Word: flints
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Family & Early Years: Born March 17, 1899, in Pinconning, Mich., where his father ran a general store. At 13, after finishing the eighth grade, he went to work as a mail boy for the Weston-Mott Co. (auto axles) in Flint. During World War I, he worked as an ammunition inspector in the Flint Chevrolet plant; after the war he opened a real-estate brokerage with his father. In 1929, he opened a Chevrolet agency which he built into one of the largest auto agencies...
Political Career: One day in 1940, Summerfield went to a Republican rally to hear Candidate Wendell Willkie. Convinced that the hostility of the audience was "a disgrace to the town," he got together with nine other Flint businessmen to organize a Republican campaign committee which gave Willkie a surprisingly large vote in Genesee County that November and helped him carry Michigan. From then on, Summerfield was wed to politics. Appointed finance director of Michigan's Republican state central committee in 1943, he proved so successful in getting contributions that other Republican leaders came to Michigan to find...
Curtice, now 59 and sure to be Wilson's successor, has been with G.M. all his business life. Born in Eaton Rapids, Mich., he graduated from Ferris Business College at Big Rapids in 1914 and hustled to Flint to start in as a bookkeeper for G.M.'s AC Spark Plug division. Within a year, he was AC's comptroller, the youngest executive (at 21) in the industry. He got a reputation as a comer who could "pitch, catch and cover first base at the same time." He learned finance, production and design, showed an aggressive flair...
Curtice lives in Flint, commutes the 67 miles to Detroit almost every weekday by company plane. A man with a genuine liking for people, he can probably first-name more business friends than any other G.M. executive. He drinks and smokes sparingly, relaxes on rare fishing and hunting trips. But like most of G.M.'s top brass, he has only two real hobbies: making automobiles and talking about them...
Angry Shouts. The Council was founded in 1943 by a group led by Lessing J. Rosenwald, onetime board chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Almost all of its members belong to Reform congregations, and Executive Director Elmer Berger, 44, is a Reform rabbi who left his synagogue in Flint, Mich, to take the job. Some of the earliest Reform rabbis were explicitly anti-Zionist, and to Council members, the rising popularity of "Israelism" in the U.S. seemed the very thing the rabbis had protested...