E.L. Cord: His Transportation Empire is made possible by a grant from the E.L. Cord Foundation.

Cord knew automobiles.

Cord knew automobile manufacturing.

Cord knew automobile marketing.

Cord knew how to streamline his operation and get rid of unnecessary expenses.

And sometimes he upset people because he took kind of a flinty approach.

It's all part of the big picture, all part of the big game.

Bottom line, dollar and cents is the bottom line.

I think Cord had a drive within him and it's something we'll probably never totally understand why he was driven to do what he did, but he did it.

And we're left with that legacy.

He was an astute industrialist who helped revolutionize the growth and popularity of personal and public transportation.

With his knowledge of business, he built an empire so massive and diverse that even the darkest days of the Depression did not stop him.

His name was Errett Lobban Cord.

Cord was a young, energetic man whose primary goal was to become a financial success.

Some would call him lucky.

Others would say he was a brilliant man who understood the system and how to make it work for him.

Talented men were drawn to his style and ideas.

Others grew to dislike him for his shrewd business tactics.

Cord was born in an era of great opportunity.

Both public and personal transportation were in their infancy across the nation, from horse drawn carriage makers to men with a dream.

All were imagining, inventing, refining and improving their ideas of what an automobile could and should look like in the 20th century.

It was a daunting task.

For every individual who succeeded, there were legions of men who fell by the wayside.

E.L. Cord was a young man in the early 1900s determined to reap the rewards that the exciting new era had to offer.

During the early part of his professional life, Cord moved from job to job.

It was always looking, always searching for that one experience, that one venture that would bring him success.

From used car salesmen to hauling ore to actually starting his own car wash business, which failed.

Of his many early ventures, only one financially rewarded him.

His fascination with automobiles.

Cord would purchase old worn out Model T Fords, remake them and race cars, compete with them until they won, then sell the cars for a handsome price because they were now winners.

I think that like many kids at that time, automobiles captured his imagination.

They were very big in this country.

It was sweeping.

They had emerged from their infancy.

And I think he got caught up into it like a lot of other kids at the time.

Married at a young age and with two children, Cord moved from California to Arizona, back to California and finally to Chicago.

Through each new job, Cord was making new contacts.

There was a gentleman in Chicago by the name of Harold Ames, who served as a pilot in one of the Expeditionary Forces squadrons over in France.

And he had a friend out in Los Angeles who happened to know Cord in Los Angeles.

And through that connection, Cord expressed interest in going to Chicago.

And this gentleman told Cord of Harold Ames and suggested that he look him up when he got into town.

Harold Ames worked as a salesman for the Thomas Hay Company, a Chandler automobile distributor.

He arranged an interview with Thomas Hay for Cord.

However, there was one serious problem that Cord was unaware of at the time.

Thomas Hay detested smokers and Cord, not knowing this lit a cigarette during the interview.

By all accounts, Hay showed him the door.

So much for Cords grand start as a salesman in Chicago or so it seemed.

Thomas Hay left for Florida on his annual vacation, and in his absence, Jack Quinlan, the general manager of the agency, was charged with overseeing the operation.

Cord went back, interviewed with Quinlan and got the job.

Apparently, Hay must have gone on an extended vacation because by the time he returned, Cord had sold so many automobiles that Quinlan was able to convince Hay to keep him on despite his smoking habit.

He has the uncanny ability to sell.

He has to believe in it.

It appears, from what I've seen, he has to personally believe in it before he can sell it.

But if he believes in it, he can make anybody believe in it.

And this was a talent that E.L. really had.

It was his main talent was his ability to sell anything that he believed in.

Cord didn't stay with the Thomas Hay Company for long.

They moved from one automobile agency to another until Jack Quinlan asked him to come and work for his new agency selling Moon automobiles.

The Moon was a popular, assembled car in the 1920s.

Between them, Cord and Quinlan were soon selling 60% of the Moon factory output.

This whole knowledge base, that Cord was gathering at the time was contributing to how he would run the Auburn Automobile Company a few years later.

He was able to figure out how to source parts.

He knew exactly what Moon was doing.

I'm sure, in terms of their production work, their distributorships, how they marketed and so on and so forth.

And all of this was accumulating in his head, and I'm sure it built up his confidence to be able to come in and take over another car company.

That was very like the Moon car company in 1874.

Charles Eckhart started the Eckhart Carriage Company in Auburn, Indiana.

The company was very successful, making a wide range of surreys, buggies, wagons and coaches.

The company was well-respected with a national reputation for excellence.

Upon Eckhart's retirement, he gave the carriage company to his two sons, Frank and Morris.

At the turn of the century, many people were experimenting with automobile manufacturing and carriage makers such as the Eckharts were not going to be left behind.

Carriage manufacturers by the droves were getting into automobile manufacturing.

Again, they were able to source engines.

They were able to source drivetrains.

