid.
53. Frank A. Munsey, “The Automobile in America,” Automobile, February 1, 1906, p. 313; “American Leads in Numerical Value,” Automobile, February 14, 1907, p. 352.
54. “More than 3,200 Autos Registered in Massachusetts,” Automobile, December 19, 1905, p. 642.
55. Massachusetts incorporation record, on the state’s secretary general’s website, at http://www.sec.state.ma.us/corpWeb/CardSearch.aspx (accessed September 15, 2013); “Recent Incorporations,” Automobile, June 29, 1905, p. 796.
56. Stephen Stranahan supplied copies of stock certificates, including one with Frank D. Stranahan as owner of fifty-one shares.
57. Automobile, July 6, 1905, p. 41, classified ads, twenty-four to a page, including the Albert Champion Company.
58. Howard Kroplick, Vanderbilt Cup Races of Long Island (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), p. 45.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 8. The Vanderbilt Cup is at the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum in Washington, DC.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 9.
63. Ibid., p. 55.
64. Ibid., p. 22. Nassau County supervisors approved the use of public roads for the auto race as an opportunity for businesses to take advantage of free-spending visitors, although many farmers relied on horses for transportation and regarded motorcars as playthings for the rich.
65. Ibid., p. 47. Albert Campbell’s Mercedes became the only Vanderbilt Cup racecar without a number.
66. “Mercedes X (1905),” Vanderbilt Cup Races, http://www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/cars/car/Mercedes_x_1905 (accessed February 15, 2014).
67. Kroplick, Vanderbilt Cup Races of Long Island, p. 50.
68. Ibid., p. 46.
69. Ibid., p. 56.
70. Ibid., p. 55.
71. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble,” New York World, January 2, 1906; the same article and headline ran January 14, 1905, in the Salt Lake Herald (Utah). Olta de Kernan’s address was listed at 260 West 25th Street in New York.
72. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble.”
73. “La Touraine Met Gales: Stormy Time also Awaited Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, When He Landed on the Deck,” Brooklyn Eagle, January 2, 1906. The newspaper had misspelled La Loraine.
74. Ibid.; “‘Villain!’ Wife’s Greeting to Albert Champion as He Steps off Steamer,” Boston Herald, January 4, 1906.
75. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble”; “‘Villain!’ Wife’s Greeting to Albert Champion as He Steps off Steamer.”
76. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble”; “‘Villain!’ Wife’s Greeting to Albert Champion as He Steps off Steamer.”
77. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble.”
78. “‘Villain!’ Wife’s Greeting to Albert Champion as he Steps off Steamer.”
79. “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble.”
80. Stewart Harris, “Have You Seen the Globe Today? A History of the Boston Newspaper,” class paper at Boston University, 1981, p. 18.
81. Stephen Stranahan, e-mails January 8, 2014, and January 10, 2014.
82. Champion launched a steady stream of weekly ads in the Automobile, listing the Albert Champion Company, Importers. They touted Nieuport’s patented spark plugs, spark coils, ignition wires, and magnetos. The ads continued for the next few years. In 1905 and 1906 most Albert Champion Company ads were among the twenty-four to a page alongside the ads of other competitors, including Constant Spark Plugs, Alpha Spark Plug, and S-M Spark Plug.
83. Gérard and Bertrand Pommier, Nieuport, p. 31.
84. Ship passenger list of Prosper Champion and Gabriel Delpuech’s arrival on La Bretagne, sailing from Le Havre, France, to New York, August 4, 1906, destined to join Albert and Elise Champion, living in Magnolia, MA. Prosper lists his previous address as Levallois-Perret.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. “Albert Champion, Head of AC, Dies in Paris Hotel,” Flint Journal, October 28, 1927.
88. Beasley, “Albert Champion.”
89. Ibid.
90. “Champion’s Death Blow to Associates: Alfred P. Sloan’s Tribute,” Motor Age, November 10, 1927.
