Word: auto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like a coach sending fresh players into a losing game, Packard Motor Car Co. last week rolled its 1951 auto team onto the bright green grass of the University of Detroit stadium. The company had spent nearly $20 million on the new models, completely redesigning them to get some of the razzle-dazzle of other auto makers who had been selling rings around Packard. The reporters who attended the first showing thought that Packard had its money's worth...
Thimbles for the Ladies. An ex-auto-worker and ex-marine who started with nothing and worked himself through night school to a law degree, Orville Hubbard brooked no opposition. He made his fire chief pay a $973 bill for thimbles which Orville passed out to housewives in his campaigning ("Here's a bill," said Orville. "It's customary to pay these to hold . . . jobs."), and then he had the chief make his whole department hose down the streets one morning at 3 a.m.; this made the chief so unpopular with the firemen that he had to quit...
Turn-of-the-century Detroiters considered it a pretty good gag: a team of horses pulling a "horseless carriage" through the streets day after day, with a sign fastened to the auto: "This is the only way you can drive a Winton." The Winton agency failed to see the humor. Just because they had refused to refund a dissatisfied customer's money, the fellow was taking his revenge in this crude manner...
Camouflage for Fear. The Winton yarn is only one of the curious gleanings that California Auto Bug M. M. (Wheels in His Head) Musselman has picked up in his lively retrace of U.S. automobile history, from linen-duster days to the present. He records all the major milestones, from the first plans drawn by George Selden of Rochester (1877), the first model of the Duryea brothers (1893), the water-cooled engine (1895), the steering wheel (1900), the windshield (1905), the left-hand drive (1909), the enclosed body (1911), the electric self-starter (1912), right down to such latter-day innovations...
With a Chamber of Commerce faith in their city's importance as a target, most city planners were sure that their local army air base or railroad yard was uppermost in Joe Stalin's mind. Detroit was certain that its auto plants would take a hit. Los Angeles had its aircraft plants. And Boston counted itself vulnerable because of the Navy yard and the massed brain power around Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...