If they had the ability to make a body, which they obviously could, because they could make a carriage buggy, they could strap an engine underneath of it and make an automobile.

And that's all that it took.

It was a growing concern.

Obviously, everybody was getting swept away in the automobile craze and nobody wanted to be left behind.

Frank and Morris, seeing a future in automobile manufacturing, purchased a car and took it apart.

They examined each moving part to see how it was made.

After dissecting the car, it was decided that they, too, could build automobiles.

In 1902, the Auburn Automobile Company was born.

They premiered their first Auburn at the Chicago Auto Show in 1903.

It had a torpedo deck and a one cylinder engine.

The Auburn became a success selling 50 cars that first year.

In 1904, they began attaching rear seats, thus making it a full four or five passenger automobile.

Each succeeding year, they sold enough automobiles to make a modest profit.

The cars they built were conservative, not sporty or elegant.

They were functional for their time.

The Eckhart brothers ran the Auburn Automobile Company for almost 20 years until they, too, were ready to retire.

In 1919, they began to look for someone to purchase the company.

At the same time, a group of Chicago investors were looking to buy.

The Chicago investors who were involved basically revolve around the investment banking firm of F.B.

Hitchcock and Company and the First National Bank of Chicago.

Many of the directors were involved in the acquisition of the Auburn Automobile Company, including William Wrigley Jr, who of the Wrigley Spearmint Gum fame, sat on the board of directors for the First National Bank.

They paid approximately one and a quarter million dollars for the Auburn Automobile Company.

That's in 1919.

And I'm sure that at the time it showed enough promise with the upswing of the beauties six sales to warrant moving on the company and taking it over.

Unfortunately, very few of them knew anything about automobile manufacturing.

None of the investors wanted to move to Auburn, Indiana, and none knew how to manage an automobile company.

For five years, they were absentee owners.

In 1921 and 22, the country was gripped by a recession.

The Auburn Automobile Company's stock wasn't worth much, and the future of the company did not look bright.

The board of directors chose Ralph Bard, who sat on the board to find someone who could turn the company around.

Bart invited Cord to come to Indiana and look over the Auburn Automobile Company.

Cord saw that the factory had potential.

However, there were 700 dusty Auburns sitting in the back lot.

Cord stayed in Auburn for about a month, examining equipment procedures, workers and their resulting products.

Upon his return to Chicago, he went before the board of directors.

He walked in with drawings.

He walked in with renderings.

He walked in with cast sheets.

He walked in with body cast sheets, chassis cast sheets.

He told them what he felt he could market it for.

He told them what he felt he could market, what the inventory that was here was for and how to sell it, how to wholesale it, get it off their books, recoup the money that they had in it, and go on to the next step.

And for that, he's willing to do for a salary plus a percentage.

From the beginning, Cord wanted a percentage of the company's profits and stock options.

At the time, the Auburn Automobile Company's stock was almost worthless at $5 a share.

Within a year, Cord had liquidated all 700 of the stockpiled cars.

He built new ones from stockpiled parts and had the factory paint them in bright, multiple color combinations.

He then sold the cars through a national advertising campaign.

These things did the trick.

In 12 months, Cord made half a million dollars for the company and became a rich man himself.

He was re-engineering the company before the term was ever invented, and he was good at finding ways of cutting waste out of the company and cutting fat.

He was very streamlined in his thinking, and he didn't believe in large levels of executive management.

Cords philosophy, which he learned back in the twenties, was how efficient and how economical it was to build the assembled car.

Now, the assembled cars, an actual category, a definition of car, and that's the kind of car that was merely put together in a factory with components that were brought in from vendors all around the country and in fact all around the world.

And this is what Cord did.

He had vendors all over this nation that brought their products to Auburn, to the factory, to merely be assembled.

It was an extremely popular notion in the twenties to build assembled cars.

That was an actual category of car, the assembled car.

And that's what Auburns were.

And that's what he learned was the efficient car kind of car to make who could sell it cheaply on the market.

You could make it look as handsome and as good as you wanted to, but you didn't have to get involved in building cars from scratch like Henry Ford was doing up in Michigan.

Within 18 months of his arrival, Cord had acquired enough stock to gain control of the Auburn Automobile Company.

Cord learned a lesson very fast in buying a controlling interest of the company.

He learned that he can buy a controlling interest for not a whole lot of money.

He can be in charge by just having enough paper to be in charge.

So he immediately starts controlling his suppliers.

He immediately buys his suppliers up to do half the cost to keep the cost of his product down.

Cord manufactured an automobile that looked like a luxury car, but was priced at less than half the cost of one.

He sees the niche.

Why he sees the niche as possibly through Moon.

He's possibly aware of that because Moon was more of a more expensive automobile than Auburn was.

He possibly sees that that niche if you can make that car and sell it for less.

You can sell it every time.

Cord eventually had enough success to buy the Chicago investors out and install himself as president of the Auburn Automobile Company.

