The Texas Touch

When the Chrysler Corp. delegated Lester Lum Colbert to negotiate a new wage agreement with the U.A.W.-C.I.O. last August, Detroit's automen gossiped that he was being groomed for the presidency (TIME, Sept. 4). Last week, Chrysler directors made it official. President K. T. Keller, nudging the retirement age of 65 and busy three days a week with his new job as director of the Defense Department's guided missile program, moved up to board chairman--a post vacant since Walter P. Chrysler's death in 1940. Into the presidency went "Tex" Colbert, 45, boss of Chrysler's Dodge division.

Colbert, born in Oakwood, Texas (pop. 1,086) and graduated from the University of Texas, is Chrysler's third president. Unlike Founder Chrysler and K. T. Keller, he did not come up through the shop. But he was K.T.'s personal choice, and also the. choice of Manhattan's Nicholas J. Kelley, the corporation's legal adviser and a potent voice in its affairs.

It was Kelley, looking for a "good sharp young man who could get along with people," who hired Colbert out of Harvard Law School in 1929 to go to work in his Manhattan law firm. In 1933 Colbert was sent to Detroit as Chrysler's resident attorney. He got along from the start with Keller, who advised him to get some mechanical know-how if he wanted to get to the top in the auto business.

Colbert went to night school to study production, mechanics and shop engineering. He got his first chance to show what he had learned in 1943 when he took over the job of running the Dodge airplane engine plant in Chicago. As postwar boss of the Dodge division and a Chrysler vice president, he showed a flair for handling labor and public relations.

As Keller stepped out of the presidency after 15 years, he left Colbert the rosiest financial statement in Chrysler history. On a gross of $1,490,404,450 in the first nine months, net profits hit a record $105,246,991, equal to $12.09 a share (v. $11.22 in the same period last year). In the third quarter alone profits were $7.55 a share. As a result, Chrysler has already declared dividends of $9.75 a share so far this year, compared to $5.25 in all of 1949.

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