Life of an American Workman

Walter P. Chrysler

Description

Walter Chrysler established the Chrysler Corporation from the embers of the Maxwell-Chambers Auto Works; then founded the much larger Dodge Brothers Motor Co. In this book he tells his story simply and with many entertaining anecdotes. He talks about his childhood, his work on the railroads, his turn-around of American Locomotive, Buick and then Maxwell-Chambers. Chrysler writes in an easy style, in the book he explains his philosophy that R&D are vital to a company's success. The Chrysler Building was in the planning stage and that is discussed in the book along with his belief that his children must start at the bottom and worth their way up. This easy-to-read autobiography is a delight for anyone but a must-read for automotive enthusiasts. 

Sujets

• Techniques
• Automatisation et Contrôle
• History
• Transportation
• Automotive

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644294
• Langue: English

Extrait

Life of an American Workman

by Walter P. Chrysler

First published in 1937
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
WALTER PERCY CHRYSLER
Life of an American Workman

by WALTER P. CHRYSLER


















TO D E L L A
I
BACKGROUND OF MY BOYHOOD

" You Had To Be a Tough Kid "
Being a machinist, I have always wanted to know how things work. Amachine enabled my pioneering father and mother to provide for me; itwas a steam locomotive of which my father was the engineer. All mytraining, instincts and aptitudes have combined to make me want topenetrate the workings of any machines I see.
Curiously, my earliest recollection of being alive is involved with anadventure growing out of the resentment of certain Americans againstmachines—railroad machines, and all they portended.
With a German-fairy-story fancifulness, my mother enlisted me in theservice of the brass lamp in our kitchen that had its own wall shelfto roost upon. She made it seem a living thing, that lamp whosesmoked-up chimney gave her a daily cleaning chore.
"You must go to the store," she told the barefooted child who naggedher for a slice of bread with sugar on it; that was me between fiveand six years old. "The lamp is empty and, therefore, hungry—justlike you. We must give his wick a big drink or he will sulk and keepus in darkness tonight. You take this can and get some coal oil."
A withered, blackened potato was impaled upon the oil-can spout. Ourswould get a fresh potato for his nose once a month, when our accountwould be squared at the store on payday.
What I wore that day was a gingham shirt and a little pair ofjeans-cloth pants that buttoned to it. The empty oil can clangedmusically as now and then a flowering weed swished against itsemptiness. We lived on the south side of the tracks; the stores, thesaloons and other excitements were on the north side of the tracks.Ellis, Kansas, the railroad town where we lived, was in the heart ofthe short-grass country.
Two utterly different streams of life bisected each other in thevicinity of our small, isolated community; east and west ran therailroad, and its tracks bridged the creek that slanted across theprairie. This creek was a yellow thread of wilderness at the edge oftown. If the railroad and its attendant establishments represented theexcitements of the tame world far to the east, the stream wassometimes a murmuring reminder of other kinds of excitement.Throughout my early years there were being freshly printed in the softbanks of that stream the tracks of wild animals of the prairie bywhich we were surrounded—of buffalo and antelope, and of coyotes.Sometimes there were tracks of a creature that wore moccasins, acreature that hated the railroad.
You had to be a tough kid. Out there where I grew up, if you weresoft, all the other kids would beat the daylights out of you.Consequently you grew tough in all your sensitive parts, just as yourbare feet did in order to avoid the pain of splinters, stone bruisesand rude boot heels. Nevertheless, there was one valid, scalp-raisingfear in my early life which has completely lost touch with currentrealities. When I have spoken of it, my children have seemedincredulous. Yet history is on the side of my memory when I say thatalong that narrow fringe of plains civilization where we grew up,everybody lived in fear of Indians.
I was a year old when, to the north of us, Custer and his men weremassacred. In the fall of 1878, when I was three and a half years old,a band of Northern Cheyennes, led by Chief Dull Knife, slaughteredsome white people living on Sappa Creek and Beaver Creek, in Decaturand Rawlins counties. Other things had happened, were happening andwere told of over and over in the nighttime glow around our kitchenstove, while neighbors sat and blew upon their steaming coffee pouredin saucers. A Kansas white woman, when carried off by Indians, hadwritten pleas for help on scraps of paper with which she made a trailfor rescuers to follow. Why, so often did we hear the tale I almostseemed to see that despairing woman tearing paper and even her aproninto scraps. Though adult voices were lowered to discuss her plight,only a dumb kid would fail to get better than a glimmering of anunderstanding as to why the Indians saved the women and girls,although invariably scalping men and boys. At five I was a palefacevulnerable to scalping, and knew it.