He realized that he needed the very best, brightest and most innovative engineers and designers to create a car that was different from any other on the market.

He wanted it to stand out.

He wanted it to say “I'm luxurious and sporty and affordable.” The Auburn Coupe was rather interesting because in the mid twenties when it was introduced at this point it used what they call a Waymon body technique.

It basically was framed out in solid wood, such as in ash.

And then there was like a chicken netting that was stapled over top of it.

And on top of that was like a cotton patty.

And then a leatherette material was applied as well.

And the seams, of course, were sealed.

The whole thing behind this was to create a lightweight body long before steel could ever do it, because you had steel over a frame of ash wood over a solid, heavy steel frame that everything rode upon.

And this is one of the early attempts at lightening the weight of an automobile, because they knew at that time that weight did affect the handling of an automobile.

Cord was experimenting with other automobile designs as well.

The speedster was a result of Auburn's foray into stock car racing at that time, from Atlantic City to Utah.

Americans were getting caught up in the excitement of car racing and land speed record attempts.

It was found that in track racing, a vehicle following directly behind the more common boxy race cars would get the win, barring a crash.

The lead car would run out of gas because it was the one pushing into the wind while the car immediately behind it caught in its draft, would get carried along to victory.

As a result, the Stutz Motor Car Company, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, developed a speedster, which featured a more aerodynamic design.

And so when Stutz introduced the speedster, Auburn obviously had to counter the move by introducing their own speedster.

The difference being that the Auburn speedster was half the price of the Stutz speedster, and it was a better looking package by far.

This foray in the stock car racing and land speed record attempts created a lot of media attention for Auburn.

It increased the public's awareness of Auburn automobiles along with sales.

Cord realized that media attention was very important in selling his cars.

Another factor in his success was a revolutionary strategy and model design.

Cord was smart enough to build his cars in three year generations.

In other words, the Auburn's from 1925, 26, 27 all look alike.

And then the next generation, 28, 29, 30, those all look alike.

And even 31, 32 and 33 are all of the same generation.

And in this way, he could keep the resale value on used cars really high and used car dealers and salesmen like this.

And the customers like this, too, because you could have a car with several years on it and it look just like a brand new Auburn.

And you can have the pride of going down the road in a used car and pass it off as a new car, if you wanted to.

So this was a clever strategy, of course, to keep the resale value on his used cars high to help feed the market in a healthy way.

Cord's next venture was to purchase the Duesenberg Automobile and Motors Company, which was based in Indianapolis, Indiana.

He wanted the biggest, most luxurious car that was ever produced on these shores.

It sounds ostentatious.

It sounds big.

It sounds overpowering in fact.

Until you see the results of what happened, The Model J was big.

It was large.

It was the most luxurious automobile that was ever made in the United States.

Again in 1926, gosh, the market is just looking great.

The times are great, the economy is great.

Money is flowing like you wouldn't believe.

There are wealthy, wealthy men throughout this country and Europe that really don't have the product that he's hoping to build.

So he's hoping again to garner he sees a niche and he's hoping to sell that product to that niche.

The result was the world's finest motor car, the Model J Duesenberg.

Duesenberg built the chassis, installed the engine and put on the famous radiator shell for the car.

However, they did not do any of the coachwork.

The new owners would choose a coachbuilder and custom designed so that their Duesenberg did not look like anyone else's.

Some people bought two custom bodies and open and a closed car, which was like having two cars in one.

Only the wealthiest individuals could consider buying a Duesenberg.

The cost of which was comparable to major real estate.

The chassis alone cost $8500 and the custom coach cost even more.

The market for Duesenbergs was very elite and so limited that the company only built an average of five cars a month.

To get more media attention, the cars were given to many Hollywood stars in return for promotional favors.

But not just Hollywood stars were interested.

European royalty soon learned of the cars, and they purchased these automobiles to travel in grand style.

After Cord turned the Auburn Automobile Company around, it soon outgrew its facilities.

Cords first instinct was to build on to the factory complex in Auburn.

However, the Auburn founding fathers had other ideas.

They decided not to allow Cord to purchase any more land in Auburn.

Cord had to look elsewhere.

He turned to Connersville, Indiana, 130 miles south of Auburn, which had a large automobile manufacturing complex up for sale.

Connersville was a major railroad hub back in the 1920s and 30s, which made it easy to ship materials.

to Cords new mall of buildings.

Cord had purchased both the Limousine Body Company and Central Manufacturing Company, which built the Cord bodies so he could continue to control production costs.

He installed the most modern steel stamping and efficient production line equipment, which allowed the pre-built bodies to be furnished on the second floor of the factory, then dropped through a hole in the floor to the ground level for final assembly.

Cords next challenge was to manufacture a front wheel drive automobile.

It had been done previously, but without much success.

So Cord hired design engineers and the Cord L-29 was created.

The Cord L-29 was the first front wheel drive production car in America.

