Walter Percy Chrysler

Walter Chrysler (1937)

Walter Percy Chrysler (born April 2, 1875 in Wamego , Kansas , † August 18, 1940 in Kings Point, Long Island , New York ) was an American automobile pioneer and founder of the international automobile company Chrysler Corporation .

Life

Walter P. Chrysler was born in 1875 in Wamego , Kansas, the son of the locomotive engineer Henry Chrysler and his wife Mary . Three years later, his family moved to Ellis , Ellis County , not far from Hays . Chrysler's eponymous German ancestor was Johann Philipp Kreißler (* 1672), who came from Guntersblum on the Rhine and emigrated to America in 1709, where the German surname Kreisler became the English Chrysler . The Fencing Master dynasty of Kreußler in Jena are also his ancestors.

Chrysler worked as a grocery store clerk, sold silverware, and was a cleaning staff on the Union Pacific Railroad . He then worked at the American Locomotive Co. (ALCo) where he made it to the base manager in Pittsburgh .

Chrysler and Della Forker married on June 4, 1900, with whom he had three children, Thelma, Bernice and Walter Percy . In 1910 he became factory manager at Buick in Flint , Michigan, and in November 1912 he succeeded Charles W. Nash, who was elected General Motors President, as President of Buick. He held this position until June 1917. Despite the not always easy collaboration with Durant, he left on good terms and as a rich man.

His next professional challenge led him immediately afterwards to the Chase Manhattan Bank , for which he was to reorganize the Willys Corporation . This was a holding company that John North Willys ran independently from his Willys Overland concern. The work was extremely well paid: Chrysler received US $ 1 million a year.

In 1921 he considered his job done and turned to the next remediation case, the Maxwell Motor Company . This company had recently merged with Chalmers Motor Car Company . Willys, meanwhile, had gotten himself into debt trying to regain control of his ventures. A part of the bankruptcy, which came up for auction were the former Duesenberg -Werksanlagen in Elizabeth , New Jersey , along with the prototype of a six-cylinder -Automobils. Chrysler was interested in this as President of Maxwell , but was outbid at the auction by his former boss Durant (who had since left GM again ). But it turned out that Durant wanted the work, not the prototype. An agreement was reached and the original Willy team further developed the car to series production. It was built from the beginning of 1924 in the former Chalmers factory in Detroit , Michigan and it was named Chrysler . In 1925 the company became the Chrysler Corporation . In 1935 Walter Chrysler retired from business life. His successor at the top of the group was Kaufman Thuma Keller .

Walter P. Chrysler had helped Buick achieve a breakthrough in his career and he was the last of the automotive pioneers to build an automotive company on his own and keep it going.

Walter Chrysler was also the owner of the Chrysler Building in New York, which was briefly the tallest building in the world.

In 1929 Chrysler was named Man of the Year 1928 by Time Magazine .

literature

• Walter Percy Chrysler: Life of an American Workman. 1937, ISBN 1-4047-8069-6
• Kimes, Beverly Rae (Editor), and Clark, Henry Austin, Jr.; "The Standard Catalog of American Cars", 2nd edition, Krause Publications, Iola WI 54990, USA (1985), ISBN 0-87341-111-0 , pp. 292-293 and 151-152.

Web links

Commons : Walter Percy Chrysler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Museum in Chrysler's youth residence in Ellis
• Newspaper article about Walter Percy Chrysler in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Claudia Roth Pierpont: The Silver Spire: How two men's dreams changed the skyline of New York (English) . In: The New Yorker , November 18, 2002. Retrieved August 2, 2012. 
2. ↑ The original TIME article (The first cover of Time completely in color.)