On that day, as I went for coal oil toward the railroad tracks and thestores, I saw another boy running; he cleared the tracks and headedtoward me along the path. As we passed I flung a question at him.
"Indians!" he yelled. "Indians are coming!"
Right now I take a lot of credit to myself, because I did not drop theoil can as I scooted for home, clearing tufts of buffalo grass at justabout the height of a prairie chicken when it flies for fresh cover. Istill had the clanging oil can as I panted into our yard, yipped awarning to my mother and scrambled out of sight, down a flight ofearthen steps into the moldy darkness of our cyclone cellar.
My memory of that occurrence ends as abruptly as a picture that istorn across, but another recollection which may be a piece of itbegins with my small self seated on the floor, amid the smell ofdust, against the wall of the second floor of the stone railroadstation in Ellis; this was also the hotel. Many people were there. Thewomen, with shawls and sun-bonnets on their heads, were enjoying theexcitement of being frightened, if I can trust what I seem toremember.
Just to prove that we were in danger, the children were not allowed toplay or make any noise. Every man who showed himself carried some kindof weapon; most had rifles, but a few younger men made savage gestureswith axes and whiffle-trees. I remember one naked saber carried almostlike a doll baby in the folded arms of an old man who leaned againstthe wall close to me. There was stable manure on his wrinkled blackboots. That occasion was certainly one of our Indian scares. I thinkthis was in 1880; it might have been in '81. However, the Indiansnever got me, in keeping with my mother's promise that they neverwould; she would reassure me whenever I hesitated to invade, alone,the awful blackness of the bedroom. Sometimes she tucked me in, notalways.
Frontier hardships accounted for great changes in the lovelyMissouri-born girl with peach-bloom complexion, tender mouth andyouthful form whom my father married in 1871. She was a shapely bridewhen she left the comfortable German culture of her father's Missourifarmhouse. By the time I became conscious of my dependence on her, mymother's large dark eyes were set in a big powerful woman of thefrontier. I was the third of four children she bore in Kansas railroadtowns in the 70's before the prairies had been tamed. She ate buffalomeat to nourish her sons. Sometimes now I seem to see her eyes lookingat me, miraculously, out of the face of one of my grandchildren.Sometimes, in a mirror, I catch a fleeting trace of her in my owneyes. At such times I hope afresh that they were right, those vanishedEllis neighbors who, when drinking coffee in our kitchen, would casta nod at me and say, "Walt takes after his ma."
Work? Of course, a boy had to work in a household where my mother wasthe ruler. She worked all the time herself and had prodigious energy.What awakened me every day was the clangor of iron lids on hercookstove before the sun was up. For years her kitchen fire was theonly heat we knew in winter, and to reach its blazing comfort in amorning that was still night-black, often I had to scamper bare-footedacross a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badlyfitting windows. I shared a bed with my bigger brother Ed, who wasthree years and three months older. Before breakfast Ed had cows tomilk, but I had other work to do.
Sometimes I was sent early to get the soup meat. Until I was six orseven, the few hundred people who lived in Ellis almost never gotbeef; we all ate buffalo meat. There was an abundance of it and it wascheap; some of it was shipped east to other towns. The rump was whatmy mother wanted. She would put a great hunk of this maroon-and-bluishgristled meat into the big black iron pot in which she made her soup.I have never tasted any other soup quite so good. She never served hersoup on the day she made it, but, steaming hot, it would appear on thetable the next morning when we had breakfast. What enormous mealsthose were with which a Kansas day began back in the '80's! Steaks,potatoes, pancakes, followed soup. Often we had hominy, but if we did,we owed it, every grain, to my mother. She soaked the yellow grains inlye water until the flintlike yellow coating vanished. A mound ofhominy was material out of which to build a dike to retain a lake ofgravy. My mother not only made the hominy but she grew the corn. Shehad a garden where no weed was ever tolerated. There was no task sheever dodged for lack of strength or skill or willingness.
A certain soft scraping sound that I hear faintly sometimes in abarbershop is like an echo of a harsh and loud scrape, scrape, scrapethat I used to hear in our kitchen when I was a boy. As I listen, withmy face and mind erased of present things by a barber's soothingtowel, I doze; and, dozing, slip back to one of those moments of mypast that is quickened by the razor's noise. Our kitchen was the onlybarbershop my father knew. My mother was the one who always cut hishair and shaved him. We never spent money for anything that we couldget without spending.
When it happened on a Sunday morning, t