There were others in Europe before this time, but the L-29 was the first in the US, and it was phenomenal too, because it was not a small front wheel drive car as what we think of most front wheel drive cars today.

And even in Europe, those early attempts at front wheel drive models were all smaller, say four cylinder models.

The L-29 was a straight eight.

It was it was enlongated.

It was phenomenal in the effect because you no longer had a drive line that elevated the car.

It was able to remain in a in a very low slung basis and it gave us styling like nothing else had ever been seen.

Again the reason why Cord did this was for the effect it really hit on people's minds.

By 1930, if you had money, you did not buy flamboyant, you know, you bought something you didn't want people to know you had money, let's put it that way.

It was not popular to be going around like it was in the twenties, flaunting your wealth.

You didn't flaunt your wealth.

If you still had money, you didn't flaunt your wealth.

Duesenberg owners were another story.

You know, most of them had so much money that it really didn't matter.

But Cord owners were in that price range where that was tough.

They simply couldn't make enough Cord L-29s to make the car more than three years.

They made it from 1929 to 1932.

It was just too different.

It wasn't too expensive because the starting price was about $3100, but it was too exotic.

Even with the failure of the L-29.

Cord had made a success of the Auburn Automobile Company and they reaped the rewards when stock prices were low.

You had bought as much as it could.

Now, with the success of the company, under his leadership, he was a millionaire.

Cord bought Lycoming Manufacturing Company, which was the supplier of all the engines for the cars.

They were in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and then he bought Columbia Axle Company.

They were in Cleveland.

They made all the front and two-speed rear axles for the cars.

And suddenly in the twenties, he was buying all these component companies building parts for his cars.

So not only did he own the manufacturer of the cars, he owned all these component builders.

Today, antitrust laws wouldn't allow such a thing to happen.

But then it was a common practice and Cord had lots of revenue coming in from his company being a success.

So he was rolling in capital that allowed him to buy these companies and soon he had gathered together so many vendors that he had a whole market basket full, enough that he could form his own corporation, which he did do in 1929, and he called it Cord Corporation.

And it was a holding company, a large umbrella holding company to oversee all these subsidiaries that he had been purchasing.

Eventually he had 60 of them.

So it really was an empire, was a huge conglomerate.

It I don't think they used that term back then, but that's what we would call it today.

And it had every kind of diverse company imaginable dealing with personal and public transportation, shipbuilding, airlines, automobiles, railroads.

He was really involved in every kind of transportation through Cord Corporation, which was formed in the summer of 29 and capitalized at $125 million.

That was really the pinnacle of his successes when he formed his own corporation and it had stock on Wall Street, common stock.

And it was quite a success.

The one thing that was very lucrative about Cord Corporation was Cord's ownership of automobile sales companies.

He didn't own just the manufacturing end of the car business.

He got involved in the wholesale and retail outlets for cars, so he often would own the big flagship dealerships in major cities around the country.

So here he was controlling both manufacturing and sales in such an inbred way.

It's something that antitrust laws wouldn't even permit today.

But back then he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and he did it rapidly.

In the late twenties.

He was making money just hand over fist.

When you think that he came here in 1924 to a company that was almost defunct, it was a dying company, and he turned it around in just five years time so that by 1929 he had gross annual revenue that year of $3.6 million.

And he had so much money coming in, he could really do whatever he wanted to do in the auto industry.

Then he wasn't encumbered by personal income tax the way someone would be today or some of the other legal entanglements that someone would face in business today.

Cord was pretty unstoppable by the late twenties.

Cord was not only an astute businessman, but lucky in his timing.

Despite the stock market crash, 1929 was one of his company's biggest years.

You know, the 29 crash, he survived because, again, he had a dealer network set up and growing.

He had a product line that was still very hot and still had several years of growth yet to come.

29 was Duesenberg's biggest year of all.

They sold, I think, almost 200 cars.

So it was a good year for them.

It was the orders that were set in advance of the stock market crash that kept them through 29 and part of 1930.

So things are still able to roll or still exist.

Demand exists.

He has got by 1930, he's got the whole 31 line laying there ready to build.

So he's got all these things to follow through with.

By 1929, Cord had revenue coming from many different sources: auto manufacturing and sales, component building, taxicabs, and stock transfer companies.

With his strong companies, he was able to weather the early years of the Depression, while others were not as prepared.

Automobiles were now an American way of life, but there was something new on the horizon - aviation.

Cords interest in air travel was piqued, so he hired a man to teach him how to fly.

Enamored with flight Cord purchased a Stinson airplane.

Now he flew around the country instead of driving or taking a train.

When his airplane needed service, Cord flew it to the Stinson factory in Wayne, Michigan.

While there, he nosed around learning everything he could about aircraft manufacturing.

Cord, ever the businessman, saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of what would become the next great mode of transportation.

When the Stinson aircraft grew too rapidly, overextending itself, Cord was right there to offer help.

He quickly gained controlling interest in the company.

