The brazenness of his affair cracked open a rift between Champion and the Stranahans, alert to a high standard of ethical behavior. The family matriarch Lizzie could hardly miss reading the Herald’s coverage and would have had a strong voice in family discussions about disassociating the Stranahan name from Albert Champion.81 She recognized the damage his behavior could have to the family’s name after their successful management of Boston’s most important hotels. The Frenchman lived by his own rules, behaved like a pirate.
Ambitious to get back to work, Champion rationalized his conduct. He and his partners now had basic differences, like water and oil. Nothing they could do, however, would bother him. He did not need them, although they needed the prestige of his name.
Champion’s affair with French actress Olta de Kerman, right, made for racy reading in newspapers, including this story in the Boston Herald. It marked a rare occasion when Champion’s wife Elise, left, was in the news—for calling her husband a villain. The scandal caused tension between Champion and his business partners. From the Boston Herald, January 4, 1906.
More important to his way of thinking was the large consignment he had brought back of the latest ignition supplies from Edouard Nieuport.82 While in Paris, Champion had visited Nieuport’s large new factory on the rue de Seine in the western suburb of Surenes, offering a view of the Paris skyline. His friend inspired him to make his own products.
“One of the primary qualities of the spark plug should be its simplicity,” Nieuport used to say. “Beware of spark plugs with odd shapes and complicated electrodes.”83 Champion heeded that advice—rather than worry about what his partners might think about him.
As part of the reconciliation between Albert and Elise, they left the clamor of the teeming city for the quiet seaside village of Magnolia on the North Shore, its rocky coastline interspersed with smooth sandy beaches.84
Albert had always provided for his mother and younger brothers, and they lived in the western suburb of Levallois-Perret.85 He was protective of youngest brother Prosper, who had lost his right eye and wore a black eye patch.86 Now eighteen, Prosper had limited job prospects. It is unknown when and how Prosper Champion suffered the disability, but Albert offered him passage to America and employment. He made the same offer to Louis and Henri, but they chose to remain in Paris. Elise wanted her younger sister, Gabrielle, twenty-two, to come and keep her company, as Albert worked long hours.
To finance the extra expenditure of buying a rustic cottage on the North Shore and picking up the tab for the ship’s passage for Prosper and Gabrielle, Albert sold fifteen of his forty-nine shares of company stock to Frank Stranahan on June 20. The transaction bolstered Frank’s majority holding to sixty-six shares while Albert held thirty-four shares. Albert’s reduced stock holding diminished his personal attachment to the company, embarking on its second year.
When not traveling to drum up accounts, Champion commuted by trolley to the Cyclorama. He liked to be seated at his desk every morning by seven o’clock.87 He plowed through paperwork, read trade journals, and organized himself to make the most of his time. He told an interviewer that one of his constant efforts was to manage his time “for more and better work.”88
He explained that he always sought to improve everything he did. “I remember a salesman one time telling me that he knew the game from A to Z. He stated that nobody could tell him anything about selling. That was to me the best proof possible that he knew nothing about selling because those who really understand merchandising, manufacturing, or anything else that is important in life are those who realize how little they really know about it and how much there is to learn every day.”89
Alfred P. Sloan, later credited with creating modern corporate management, said: “The keynote of his success was that he was never satisfied with the product of the job he was then doing. His mind was always open to the necessity for constant improvement.”90
With a laugh, Champion once explained his passion for work during an interview. “You know the old line. Everybody who has a hobby, whether golf, fishing, baseball, tennis, or whatnot, always has some good arguments for indulging in it. They find those arguments because they like the game they play. Well, I like the game of work, and I can find good arguments for it, too.”91
The Albert Champion Company had benefited from treasurer Stranahan’s bookkeeping to keep pace in supplying customers in the escalating auto industry. Following the March 1906 Boston Automobile Dealers’ Association Show, the company was ready to hire.
In August 1906 Prosper and Gabrielle arrived together in New York aboard the French liner La Bretagne.92 An immigration officer at Ellis Island noted Prosper’s disability.
