A hundred years ago Walter Chrysler already owned a car and had taken it apart and put it together piece by piece. He hadn't yet manufactured one, though. He was still a railroad man — and in Pittsburgh.
At 35 Chrysler managed a locomotive works in the North Side and lived in Bellevue at $40 a month rent. The factory, long idle, is being razed but a recent drive-by stirred a certain curiosity in whatever became of Walt Chrysler, master mechanic.
He probably wouldn't have missed a beat in today's "jobless recovery." He knew all about mid-life career switches. For the right opportunity he'd take a new job for lower pay than the old.
He was earning $350 a month, good money then, as chief of locomotive maintenance for the old Chicago Great Western, when he came here in 1910 to break into manufacturing. At $275 a month — note the comedown — he became assistant manager at the red ink-stained American Locomotive Co.
Within two years he straightened out ALCO's tangle of foundries and forges into a production line turning out a reputed "engine a day," making profits, and himself as boss at $8,000 a year. General Motors' busy but inefficient Buick subsidiary recruited him to Flint, Mich.
ALCO at once tried to raise him 50 percent to $12,000. Buick offered only $6,000, but he took it, reasoning that railroads had "reached their zenith" while autos provided "flexible, economical, individual transportation for either business or pleasure ... I wanted to be part of that."
Vincent Curcio's 2000 biography, "Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius," said the up-and-comer stayed eight years at Buick and left as president with a payout in GM stock worth $10 million. Four years later he transformed Maxwell Motors into his own Chrysler Corp., stretched his plant capacity by buying Dodge Brothers in 1928, and brought out his own Plymouth as low-priced competition to Ford and Chevrolet. "Compare all three," he challenged customers in newspaper ads that became famous.
Chrysler had started out as a sweeper in a railroad roundhouse at 10 cents an hour, characteristically took a pay cut to 5.5 cents for the chance to apprentice as a mechanic He and Henry Ford were the only Detroit tycoons to make it to the top from the shop floor.
But he never lived in Detroit. His eventual mansion was on 11 acres (complete with dock and yacht) on the "great Gatsby" north shore of Long Island. And it wasn't the company but the man who built Manhattan's crowning 1920s Chrysler Building, briefly the world's tallest, as a real estate investment for his children..
Chrysler Corp. made profits through the 1930s Depression, while the boss fought hard against exclusive bargaining rights for the then new United Auto Workers. The 1937 auto strike was his last great battle. He died at 65 in 1940.
Today the company he left behind struggles to find new life with Italy's Fiat, the UAW and the U.S. taxpayer as "partners"— thanks in part to high costs and rigid work rules that Walter Chrysler might have foreseen. He knew manufacturing, no doubt about that. And he proved it in Pittsburgh.