He was driven by the idea of profiting from this new endeavor.

Cord knew that to become successful, he had to own his own airline and his own aviation and aircraft manufacturing concerns.

And he accomplished these things as rapidly as he had done in the automobile industry.

Well, Cord sees in aviation the need for transportation, and at this point in time, transportation as transportation, aviation is too expensive.

But if you subsidize it, if you bring in air mail, if you do other things for it, you know, it could potentially work.

And if he can build planes that are cheaper, you can make it work as transportation.

And transportation with airlines is the next step.

He he's quite aware of this but it is the most logical next step.

You can only go so fast on a train.

You can only go so fast on the ground with the existing systems that exist.

Automobiles, of course, you know, with speed limits were way under what they are even today during this period of time.

So if you want to communicate and if you want to be an executive and travel around, aviation is the next step.

Cord had now stretched himself very thin.

He was working on two separate fronts still at the Auburn Automobile Company and now involved in aviation.

Just when his future looked very bright, tragedy struck.

His wife, Helen died in late 1930 from cancer.

Some say this was a turning point in Cord's life.

His companies were prospering and upon his wife's death, he left the city of Auburn for good.

He headed to California and bought a tract of land in Beverly Hills prior to its widespread development.

Upon moving to California, Cord met and married his second wife, Virginia Tharp, and built a 62 room mansion called Cord Haven.

There, he and Virginia started a second family, and from Cord Haven, he ran his business affairs.

Meanwhile, the Auburn Automobile Company was still highly successful.

1930 and 1931 was a very tough economic time in this country during the early depression.

And not surprisingly, everybody in the auto industry was suffering desperately except E.L. Cord.

He was the only person who was doing well and still making money in those early years.

And this is what got him widespread press coverage of that time in the trade magazines and the business magazines.

Everyone wrote up E.L. Cord as the “Boy Wonder” who was making hay when the sun was no longer shining.

And this is what got his reputation in those early thirties years.

He could survive.

All right.

Because Cord Corporation was built up to such a size and such a financial strength that it was almost indestructible in the early thirties, it was diverse, it was broad based.

There were enough companies there among the 60 subsidiaries that if a few went anemic, the strong winds could take over and keep the company afloat.

So this is what got Cord mass media attention was the “Boy Wonder” makes good when no one else does.

By 1931, this small, independent, non-union car company had reached its peak in production manufacturing 34,000 cars.

That year, Auburn sales ranked 13th nationally, and Cord was beating out Packard and many of the other great automobile manufacturers.

During the Depression, it was considered in poor taste to buy an ostentatious luxury automobile.

However, the Auburn was the perfect car to buy.

It was inexpensive and it looked great, so there was no guilt in buying an Auburn.

Now, by 1932, things were falling off.

33, they were a little worse.

And his fortunes did go down eventually.

But those first two years or two and a half years of the Depression, he was flying high and nobody else was.

But he was still growing.

He was still buying more companies.

He was still building new additional products.

He still hired more employees.

Things were going very well because he had the right kind of products to appeal to people during the Depression, Cord stepped down as president of the Auburn Automobile Company to oversee all of Cord Corporation and continue his pursuit of success in the area of aviation.

He was still involved with the car company, but now he saw his future in air travel.

Having acquired Stinson aircraft.

The next logical step was to form his own airlines, and it was called Century Airlines.

It was a small Midwest regional hub airline, and you could travel from Chicago to Saint Louis, or you could go from Detroit to Cleveland on Century Airlines.

Well, it was staffed with a fleet of 14 planes.

And what kind of planes were they?

Stinson.

And what were they powered by?

Lycoming engines.

And when you got off of the plane, what kind of ground transportation did you use?

An Auburn seven passenger limousine, which he didn't even need, but he was already making the cars.

And that was another prestige accouterment to his all airlines was to have these glamorous big airport limousine sedans that were Auburns.

As Century Airlines became successful, Cord started Century Pacific Airlines, which flew from Los Angeles to Bakersfield and San Francisco, eventually going to Phenix as well.

Because passenger flight was such a new concept, not many people took to the skies.

The only way to make an airline profitable at the time was to be awarded a coveted airmail contract with the government.

A tough assignment to get.

You had to know someone in government to get a contract.

Cord, who did not have an airmail contract began questioning the system.

He explained to a government commission that he could underbid those who had received the contract and still make a profit.

Cord created quite a stir in Washington where people didn't like him or the way ran his airlines.

Stinson planes, quite frankly, were not well built.

I mean, they were cheaply built and rapidly built.

They were not what the Ford Tri-motor was.

And the government didn't like the way he was staffing his airlines with fleets of these cheap planes.

And they also didn't like how he was exploiting pilots to get his airline to operate in a very cheap way.

Cord thought that airline pilots were like cab drivers and he treated them that way.

They were paid very, very low salaries.

They were exploited at every opportunity.