91. Beasley, “Albert Champion.”
92. Ship passenger list.
93. Ibid.
94. Automobile, November 8, 1906, p. 66.
95. Ibid.
96. “Concerning Spark Coils: Just How They Are Made and How They Perform Their Functions,” Bicycling World, May 28, 1904, p. 299.
97. Automobile, May 2, 1907.
98. Ibid.
99. Automobile, May 9, 1907, p. 62.
100. Automobile, May 16, 1907, p. 84.
101. “AC Pioneer Is Dead: H. Albert Schmidt Was a Founder,” Flint Journal, November 13, 1942.
102. Ibid.
103. Half-page ad in Automobile, February 6, 1908, p. 96.
104. Automobile, November 7, 1907, p. 69.
CHAPTER 11. THE NAME GAME
1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 135.
2. Robert Allen Stranahan II, Harvard Class of 1908, Quidecennial Report, 1923, p. 514.
3. Ibid.
4. Robert Allen Stranahan, Harvard Class of 1908, Anniversary Reports, Second Class Report, 1914, p. 297.
5. Ann Stranahan, e-mail recollection of her in-law Robert and his older brother, Frank, July 13, 2004; great-nephew Stephen Stranahan, e-mail, February 9, 2005.
6. Beverly Rae Kimes, Standard Catalogue of American Cars, 1805–1942 (Detroit: 1979), p. 1359. On October 5, 1906, five hundred shares of $100 each were issued for the Tremont Garage Company. Frank D. Stranahan received Stock Certificate No. 1 for 54 shares and Certificate No. 3 for 220 shares, totaling 274 shares at $100 each, valued at $27,400. Copies of the stock certificates supplied November 19, 2001, by Stephen Stranahan, grandson of Frank D. Stranahan. Thus Frank D. Stranahan held majority ownership.
7. Measuring Worth, http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus (accessed December 15, 2013).
8. Arthur Pound, The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors through Twenty-Five Years, 1908–1933 (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1934), p. 88.
9. Mark Dill, “Prest-O-Lite History,” The First Super Speedway, http://www.firstsuperspeedway.com/articles/prest-o-lite (accessed December 5, 2013).
10. Prest-O-Lite full-page ad in Automobile, August 1, 1907, p. 104.
11. Ibid.
12. “News and Trade Miscellany,” Automobile, October 18, 1906, p. 524.
13. “News and Trade Miscellany,” Automobile, December 27, 1906, p. 937.
14. Automobile, half-page ad, November 7, 1907, p. 69. The ad includes art of a Champion spark plug and a magneto sold through the Albert Champion Company at 36 Whittier Street, Boston. The Whittier Street address continues in all the company’s ads through 1908, when Champion left the company and moved to Flint, MI.
15. “Champion Overestimates Self: Defeat by MacLean Marks His Return to the Track,” Bicycling World and Motorcycle Review, March 14, 1908, p. 849.
16. Ibid.
17. “Second Defeat for Champion,” Bicycling World and Motorcycle Review, March 28, 1908, p. 17.
18. “Official Figures on American Auto Production,” Automobile, June 13, 1907, p. 963.
19. Ibid.
20. “The Automobile Is in the Nature of an Evolution,” Automobile, January 9, 1908, p. 61.
21. Richard P. Scharchburg, ed., The GM Story: Corporation Created by Dynamic Flint, Bold Men (Flint, MI: General Motors Institute, 1958), p. 1.
22. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. with John McDonald, My Years with General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 6.
23. Victor Lougheed, “The Horse and the Automobile,” Automobile, February 14, 1907, p. 315.
25. “America Leads in Numerical Value,” Automobile, February 21, 1907, p. 352.
26. Scharchburg, GM Story.
27. “Detroit’s Auto Interests,” Automobile, October 18, 1906, p. 512.
28. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 46.
