The Big Shake

For weeks the corridors of Detroit's General Motors Building buzzed with rumors. President Charles Erwin Wilson had been very busy--and very quiet. G.M.'s top brass, so the gossip went, was in for the biggest shake-up in years. This week the shaking started. The biggest shake of all was given Harlow H. ("Red") Curtice, 55, the slight, reserved general manager of the Buick Motor division. He was moved up to the newly created job of G.M. executive vice president in charge of all nonproduction activities except finance (labor relations, public relations, etc.) The promotion put him at the head of the line for Charlie Wilson's job if Wilson steps out or up into the board chairmanship.

Other changes:

P: W. F. Armstrong, 49, a G.M. vice president since 1944, moved up to general manager of Chevrolet, replacing the late Nicholas Dreystadt.

P: W. F. ("Bill") Hufstader, 53, Buick's sales manager, was made sales boss for all G.M., replacing Wendell Lewellen, who resigned.

P: Ivan L. Wiles, 50, Buick comptroller, was named a vice president and took over Curtice's job.

P: Vice President Louis Clifford Goad, 47, Fisher Body boss, moved up to head the new body-and-fabricating division, which will coordinate the activities of Fisher Body and the "B.O.P." (Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac) assembly plants.

P: J. J. Cronin, 43, Fisher Body manufacturing manager, was made a vice president and moved up to take Goad's place.

The shake-up was Charlie Wilson's way of moving a new and younger production team into G.M.'s top spots to give G.M. new teeth for the coming dog-eat-dog competition in the automobile business. Furthermore, the team will be ready to take over completely when some of the older top executives, now close to the compulsory retirement age,* step down. (The gossip was that two or three of them would retire shortly.)

Getting the Eye. Red Curtice was the heir apparent chiefly because of his spectacular job as boss at Buick. An Eaton Rapids (Mich.) boy, Curtice worked as a short-order cook, pushed a fruit cart, clerked in a woolen mill during high-school days. He worked his way through the Ferris Institute at Big Rapids, and, after graduation in 1914 as an accountant, became a bookkeeper in G.M.'s AC Spark Plug division at Flint. Next year he became comptroller at 21, the youngest executive in the auto industry. After a hitch in the Army in World War I, Curtice returned to AC Spark Plug, and became its president at 35.

In 1933, Curtice was sent "around the corner" in Flint to Buick. The depression had hit the whole industry, but Buick, which had nothing to meet the switch of buyers to lower-priced lines, almost fell apart. In that year it made only 40,621 cars.

Moon-Shooter. Curtice and his ace salesman Bill Hufstader rebuilt the dealer organization, brought out low, medium and high-priced Buicks that could compete in almost any price range. By 1941, when Buick turned out 316,251 cars, they had pushed from eighth place to fourth, crowding out Dodge, Pontiac and Oldsmobile along the way. Once when the late Bill Knudsen saw one of Curtice's sales forecasts, he muttered: "Well, by Got, you can't shoot the moon unless you see it first, you know." Curtice not only made Buick one of G.M.'s most profitable divisions but kept its engineers hopping. (Buick's Dynaflow automatic transmission was the outstanding auto development in 1947.)

The moon Curtice has been trying to shoot recently is Plymouth's No. 3 sales position. Since war's end, Curtice has stepped up Buick's capacity to 500,000 cars a year but he has not been able to get enough steel to run full blast. Nevertheless, he has been treading hard on Plymouth's heels. At this time last year, Plymouth's lead over Buick in new car registrations was 43,130; last week it was only 37,308. As Red Curtice says: "In this business you can't stand still."

*Originally 70. But it is being moved back each year; in 1950 it will stop permanently at 65.

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