They were made to fly double shifts with no warning, which would be illegal today.

And Cord up offending airline pilots so deeply that the next year, in 1932, they formed the Airline Pilots Association, which was the first trade association ever formed for self-protection and defense.

Well, what did they do right away?

They went on strike against Cord, which was the first pathway to then unionizing, which they did for all time shortly after that.

Well, Cord ran into so much trouble trying to run his airlines and not being able to get cooperation with this barebones management and not getting any cooperation, in fact, making enemies with all airline pilots.

He put off the government and they wouldn't give him the airline contracts he wanted.

So he thought, well, this airline isn't profitable here in the Midwest and my West Coast airline isn't profitable either.

And I've only had him a year.

I have to get rid of them.

What am I going to do?

So he went to Aviation Corporation and said, Would you like to buy the remnants of my airlines?

And they said, Well, sure, but Cord, true to his nature, he didn't want to sell his airlines for cash because he never wanted to do that.

He wanted to sell his two airlines for stock and he got it.

And he also wanted a position on the board of directors of aviation Corporation, which he got so true to his wily nature, he got just what he wanted.

And after he became a partial stockholder in Aviation Corporation, he started buying more and more stock until he became one of the controlling stockholders and was on the board of directors.

And eventually they ended up being named by the acronym AVCO.

And they controlled a lot of the great aviation companies in this country, including American Airways, which became American Airlines as we know it today.

And that's why Mr. Cord became a major controlling stockholder in American Airlines.

He got started by selling his two Century airlines for stock and position.

All the while, Cord was buying and selling stock, gaining control of companies and manipulating their stock prices.

To his advantage.

Cord was really very crafty about manipulating the stock market, and he wasn't alone in doing this.

In the early depression, he would form stock syndicates with his colleagues who were really his cronies, and he would instruct them to buy large blocks of stock according to very precisely timed patterns.

Strategic patterns, and they would buy big blocks of stock, wait for the market to be artificially inflated, then rapidly sell all those blocks of stock, take the money and run, and then do this over and over and over again in a repeated pattern.

Others were doing this in the Depression.

It was desperate times call for desperate measures.

Cord did this excessively to the point where he was attracting the attention of government officials and the brand new dreaded Securities and Exchange Commission, which was examining Cord very closely in 1932 when it was a new administration.

He was kind of a test case and a whipping boy for them.

And 32 was the first year when Cord had a downturn in his company, 1930 and 31.

He was doing fine with his Auburn Automobile Company.

In fact, 31 was their biggest production year for cars.

But in 32 he was realizing the first red figures on the books, and he was always very concerned about a good image for his companies, a good public image and saving face.

And he would go so far as to stage falsely pumped up publicity pictures.

He had one photograph that was of the Connersville plant, his second plant in Connersville, Indiana, showing throngs of people emerging from the factory at the end of a workday with their lunch boxes looking very contented and productive.

And he infused these photographs with unrealistic numbers of people to make his factories look very productive.

Cord really had to resort in this 1932 and 33 period for the first time to some desperate measures to keep his public image clean and to look productive and forward moving.

And he wasn't alone in this.

Everybody was having to do this to some in the Great Depression.

And Cord found that he had to do it for the first time.

With FDR, his appointment of Joseph Kennedy to go after stock manipulators.

And the reason he hired Joseph Kennedy, because Joseph Kennedy learned the business as a stock manipulator.

He knew who to go after.

He knew who was playing that game.

With the enactment of the laws that prohibited stock manipulation.

One of the big boys to go after was Cord because he is one of the big boys in the game.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was a brand new agency in 1932, and they had their eyes and their ears on Mr. Cord at every moment.

He was quite the test case for them when they were new, and what they were noticing was the two frequent activity of this blocks of stock buying going on.

Cord was having his associates, his directors on his board, his officers, and he himself, they were buying blocks of stock, waiting for the market to shoot up rapidly and then dumping all of it at once, taking the money out and then doing the same pattern again over and over.

So this becomes fairly conspicuous after a while.

And Cord started taking heat from the SEC, from politicians, from all sides.

And he had other financial woes and other business problems in his corporation at this time.

And he, after a while couldn't take any more of the scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So he didn't know what to do.

But he was always blessed with one thing, and that was a bevy of very knowledgeable and wise legal and financial advisers surrounding him to give him good advice.

So they came to him and they said, Why don't you just lie low for a while?

And he said, Well, how can I do that?

And they said, Leave the USA, which in hindsight was the wisest thing he could have done.

And the way he did this was very graceful and very tactful.

He instead of just leaving the country unexplained, he went to the news media and said that he had experienced some kidnaping threats against his sons, Charles and Billy.

Well, this is a very credible story at that time, because this was the era of the Lindbergh kidnaping and of criminals using extortion and kidnaping threats in their criminal activities.

So it was totally plausible that he would have had these kidnaping threats.

Today, we have no hard confirmed evidence that he had any kidnaping threats against his family.