29. Ibid., p. 52.
30. Ibid., p. 62.
31. Lawrence R. Gustin, Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors (Flushing, MI: Craneshaw Publishers, 1984), p. 98.
32. Ibid., p. 92. A carriage trimmer could earn two dollars daily while car manufacturers paid four dollars for about the same labor.
33. Bernard A. Weisberger, The Dream Maker: William C. Durant, Founder of General Motors (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), p. 140.
34. “Pontchartrain (Louis Phélypeux, compte de),” Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse (Paris, 1984).
35. Alfred P. Sloan, Adventures of a White-Collar Man, written in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1941), p. 79.
36. Ibid., p. 80.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 79.
40. Ibid.
41. Weisberger, Dream Maker.
42. Stranahan, Harvard Class of 1908, Anniversary Reports, p. 297.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Automobile, March 12, 1908, p. 96.
46. Don Ramsdell, telephone interview, April 9, 2009. Ramsdell of Holland, Ohio, was an executive at the Champion Spark Plug Company from 1953 to 1988. He said the story of Robert Stranahan II and Albert Champion fist fighting was passed from Stranahan to his son, Robert Allen Stranahan III. The prospect of the fisticuffs jibes with the personalities of the two men.
47. Stephen Stranahan, e-mail, February 9, 2005.
48. Scharchburg, GM Story, p. 2.
49. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 87; Sloan, My Years with General Motors, p. 5.
50. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove Press, 1990), p. 121.
51. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 85.
52. Ibid., p. 20; Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 27.
53. Sloan, My Years with General Motors, p. 5.
54. William C. Durant, William C. Durant: In His Own Words, The Unedited Memoirs of William C. Durant (Flint, MI: Scharchburg Archives at Kettering University, 2008), p. 20.
55. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 15.
56. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 20. Durant says he was born December 8, 1861, in Boston.
57. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 49.
58. Ibid., p. 33. Durant dropped out of Flint High School a half year short of graduation to work in the family lumber company.
59. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 78.
60. Sloan, Adventures of a White-Collar Man, p. 108.
61. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 20.
62. Ibid. Durant discusses how selling was born to him: “It thrills me as it does every other real salesman to close a clean sale.”
63. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 18.
64. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 78.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 17.
69. Ibid.
70. Pound, Turning Wheel.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 65.
74. Ibid., p. 48.
75. Ibid.
76. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 19.
77. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 79.
78. Ibid., p. 84.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.; Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 49.
86. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 79.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 67.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., p. 69; Weisberger, Dream Maker, p. 92.
93. Gustin, Billy Durant.
94. Scharchburg, GM Story, p. 3.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., p. 56.
97. Scharchburg, GM Story; Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 69.
98. Scharchburg, GM Story; Pound, Turning Wheel.
99. Scharchburg, GM Story; Pound, Turning Wheel.
100. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 57; Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 69.
101. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 57; Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 69.
102. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 57; Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 69.
103. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 57.
104. Ibid., p. 69.
105. Ibid.
106. Scharchburg, GM Story, p. 3.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 82; Sloan, Adventures of a White-Collar Man, pp. 145–46. On January 12, 1940, GM celebrated the 25 millionth GM car rolling off the assembly line at the Chevrolet division plant in Flint. The next day in New York before an audience of five thousand celebrating at a dinner pageant, Sloan paid tribute to Durant on the stage as founder of GM.
110. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 20. Durant titled the third chapter “The A.C. Spark Plug.”
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid. Durant notes that Champion said he had “worked for a number of years with Mr. Renault of Paris,” but Durant may have been confused. Durant had started composing his memoir at age eighty in 1942. By then he had suffered three major reversals of fortune, lost the last of his money in the 1929 stock market crash, and was managing a bowling alley in Flint and working as a short-order cook in a corner food counter. Durant may have been unfamiliar with Champion’s influence under Adolphe Clément-Bayard and Clément-Bayard’s role in the French auto industry, which had been wiped out. During World War I, most of Clément-Bayard’s auto plants had been destroyed. What was left was his Levallois-Perret auto plant in suburban Paris, which he had sold in 1918 to carmaker André Citröen. Clément died in 1928.
