"K.T."

(See Cover)

For five humid May days in 1928 a group of shirtsleeved men stayed in a smoke-fogged suite in Manhattan's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, bargaining, eating, occasionally sleeping. Clarence Dillon wanted to sell the automobile company bought four years before by Dillon, Read & Co. from the widows of Motormakers John and Horace Dodge. Walter P. Chrysler, as expert a machinist as ever stood at a lathe, as smart a trader as ever swapped a horse, wanted to buy it.

By the end of the fifth day the fat was in the fire. Onetime roundhouse sweeper Walter Chrysler, who had left the presidency of Buick ($500,000 a year) to retire at 44 from an industry that wouldn't let him quit, who had later founded blazing Chrysler Corp. on the ashes of the dying Maxwell-Chalmers fire, had agreed to buy Dodge. The price suited Walter Chrysler, right down to the ground: $170,000,000 in new Chrysler stock. Without turning over a penny of cash Chrysler Corp. had taken over all the floor space and forge and foundry facilities it needed to drive from No. 5 in the industry to the No. 2 position it holds today. (No. 1, General Motors: No. 3, Ford.)

Two months later Dodge stockholders had assented to the deal and the contract was signed. Next morning Broker Dillon dropped in to see Motorman Chrysler at his office on Madison Avenue to find out when Chrysler would begin operating Dodge. "Hell, Clarence," replied Walter, "our boys moved in last night."

Boss of the boys that moved in that night (carrying canvas signs: CHRYSLER CORPORATION, DODGE DIVISION) was the husky, jut-jawed Chrysler general manager whom Walter Chrysler described to his biographer, Boyden Sparkes, as "a great production man." That night at Detroit "K. T." had stayed close to the phone and when Walter Chrysler called from New York ("We've bought the Dodge--put up your signs") he knew what to do. Within a year he was president of Dodge and his brilliant production methods, stemming from the machine-shop where he had worked as a horny-handed mechanic, were driving Chrysler spectacularly into then motor's Big Three.

Ailing for more than a year, Walter P. Chrysler sat last week at his home on the shore of Long Island's Little Neck Bay. Not for months had he been seen around the docks where in days of health he loved to tinker at his motorboat engines with his derby awry and his white shirt rumpling up under his suspenders. Not for more than a year had his quick laugh been heard in any of the 24 Chrysler plants. His friends feared that Board Chairman Walter Chrysler, burned out at 64 by the gruelling drive from the roundhouse to a paneled office, would never mix in motor's hurly-burly again.

But in his impetuous, romantic rise from the little West Kansas town where he was raised, son of a crack Union Pacific railroad engineer, Walter Chrysler had done something more than pull himself up by his bootstraps. Like most other successful U. S. businessmen he had picked his subordinates with unerring eye. And while he was sick and out of the game, no Chrysler stockholder suffered.

For in the vice-presidents' office sat a set of keen-eyed executives tempered by Chrysler: men like B. E. Hutchinson, Fred M. Zeder, Joe Fields. Their fingers were on the controls of every part of Chrysler Corp.'s complicated mechanism. And in the president's paneled office on the fifth floor of the Highland Park plant sat Kaufman Thuma Keller, the same "K. T." who had made the night foray on the Dodge plant eleven years ago.

While the impetuous Chrysler was wandering from roundhouse to roundhouse in the west at the turn of the century, always able to find a job, always quick to quit it when he had a row with the boss, purposeful K. T. Keller was a high-school boy in Mount Joy, Pa. Symbol of Walter Chrysler's youthful irresponsibility was his big silver-plated tuba, which he played in roundhouse bands, shipped from town to town in friendly cabooses while he rode up ahead in a boxcar with the hoboes. Mark of K. T. Keller's determination to go places was his position at the top of the Mount Joy High School graduating class.

The year Keller graduated (1901) Walter Chrysler lost his tuba, and the month Keller left the Mount Joy High School Chrysler married sweet-faced Della Forker in the Methodist church at their home town, Ellis, Kans. From then on, life was all business for Walter Chrysler. He left the railroad business as a shop foreman for Chicago Great Western, became works manager for American Locomotive Co., got his first job in the automobile business in 1911 (age 36) as works manager for Buick.

From the start, life was all business for K. T. Keller. After putting himself through a business school--on money scraped together in such variegated activities as raising squabs and working in factories--he spent two years in the British Isles as secretary to a lecturer, returned at 21 convinced that his future lay not in a white collar but in overalls. At the Westinghouse Machine Co. plant in Pittsburgh he found what he wanted: two years apprenticeship as a machinist at 20-c- an hour. And in Detroit he found experience in half-a-dozen grimy shops.