But it was the perfect invention for him to gracefully leave the country.

Cord went to England and lived in high style at an estate called Walton Oaks.

He spent his time playing golf, going to horse races, playing tennis and traveling Cord, traveled on his own yacht, named the Virginia, having Prince George and other prominent friends as his guests, Cord was able to truly relax and enjoy himself out of the country for these six months because he left all of his companies in the hands of good, trustworthy people.

The trip had its desired effect.

During his time in England, the press and the public forgot about Cord and his business practices.

The exploits of a successful businessman were not of much interest anymore because things were economically tough in the United States.

After six months, Cord brought his family back to the United States to little fanfare.

Upon his return, Cord was ready to enter a new phase of automobile manufacturing.

He discontinued the Cord L-29, and commissioned the Cord A-10.

The designers, the engineers, I feel, had a product that they were and that they felt was a great product.

They really did.

The employees of Auburn Cord were very much enamored of that car, and it was a hit there's no question about it.

And it still is today.

I mean, it is such a wild piece of design work that, I mean, most people still today remember when they first saw a Cord.

The Cord A-10 was built to be entered in the New York Auto Show at the end of 1935.

The rules of the show stipulated that 100 cars had to be produced before a model could be entered.

Working day and night against a tight deadline, the employees got all 100 Cord A-10s built.

The Cord A-10 became a huge hit immediately.

People were surrounding it.

The other car companies were complaining because the public was climbing on top of their displays to get a glimpse of this new automobile.

It was front wheel drive like the L-29 was, but it was more than that as well.

It had a V8 engine into it, a rather novel approach for engine layouts at that time.

It had hidden in the headlights.

It did not have any running boards onto it.

There was a whole host of features.

There was no prominent grille or radiator in the front.

It was just a series of louvers that wrapped around the coffin nose, as they called it, and allowed air to go into the engine.

It was an evolutionary dead end too.

There was, after it was designed, there was nothing before it previous to the A-10 and there was nothing that ever came along afterwards.

It was, uh, it was a phenomenal stroke of genius.

If Cord ever wanted to, uh, catch the public eye like he has all along, this was something that did it and in a big way as well.

The Cord A-10 was a sensational car.

It was so modern and so much of the future, and it stayed modern looking for decades.

As you look back now, you see how it remained modern through all the years after it was made, and it was so appealing to people that when they saw its introduction at the New York Auto Show at the end of 1935, they all wanted to order one right away.

It had great innovations technologically.

It had the great styling.

Everybody wanted one, and so they were taking advance orders for the company right there at the New York Auto Show, promising people over optimistically, that they could have their new car at the beginning of the year.

Well, that out to be a hollow promise because they didn't even have the production facility all set up until February of 1936.

And so to keep the rich people who had advanced ordered their cars placated and happy for a while, they were gracious enough to issued each of them a little handsome model of the car in bronze accord, sitting on a marble.

And it was a very generous and classy way for them to placate these customers while they were waiting for their cars.

That the Cord, as a sole product, couldn't keep the Auburn Automobile Company alive because by 1937 that was the only product they had to market.

Auburns weren't being made anymore, and the Cord was a little too peculiar as appealing as it was a little too specialized and had the front wheel drive and such radical features.

It never sold in great enough numbers to keep Auburn Automobile Company alive for the long term.

So unfortunately, they only made the Cord for a year and a half all of 1936 and just half of 1937 because the company went out of business in the summer of that year.

But it was a phenomenal car while it lasted.

It's had a lasting reputation all these years and it was truly a noble car for the company to go out on as its last gasp.

When Cord saw his opportunities in automobile manufacturing dying, he moved on.

The Auburn was not making any money.

In order for their cars not to be surplus, they had to almost be given away at cost.

The cars, which had sold for $1600 just a few years earlier, were selling for $695 just higher than a Ford or a Chevrolet.

After 1936, the company stopped making Auburns, offering one product, the Cord A-10, and the Duesenberg market had dried up because there were only so many millionaires and the plant went idle.

By the summer of 1937, Cords advisors told him that there was no longer any hope of making a profit from Auburn, Cord or Duesenberg.

So Cord did what he had to do.

He sold Cord Corp.

He sold it in the summer of 1937 to a group of New York financiers.

He finally got away from the Chicago financiers and he sold it to a group headed by Victor Emanuel, who was a major investor in New York at that time.

Emanuel had done his research and done his homework, and he realized the Cord Corporation was lucrative as a whole.

The aviation portion was especially lucrative, and the automotive wasn't.

It was just a total loss.

So all the automotive companies in Cord Corporation went into dissolution.

And in fact, Auburn Automobile Company went into bankruptcy officially then in the spring of 1938.

But the aviation part was strong, and that's what lived on under Victor Emanuel's direction.

It was kind of a sad end for Auburn Automobile Company, but they kept the workers here in the parts and service division so they could supply replacement parts for the owners of these obsolete cars so they wouldn't be left out in the cold and feel like the owners of an orphaned product.