Another Parisian joining Albert’s payroll that summer was Basil De Guichard, retired from racing and ready to do whatever was needed at the Albert Champion Company. De Guichard arrived with his usual bonhomie and soon would become Albert’s right-hand man and expert at quality control.
Albert deputized Prosper to travel and make business calls. As soon as Prosper could afford to, he replaced the eye patch with a glass eye.93 His new look freed him from being stared at by strangers.
Off to a side in the Cyclorama building, Champion set up a workshop with hand tools. He made an engine battery and put his name on it—the Champion B.G.S. Battery. It caused a sensation when a Maxwell touring car drove a remarkable twenty-five hundred miles over rough New England dirt roads in 115 hours without having to recharge the Champion B.G.S. Battery. Maxwells were one of the country’s premier brands.94 The owner of the local dealership, the Maxwell-Briscoe Boston Company, wrote a letter with the company logo praising the battery for keeping the car going. Champion had been regularly buying small ads in Automobile—usually one of twenty-four on a page at the back of the book. For this testimonial, he sought to make the magazine readers take notice by reproducing the entire letter. He splurged for his first full-page advertisement.95
Youngest brother Prosper Champion followed Albert to America and worked as an engineer in Albert’s companies. Prosper became a naturalized citizen and during World War II served as a volunteer in the US Army Air Corps. Photo courtesy of Cherie Champion.
One part integral to the ignition system that transformed the inert metal of an engine into a throbbing, noisy source of heat and horsepower was the spark coil. Champion calculated that spark coils, the component least understood by auto enthusiasts and consumers,96 presented him with an opportunity. He designed original four-part spark coils: an iron core, primary and secondary windings, and a condenser. They created a high-voltage discharge that could jump the air gap between the spark plug electrodes to fire the fuel-air mixture in the combustion chamber.
Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he devised his spark coil prototype. After weeks of tests, he broke down the manufacturing process. Prosper, Spencer Stranahan, and some other new hires made the parts by hand and assembled them for finished products. De Guichard took over quality control.
By the spring of 1907, the Albert Champion Company was advertising Champion coils among its ignition products.97 A new round of ads for Nieuport spark plugs relied on phonetic spelling, Nuport.98 Champion’s ads promoted a trademarked symbol—a Mercator projection drawing of the globe with Champion spelled out in a banner arranged diagonally across America.99 He was making his bid to a national audience.
Next he added the Champion high-voltage terminals to Nuport spark plugs. His new Champion Nuport plugs were advertised with the trademarked logo in a full-page ad in Automobile.100 The Albert Champion Company could now boast that it was both importer and manufacturer.
Champion was ambitious to build his own brand of spark plugs. However, they were far more difficult to make than spark coils. Even possessing the proper clay, the firing of clay to make porcelain, like treating steel, involves great care to get the proper temperature. If the clay is underheated, the resulting porcelain will not stand engine heat and cooling; overheating the clay causes the porcelain to blister. Champio
n required an artisan skilled in firing clay in a kiln to make porcelain. Through French connections, he learned about Henri Albert Schmidt, living in Brooklyn.
Schmidt, trained as an engineer in Paris, knew how to make porcelain and had immigrated in 1907. He was the older brother of Charles Schmidt,101 who had recently been hired away, for twice the pay, from designing Packards in Detroit to instead work for the Peerless Motor Company in Cleveland, one of the Packard Motor Car Company’s high-end rivals. Champion offered the older Schmidt a job.
Champion put his name on the globe promoting his Champion spark plug in Automobile magazine, May 16, 1907.
Albert Schmidt, as he preferred to be called, had a narrow face and a high, broad forehead. He was fluent in not only French and English but also German and Arabic, the last language a result of serving in France’s African colonies during his compulsory military duty. Now forty, he held his head high as though still wearing a military collar.