113. Ibid. What is revealing so early in Durant’s autobiography is his discussion of how he likes to sell a good product. In the next paragraph, he recalls meeting Champion in the Boston Buick dealership. The account of their meeting continues for four pages, including dialogue, as Durant recalled it. This scene Durant recalled had taken place about two weeks before September 16 when he filed incorporation papers for General Motors.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid.
116. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 95. Recollection about Durant from Lee Dunlap, general manager of the Oakland Motor Car Company in Pontiac, MI, one of the companies purchased by Durant and subsequently the basis for the Pontiac brand.
117. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 124, notes that Durant was just under five feet eight inches tall; Champion’s trainer, Choppy Warburton, had measured Champion at five feet seven and a half inches. “Men of Mark in the Cycling World,” Hub (London), February 20, 1897, p. 101.
118. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 21. Durant wrote that Champion’s company was “not making any money, and the future did not look very bright.” This may not be accurate, as Albert Champion bought weekly ads and the company was adding staff. Champion may have colored the situation over his personal conflicts with Robert Allen Stranahan II.
119. Sloan, My Years with General Motors, p. 7.
120. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 23.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid., p. 22.
123. Ibid. Durant recalls meeting Stranahan to discuss opening a Buick dealership and contends that “the firm of Stranahan & Eldridge was organized,” when it already had been a going concern for three years.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
127. Scharchburg, GM Story, p. 3.
128. Ibid.
129. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 72.
130. Scharchburg, GM Story.
131. Durant, William C. Durant.
132. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 456.
133. Articles of Association of Champion Ignition Company, State of Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Corporations, Securities and Commercial Licensing Bureau, Corporation Division. The $60,000 capital was divided into six hundred shares of $100 each. Champion owned one share, F. A. Allen owned one share, and Arnold M. Goss owned 598.
134. US Patent Office, Patent 959,052, application filed November 3, 1908, granted May 24, 1910.
135. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 111.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid.
138. Ibid., p. 112.
139. Ibid.
140. Scharchburg, GM Story.
141. Ibid.
142. Durant, William C. Durant, p. 23.
143. “Calendar Production Figures for GM,” The First 75 Years of Transportation Products (Princeton, NJ: Automobile Quarterly Productions; Detroit: General Motors, 1983), p. 216. From 8,220 Buicks in 1908 to 14,606 in 1909.
144. Durant, William C. Durant.
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid.
147. Ibid.
148. Ibid.
149. Ibid.
150. Ibid.
151. Pound, Turning Wheel, p. 109.
152. Stranahan, Harvard Class of 1908, Anniversary Reports, p. 297.
153. Automobile, December 31, 1908, half-page ad, p. F-15.
154. Stranahan, American Chronicle, p. 48.
155. The Champion Company: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/CorpWebCardsearch.aspx, card file, p. 3 (accessed September 15, 2013). The date of the company’s name change was July 1, 1909.
CHAPTER 12. CHAMPION AND CHEVROLET SMASHUP
1. Arthur Pound, The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors through Twenty-Five Years, 1908–1933 (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1934), p. 107, quoting a letter from F. S. Bennett of London, the pioneer agent of Cadillac in the British Isles, published in Automobile Trade Journal, December 1924.
2. “Champion Will Make Magnetos,” Automobile, November 10, 1908, p. 729.
3. Lawrence R. Gustin, Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors (Flushing, MI: Craneshaw Publishers, 1984), p. 91.
4. Ibid.
5. “Chevrolet 70 M.P.H. in Long Island Derby,” Automobile, September 30, 1909.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Gustin, Billy Durant, p. 89.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 93.
13. Griffith Borgeson, The Golden Age of the American Racing Car (New York: Bonanza Books, by agreement with W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 54.