Read it for the fun of it.
You don't realize all the showrooms that were once in AP.
But read this one.
....
"Money is only loaned to a man," William Crapo Durant once said. "He
comes into the world with nothing and he leaves with nothing."
"Billy" Durant came into the world in Boston with not even a loan.
Raised in Flint, Mich., he quit school at 17. By selling patent
medicine, cigars, insurance and borrowing from friends, he scraped up
enough to join a fellow clerk in buying out a carriage factory for
$2,000. Through his prodigious energy and salesmanship ("he could
coax a bird out of a tree") the company acquired 14 plants by 1904.
Durant's "Blue Ribbon" carriages became the Fords of a horse-drawn
world.
The company overinvested in bicycles, lost out. Unperturbed, Durant
got control of the tottering Flint Wagon Works, sold $10,000,000
worth of stock to exploit its rights to manufacture a horseless
carriage, designed by David Buick. He made millions in a few years,
laid grandiose plans to take over the lusty young auto industry. He
almost did, by merging five companies—Henry Ford was the most
important holdout—into General Motors.
In the panic of 1910 Durant lost control of G.M. Unfazed, he started
manufacturing a car called the Chevrolet. Quietly he bought back 40%
of G.M.'s stock (with the help of the Du Ponts) and walked into a
G.M. board meeting with his pockets bulging with stock certificates.
Imperiously he announced: "Gentlemen, I control this company." As
Walter P. Chrysler later said: "It was like Napoleon's return from
Elba."
In the post-World War I slump, G.M. stock slipped from $400 to $12.
Durant spent an estimated $90,000,000 trying to bolster it before he
finally lost control of G.M. for good. He founded Durant Motors,
aiming to start a new G.M. But this time it was no go. He piled up
another fortune by playing the stockmarket, but the 1929 crash
virtually wiped him out. Later, he went into bankruptcy, listing $250
(the clothes on his back) as his only assets.
He still had his chipper spirits. But his Midas touch was gone. In
1936 he turned up in Asbury Park, N.J. as a lunchroom and supermarket
owner. He plugged a dandruff cure on the side, operated a bowling
alley in Flint. He still talked grandly of making a pile. But it was
too late. Last week, in his eight-room apartment in Manhattan, Billy
Durant, 85, died. Of the millions he had been "loaned" he left
nothing.
March 1947
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