Both Alberts hit it off—two excitable Gauls notorious for their short tempers. Champion purchased a kiln and accoutrements and installed them in the Cyclorama for his new employee. They imported from France and England the mixture of clays they needed to make porcelain, such as feldspar, flint, kaolin, and ball clay. Champion and Schmidt would argue in rapid-fire French over some detail at the top of their voices like enemies, then they would quickly make up and again be best friends—a pattern they would continue for years.102
Soon after founding his Albert Champion Company in Boston’s South End in June 1905, Champion introduced spark plugs bearing his name. In this ad, he poked fun at others who would copy his product—and his name. From Automobile magazine, February 6, 1908.
By early 1908, Schmidt had started to roll out spark plugs.103 On the porcelain insulator, he stamped the name Champion.104 Albert Champion bought half-page ads to promote his new Champion spark plugs. He was forming his traveling team of Frenchmen to split off from the Stranahans and set up another company in another city.
I WAS THIRTY. BEFORE ME STRETCHED THE PORTENTOUS, MENACING ROAD OF A NEW DECADE.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY1
Unrest began to foment at the Albert Champion Company in 1907, possibly instigated by the youngest Stranahan. Twenty-one-year-old Robert Allen Stranahan Jr. boasted of a leave granted from Harvard after he had set a record for the college by completing all requirements of his four-year degree in two and a half years.2 He had wasted a few months trying real estate and other vocations before giving his brothers’ auto parts business a go,3 breezing into the stock room.4
Robert, with the handsome features of his brothers, was the most assertive of the family—loquacious to the reserve of his brothers and sisters, a braggadocio to their modesty,5 and boorish while his siblings considered how others felt. Over decades of family gatherings, Robert waxed eloquent about Spencer as the smartest and best of them while Frank, the steady eldest brother who had led them through the death of their father and paid for Robert’s education so that he could become the first in the family to attend college, nodded politely. Frank was ten years Robert’s senior, and he respected Champion as the company namesake. Robert saw only a bald guy with a tarnished reputation speaking awkward English and bumping along with a limp.
Lizzie Stranahan dreaded the effects of her sons’ association with the Frenchman and his tawdry affair. It could wipe out all the goodwill from Frank’s unimpeachable management of the Hotel Savoy. She was anxious to avoid blemishing the family name again as her late husband had in Buffalo. On occasions when her adult progeny and their spouses came together, she would have set her jaw in defiance and expressed her opinion of Champion.
Robert Allen Stranahan II completed his Harvard classes a year ahead of schedule and in 1907 started working in the stock room of the Albert Champion Company, where he learned to make spark plugs. Photo courtesy of Ann and Stephen Stranahan.
Robert had come aboard as Frank engrossed himself in a new venture in addition to operating the Buick dealership and running the Tremont Garage Company. Frank had recently incorporated the dealership6 with capital of $50,000 ($1.5 million in 2014)7 and held majority ownership. His latest project was directing a Prest-O-Lite station.
Cars were then sold without headlights, although Buick offered a pair of brass kerosene lanterns as an option for $125.8 Most drivers limited travel to daytime. The Prest-O-Lite Company of Indianapolis had introduced the first practical headlights for driving after dark.9 Prest-O-Lite offered a cylindrical metal tank filled with compressed acetylene—the gas that lighthouses burned as beacons for ships—set along the running board with a rubber hose extending over the fender to the headlights. The driver ignited the gas by flipping a sparking switch. Twenty thousand customers in cities across North America counted on Prest-O-Lite. More than twelve hundred replacing stations10 stored from six hundred to two thousand tanks for quick replacement.11 When the containers emptied, customers would mail them to one of the stations; within a few days, the postal service would return a fully charged replacement. Frank oversaw the replacing station for the New England region. He also established a pumping plant in a brick building housing a big acetylene storage container for refills.12 Pumping plants were prone to exploding. Frank directed one of only five in the United States and Canada.13
Robert had high expectations and had grown restless in the stock room. It is possible that he criticized Champion. Or perhaps the Cyclorama had become cramped from folks strolling into the Buick showroom. Or maybe processing Prest-O-Lite orders had interfered one way or another with Champion and his French cohorts producing spark plugs, coils, and magnetos. Whatever the cause, within weeks of Robert’s joining the company, Champion cleared out. He and Prosper and compatriots packed the kiln and tools and relocated across town to a warehouse at 36 Whittier Street in the Roxbury neighborhood.14 He broadcast the change of venue with a half-page advertisement in Automobile. Week after week, adverts listing the Whittier Street address hawked Albert Champion Company ignition supplies, as well as Champion spark plugs and Champion magnetos in all sizes to fit any car.