"I am a machinist by trade," Keller says today and many a Chrysler man has seen him prove it. So far as Walter Chrysler was concerned, he had proved he was much more than a good lathe-hand as far back as 1916 when President Chrysler of Buick (who had seen Keller's work in the General Motors shops) hired him as Buick's master mechanic.

From then on Keller's progress was all up the hill. Shortly after Chrysler left General Motors, "K. T." became executive vice-president of Chevrolet but when Chrysler hired him for Chrysler Corp.'s general manager in 1926 he was glad to chuck his job and go to work for the man he admired most in the motor business. And when Walter Chrysler stepped out of the presidency of his company four years ago he had only one candidate for the job: serious, barrel-chested Dodge President K. T. Keller. For Keller had shown more than production genius and executive ability in the crowded, exciting days after 1928 that had added Plymouth to the line and given Chrysler a formidable competitor to Ford and Chevrolet. Competent, profane, full of studious curiosity, he had handled the complex problems of the Dodge plant--sales, labor, the thousands of trivia that pour over the desk of a big corporation executive--in his unruffled stride. In Walter Chrysler's mind there was no doubt that K. T. Keller had the mental heft to steer a motor giant which in the year just past had sold $516,830,333 worth of automobiles, had given employment to 59,000 workmen.

He had also shown two other qualities that the hard-riding U. S. motor industry requires of all its topflight executives: the stamina to hold up under hard work, the singleness of purpose that eventually makes "the plant" the be-all and end-all of their existence.

In eleven years K. T. Keller has had only three vacations (fishing). He has cut out figure skating, at which he once excelled, because it took too much time. A rounding paunch has been the penalty, more time for work the reward. He plays golf abominably ("I get quite a thrill if I break 100"), avoids bridge for more than a tenth of a cent "because it gets too serious and I don't have the time to devote to the game."

His playhouse is "the plant." When he is in Detroit he gets to the office at 9 o'clock in the morning, gets out of it as soon as he can get through the mail, to go through one of the factories and to spend long hours in the engineering department. When he is on the road visiting the Chrysler factories outside Detroit, he spends his nights on Pullmans, his days in inspection and in whooping up the sales force. He hasn't had a drink since 1927 when his doctors assured him it was bad for his health, and he seldom goes to his church (Methodist) because he has a hard time staying awake.

When he goes home at night to his Elizabethan house in swank Palmer Woods, he likes to stay there and read (history and biography) and before bedtime to go for a walk. Sometimes on his walks he meets husky President Bill Knudsen of General Motors or Director Pete Martin of Ford, both neighbors, but he seldom sees them otherwise. He is too busy and so are they.

Few years ago he used to spend some of his evenings in the machine-shop in his basement, just tinkering, but lately he has had no time for that and it has been taken over by his 16-year-old son Richard. Last summer Richard built himself a one-lung automobile in the basement shop. Said his father, with the characteristic wrinkled grin that makes his eyes disappear: "A good mechanic's job--and I didn't help him." His other son, Robert, 27, is a Chrysler research engineer. No seeker for a college degree, he went to work for Chrysler after high school. "I gave him a four-year college course in the shop," says his father today, "and I think now that he's a damned fine mechanic."

For the first two years in his new job K. T. Keller steered Chrysler Corp. through some muddy business roads, but Chrysler's sales hit their top in 1937: $769,807,839. And when Chrysler's report for the first six months of 1939 was published in August, he had some sensational news for U. S. business. After a miserable depression year, Chrysler's sales had jumped to $342,788,293, up a whacking 82% from the first half of 1938. For the rest of this year Chrysler, like the rest of the U. S. motor industry (see below), can see nothing but smooth going ahead.

But to K. T. Keller that is no more reason for taking life easier than it is for any other Detroit motormaker. "This game," he says, "isn't a puzzle that you can lay down and pick up again; it's like a bridge hand and you have to play it every minute."

Last week, K. T. Keller was busiest in the engineering department where Chrysler's smart research staff is already busy on 1941 models. It is there the first work is done on K. T. Keller's only recipe for a successful business: "Put out a good product: if it's lousy, you better quit."

To this realistic philosophy, to a pragmatic genius which stems from the machinist's bench and burgeons in a burning urge to put out a good product in quantity for low-priced sale, the U. S. motor industry owes its spectacular growth in the U. S. Most of its topflight executives, men like Ford, Chrysler, Knudsen and Keller, had nothing but their two hands and a kit of tools when they went to work.

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