In 1937, the Auburn factory closed and was sold: parts, blueprints, everything.

An auto parts manufacturer moved into the old factory, giving some of the former Auburn employees jobs.

But a glorious era and car manufacturing had come to a close.

Cord pursued many other projects throughout his life, with varying degrees of financial success.

He gained control of the New York Shipbuilding Corporation on the day before it was awarded a major government contract.

He invested heavily in land script in an attempt to acquire thousands of acres of oil rich land, a plan that was thwarted by the United States government from his early days of hauling ore, he knew that mining was profitable.

He bought mines in the West and he also bought and lived on a cattle ranch in California.

Cord would grow and diversify in ways that were impossible in small town Indiana.

He started radio stations in Los Angeles and bought television stations as well.

Cord also bought a desirable section of land along Wilshire Boulevard, knowing that someday it would be worth millions.

Among his many other accomplishments, Cord served as a Nevada state senator.

When Errett Lobban Cord died in 1974, he left on an estate worth an estimated $39 million to his family and a charitable organization.

The E.L. Cord Foundation.

Cord was really quite a hard businessman, very bottom line, always worried about just making money.

That was his concern of his life.

But he was good at it.

And he did make good money always.

If you look at his early career, he made lots of money in partnerships with other people.

If you look at his middle life, when his career was at its peak in the transportation industry, he made tons of money.

In his later life, he really followed his own mind and his own taste in his own way and explored all kinds of avenues in commerce away from transportation and still made tons of money.

He never failed on his personal fortunes over the years.

Cord left a legacy in his automobiles that he left behind more than anything else.

He may be more interested in aviation.

He made more money in his land deals out west.

But I think his legacy lives on in his automobiles: Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg.

If there was a modern day equivalent, I couldn't think of any, Not simply because the small independent automakers have disappeared, but because his spirit of innovation, his wanting to be different, his willingness to put himself out on a limb, to pursue an automobile, to create something unique in the marketplace, and to do so at a price where people could afford it, that that is simply no longer around any longer.

You know, today I think Cord has revered - the man as revered, the institutions he developed, the concepts, he developed, the salesmanship, the design, all of those things we still look at today.

And that really was the strange duality of this man, the fact that he claimed to be a good business man who really just wanted to make money and did it well.

And of course he did it brilliantly.

He always made money through every part of his career, but he wasn't the kind of person to reflect on his own life and his own career.

He wasn't historically minded.

He wasn't sentimental about the past.

He wouldn't even consent to talk about the past with anyone in public interviews or in private conversations.

So we have evidence that maybe he didn't view this great period of the twenties and thirties when he was at the top of the heap in the transportation industry as a peak period in his career, he may have thought that it was a shame that his car companies came to an end after being alive not so many years and went into dissolution and bankruptcy.

He may have thought that this period of of his life was not that significant as far as what he created in the products of these cars.

And maybe he thought this was just another fleeting period of a multifaceted career.

Of course, today we historians attach the car years as as the pinnacle of his career, and it's such a great family of cars with with glittering design and and beauty and and technological advancement.

But he may have not viewed it that way at all.

He may have thought, well, that was just one period when I found a mechanism through which I could make money, And then later on I turn my back on that and found other ways of making money because that was always his main concern.

So that's the final irony, is the fact that he never waved his own flag about the great accomplishments of the car days.

He just didn't want to look over his shoulder.

And he may not have thought that this was the pinnacle of his career.

Isn't it ironic that the one venture Cord will always be remembered for is the one he thought was a failure?

His automobiles have stood the test of time and are considered by many to be works of art.

However, he didn't do it alone.

He had many bright, talented, innovative people, all working for a man that challenged and inspired them to always go one step further.

He was a young upstart who took a dying company, small independent auto manufacturer, rebuilt it and used it as a stepping stone to create more personal wealth and additional business opportunities.

He created a specialized niche for himself in the very small marketplace of luxury car customers and carved a niche with the middle class car buyers as well.

His passions were the challenges, the innovations, and above all, the profits.

Cord was always a businessman at heart and a successful one at that.

Part of his success can be attributed to the fact that current business laws and tax regulations did not exist in his time.

But it was also due to his knowledge of what Americans wanted in an automobile and his ability to provide it to them at a reasonable cost.

As very diverse companies formed a huge conglomerate which enabled him to weather the Depression unlike many American businessmen.

He set out on a mission to be successful and in doing so, left behind a great legacy of automotive achievement and helped to lay the foundation of modern aviation.

Errett Lobban Cord created a transportation empire.

In the end, however, he will be remembered for the Auburn, the Cord, and the Duesenberg - three grand statements of an era gone by, created by a man who will always be revered as a genius in automotive manufacturing.

E.L. Cord: His Transportation Empire is made possible by a grant from the E.L. Cord Foundation.