[...]... established as September 4, 1957—was twelve hundred Edsel dealers from coast to coast They were not to be just any dealers, either; Krafve made it clear that Edsel was interested in signing up only dealers whose records showed that they had a marked ability to sell cars without resorting to the highpressure tricks of borderline legality that had lately been giving the automobile business a bad name “We simply... edged so close that the Edsel got sideswiped Minor damage.” in 1959, immediately after the demise of the Edsel, Business Week stated that at the big press preview a Ford executive had said to a reporter, “If the company weren’t in so deep, we never would have brought it out now.” However, since Business Week neglected to publish this patently sensational LATE statement for over two years, and since to... facts and figures At its conclusion, Plumley was back on the tape, hammering away at his theme, which had now taken on overtones of “I told you so.” “We have had an awesome demonstration that the ‘right business climate’ cannot be brushed off as a Madison Avenue cliché but is a reality much to be desired,” the broad tape quoted him as saying So it went through the early afternoon; it must have been a... Exchange tape did not print the day’s last transaction until 8:15—four and threequarters hours after it had actually occurred Nor did the next day, Memorial Day, turn out to be a day off for the securities business Wise old Wall Streeters had expressed the opinion that the holiday, falling by happy chance in the middle of the crisis and thus providing an opportunity for the cooling of overheated emotions,... of the total volume during the three days—were sold as a result of margin calls In sum, if there was a villain, it appeared to have been the relatively rich investor not connected with the securities business —and, more often than might have been expected, the female, rural, or foreign one, in many cases playing the market partly on borrowed money The role of the hero was filled, surprisingly, by the... the Dow-Jones would go down to four hundred I said five hundred The point is that now, in contrast to 1929, the government, Republican or Democratic, realizes that it must be attentive to the needs of business There will never be apple-sellers on Wall Street again As to whether what happened that May can happen again—of course it can I think that people may be more careful for a year or two, and then... the same company’s Model A, brought out thirty years earlier The total amount spent on the Edsel before the first specimen went on sale was announced as a quarter of a billion dollars; its launching—as Business Week declared and nobody cared to deny—was more costly than that of any other consumer product in history As a starter toward getting its investment back, Ford counted on selling at least 200,000... alive in 1954, was breathing its last (The members of the Forward Product Planning Committee must have glanced at each other uneasily when, a year later, Henry J Kaiser wrote, in a valediction to his car business, “We expected to toss fifty million dollars into the automobile pond, but we didn’t expect it to disappear without a ripple.”) The Ford men also knew that neither of the other members of the industry’s... offices, in the company’s barony of Dearborn, just outside Detroit—work on it progressed under the conditions of melodramatic, if ineffectual, secrecy that invariably attend such operations in the automobile business: locks on the studio doors that could be changed in fifteen minutes if a key should fall into enemy hands; a security force standing round-the-clock guard over the establishment; and a telescope... insisted, typically, on living in Ann Arbor, where he could bask in the scholarly aura of the University of Michigan, rather than in Dearborn or Detroit, both of which he declared were intolerable after business hours Whatever the degree of his success in projecting the image of the E-Car, he seems, by his small eccentricities, to have done splendidly at projecting the image of Wallace “I don’t think .