He was a wide-eyed young man infatuated by machinery. Throughout his life, his willingness to learn was his greatest schooling—his day school, his adult education program, his university.
A son of the bare plains of Kansas, Walter Chrysler refused to go to college after graduating from high school, dashing the hopes of his engineer father. Instead, he took a job in the Kansas engine yards as a sweeper for low-paying, workingman’s wages. In the process, he learned about the novel, integral machines which long fascinated him. After his apprenticeship ended, he bounced around to different railroad jobs in the West. Before long, he had learned enough to become master mechanic of the expansive Chicago Great Western Railway.
From the Kansas Plains to Symbol of Success
Born April 2, 1875, Walter Chrysler’s father, Henry Chrysler, was a railroad engineer. Shortly after Walter’s birth, the Chrysler family settled in the railroad town of Ellis, Kansas. From his earliest days, Walter was assigned a series of chores and expected to contribute to the family’s well-being, from pitching in at fixing meals to milking cows. Chrysler wrote affectionately of his father and the memories he cherished of the two of them, the young boy walking side by side with Henry from the railroad yards “carrying the dinner pail.”
Occasionally, the boy was allowed to ride in the locomotive cab and with his father’s permission. He would yank the whistle chord, smiling as it shrieked. A permanent love of mechanics and machinery developed in those tender moments.
The older Chrysler, however, tried to steer his son away from a life of machinery, refusing to even enable an introductory apprenticeship for him. But Walter would not be diverted. He solicited and found menial work as sweeper and oiler in a machine shop. With gritty resolve, he worked his way up to the role of apprentice. The work only got more demanding and not much more lucrative, the scantest sum covering a taxing 10-hour day. But his youthful drive and vigorous sense of purpose triumphed over the challenging character of the work.
He worked in the shops of the Santa Fe railroad, at one point living in Wellington, Kansas. In his mid-20s, he returned briefly to Ellis before embarking on a new phase of life in Utah, where “he was earning 30 cents an hour for a 10-hour day, but he had more ambition than ever.”
True to form, he never shied away from the simplest or most repetitive duties, and he was keen to learn every facet of working with machinery. He received one promotion after another and moved from one railroad job to another. Indeed, his intellect and ambition were rewarded with the elevated position of foreman of the shops, and, soon, his standing grew, and he was awarded a general foreman position in Colorado, and then a master mechanic job in Texas. When the Chicago Great Western Railway needed a general master mechanic, Chrysler was selected for the position. He thrived in the environment and was promoted to greater responsibility and bigger pay.
New Age of the Automobile
In 1908, Walter Chrysler attended an automobile show in Chicago. He spent four days gawking at bright paint jobs, handsome trims, shiny tops, and clean, inviting interiors. His curiosity was hooked. He wanted to know how the automobile operated and what made its parts move. He had a keen understanding of railroads and the materials, functions, and movements that powered their capabilities. But the automobile was a charming mystery. He decided that owning one of these Locomobile touring cars would be worth it even if it meant going into debt.
After obtaining a loan to make the $5,000 payment and having the vehicle shipped to him, Chrysler spent three months tearing the car apart in his garage. For him to best understand the true nature of the automobile, parts and pieces were inventoried and inspected. Indeed, he removed entire sections, studied them, and then put them back as one again.
Origins of a Manufacturing Titan
Though he was applying himself physically to his work with the railroads with vigor, his mind was thinking more and more about the flexibility and practicality of the emerging automobile. When someone from General Motors offered him a position with the Buick Motor Company, he jumped at the chance.
Walter Chrysler turned his talents to a fresh industry, focusing on speeding up production and slashing overall costs. Within a few years he became president of the rapidly-growing Buick company and was earning more money annually than most made in a lifetime. In 1919, troubled by the rapid expansion of the company and its unswerving course, he retired.
After a few months of idleness, Chrysler was lured out of retirement by a group of bankers affiliated with the Willys-Overland Company, looking for the right person to help them rescue their struggling automobile corporation. In addition to their problems at Willys, they were also looking for someone to restructure the foundering Maxwell Motor Company. Accepting their invitation to help (and a handsome salary, too), Chrysler was soon back at work. Soon, Chrysler and the investors announced that they were testing and manufacturing a new addition to the field of automobiles, “a car so fine that it would revolutionize the industry.”
The key feature of this revolutionary car was a high-compression, six-cylinder engine, something which only racing-car owners had been familiar. Chrysler and his associates modified it for use in an ordinary, family-style car, and the “Chrysler 70,” nicknamed the “Chrysler Six,” became the phenomenon of the country in its first year of production, in 1924.
In 1925, the Maxwell Motor Company became the Chrysler Corporation, and, by 1936, Chrysler was buying, launching, and streamlining enough vehicles to bolster its status as the second-largest automaker in the United States.
Walter Chrysler, the tough, self-taught, ex-mechanic, would become unimaginably wealthy, a great success of personal and professional industry. As a boss, he had the reputation as someone who treated others fairly and rightfully. His mastery of mechanics made him relatable to the employees he managed. Though he was an upper-tier executive, at his center, he was the same ambitious, unschooled kid who began “an industrial career crawling through boilers of railroad locomotives at a nickel an hour,” never losing perspective of the workers and machinists he had toiled most of his life with.
Walter Chrysler, the man who lived and loved machinery, died in 1940.