For Champion, 1908 ushered in every man’s nemesis—his thirtieth birthday. Champion retrieved his bicycle from storage and pumped up the tires. Instead of relaxing on evenings and weekends over a glass of wine and conversation with his wife, brother, sister-in-law, and friends, he was pedaling fervently around the indoor Park Square board track. He mixed it up on the velodrome with younger pros to get back in shape for his battle against a stealthy adversary. On April 5, he would turn thirty—the gateway to middle age.
On the Park Square track a month before his milestone birthday, he entered his first race in years. Fans welcomed him with an ovation.15 After the start gun fired, opponents he had beaten in his prime dashed away. He could only watch them go as though his legs were filled with water. A reporter wrote that he had overestimated his ability16 and should have been “content to remain in his automobile supply store instead of returning to the track.”
Albert, strong-willed, persisted, expecting to improve. A couple weeks later, he was trounced in two straight matches.
At home Elise would have narrowed her eyes at him and remarked that he had his share of La Gloire! His future lay ahead in business.
However reluctantly, he finally let go of his youth.17
Since he had immigrated, the early auto industry’s Boston-Springfield-Hartford axis had vanished into the memories of pioneers. Michigan, a tranquil agricultural state, had transformed from its first new auto factory in 1900 to twenty-two in just five years.18 It jumped over the previous leader, New York, which had twenty-one auto factories.19 Ohio, Connecticut, and Massachusetts followed in motor production. Burton Becker of Elmore cars in Ohio declared motor vehicles were part of an unstoppable evolution: “You can no more get along without the automobile today than you could without the horse.”20
The number of American car brands had ballooned to about three hundred.21 Most were small-timers, including E
lmore cars. The logo on the radiator featured the name Elmore written in cursive. Elmores came out of a bicycle company of the same name, after the Ohio village where the shop had begun.22 Elmores and other garage outfits lacked resources to sell whatever they made, unlike concerns such as Buick, Maxwell, and Oldsmobile, with their factories, economies of scale, dealerships, and advertising budgets.
For the first time going back to the dawn of civilization, the hegemony of horses on urban roads was threatened. Horse-riding clubs in cities were losing members or closing their doors.23 “Livery stables are losing money or being transformed into garages,” noted Automobile.24
Michigan played a critical role in advancing America’s standing abroad. The United States in 1906 had produced sixty thousand autos to overtake France—with fifty-five thousand motor vehicles—to lead the world.25 America would sustain that eminence throughout the rest of the twentieth century.
By 1908, almost two hundred thousand cars were cruising US roads.26 The city producing the greatest number was Detroit.27 Car companies and allied trades employed more than eight thousand and maintained an annual payroll running into the millions. Detroit was on its way to becoming America’s car capital, thanks to the unprecedented success of Ransom Olds and his Olds Motor Works plant,28 constructed in 1900 as the country’s first factory dedicated to manufacturing cars in quantity.29 Sales of Oldsmobiles created modern fortunes. Three years after the factory began operations, Ransom Olds at age forty had earned “his million,”30 as they used to say, in unparalleled speed from autos. He became embroiled in a management dispute and walked away to retire to a more leisurely life.31 The city’s business community invested in the capital-intense auto industry when Eastern bankers preferred to keep their money in traditional safe bets like steel, meat-packing, trolley trains, and utilities. Detroit car companies were paying laborers double the wages for comparable skills in the carriage trade—luring a talented labor force from around the country.32 Detroit was to automobiles what Northern California’s Silicon Valley later in the century became to computer technology.
The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 28