Word: breeches
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Young Henry brought in Ernest R. Breech, a crack production man who had run three General Motors subsidiaries, and made him executive vice president. When he joined Ford, said Breech, "there was no second team. We had nothing but top bosses and workers. We had no real research. Even the new [postwar] engine was no good; the Rouge was obsolete, and the company had lost $55 million in the first half of '46. About all we had that was any 'good was the name of Ford...
...Solutions. Together, Breech and HF II performed radical surgery. They shucked off all Old Henry Ford's peripheral enterprises, such as his Brazilian rubber plantations, his money-losing deal to make Harry Ferguson's tractors,* his experimental farms. They had another big problem: the inheritance taxes on the $208 million estates of Henry and Edsel. Luckily, Old Henry himself left $28 million in cash, and the family got the rest by loans from the company and sales of property. They kept control in the family by keeping the 172,645 shares of voting stock (now held in equal...
After reorganizing the company from top to bottom, Ford and Breech began to plow back profits and cash on hand into modernization and expansion...
...never given a hoot about either ("Give them any color they want as long as it's black"). Edsel, who had a flair for design, brought out the Lincoln Continental in 1939. But he made little progress in getting the company to set up its own design department. Breech and young Henry made that a first order of business. They also hired George Walker, a noted independent Detroit designer...
...Clair on weekends in his 42-ft. cabin cruiser with his wife, the former Edith McNaughton of Detroit, and their two children. Like Henry, Ben has also developed into an able speaker. "When we decided it was time for him to make a speech to the Washington dealers," Ernie Breech recalls, "he stammered and stumbled, and I think he would have fallen on his face if he hadn't been holding on to the podium." Now Ben has plenty of confidence on his feet...