Word: edsel
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...England's Northernaires and Sweden's Vocal Vikings among them. A grand march through downtown brings out a galaxy of past champs. The Dukes of Harmony, 1977 and 1980 gold medalists, are prominent in a blue Ford Model A. The Gay Notes, 1958 titlists, cruise by in a '58 Edsel. Old quartets endure as much for their catchy names as their sounds. The Gala Lads and Chord Busters are here. The Four Hearsemen, who swept the 1955 sing-off garbed as undertakers, have trekked south from Amarillo. But now they are minus their lead tenor, who has passed...
...someone whose name is on the building, since hardly anybody has a moniker like Exxon, Primerica or Unisys. But at Ford, Detroit's fastest moving automaker, the fourth generation of a family dynasty is moving up. Last week the company elevated two young executives to its board of directors: Edsel B. Ford II, 39, and William Clay Ford Jr., 30, both great-grandsons of the founder. Edsel II is general sales manager of the Lincoln-Mercury division, and William Jr. heads Ford's operations in Switzerland...
Born Sept. 4, 1917, to Edsel and Eleanor Clay Ford, Henry led the privileged yet cloistered life of Henry Ford's grandson. His boyhood included chauffeur-driven lifts to grammar school. After Hotchkiss, Ford went to Yale, but he did not graduate. Reason: he paid a student to write a paper for him about Thomas Hardy's novels. Although admitting that he cheated, Ford denied that he was caught because he accidentally dropped the bill for the student's services into the professor's lap. "I may be stupid," he told Biographer Booton Herndon, "but I'm not that stupid...
...founder was then 80 and shakily in control after the death the previous May of his son Edsel from cancer. In his dotage, the old man had surrounded himself with managerial incompetents and given them enormous power. Among them was Harry Bennett, Ford's pistol-toting aide-de-camp, who had become the company Rasputin. Young Ford demanded that his grandfather turn all management control over to him. "I want a completely free hand," he said. The old man finally relented. In 1945, at 28, Henry Ford II took charge. His first act was to fire Bennett...
...much as Alfred Sloan had done at GM. In the 1950s and 1960s, under Ford and Breech, the reborn Ford Motor Co. prospered and came up with several winners, including the sporty Thunderbird in 1954 and the Mustang in 1964. One failure, though, became synonymous with marketing disaster: the Edsel in 1957. In later years, Ford was not as successful. The company lagged behind its rivals in coming up with the right mix of fuel-efficient cars after the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Ford insisted that Americans would never buy small economy cars, and the firm...