Skateboard To Hell (Fiction)

By Mark Lax

Danny could do amazing things with just a napkin and a ballpoint pen. He would get your attention with small chat—data really, pertinent stuff which he could just rattle off. He knew the local market conditions from Halifax to El Paso, from Stockton to Battle Creek. By the time he was ready to pull out the napkin, he had already proved that. You might be at a bar, or in your office or in someone else’s office. At some point, that only he knows, he’s told you enough jokes, mesmerized you with enough facts, that you are ready. Out comes the napkin. He draws two lines and looks you in the eyes. “I bet you and I, we, could come up with a car that sells.”

I guess he learned this from E.L. Cord. I know Danny worked directly under Cord. Unlike Cord, Danny didn’t draw his inspiration from Flash Gordon. Danny drew from life; the life of the market with an eye for what credibly could be produced. First he draws the back window, in the shape of a bullet. “Blind spots, right? There isn’t a blind spot on this thing thicker than your wrist.”

He knew about the evolving bathtub style. That was in the cards, even before the war. During the war Danny worked in civil defense, keeping track of existing auto parts inventories. He had a line on all of the parts which were off the restricted list. When Danny went to visit dealers on his own time, the dealers, who had nothing but used cars needing parts, were always willing to talk to him.

Everyone who met Danny thought he was a salesman. (As if salesmen could draw.) Actually, he started as an enthusiastic draftsman at Peerless. From there he went to model making at Packard, dealer relations at Cord and finally landed as marketing director for Hupmobile. By the time his civil defense work started, he had technically been out of the industry for five years. In all likelihood, that’s really where the act started, or rather evolved. Like a good salesman, like E.L.Cord himself, Danny did more listening than talking and when he did talk it wasn’t to voice his opinion, but rather to disclose what others had told him.

The car on the napkin was a collective fantasy, dreamed up by dealers and fleshed out by Danny’s steady strokes. By 1943 he had the car down. He could draw it in three quarters view form the front and back angles. Originally, he would tell you, it had a split back window. It was the bullet shape that he was looking for. Thanks to this new glass process, and he could give the parts maker’s name and location, it could be done with one sheet of glass. As he sketched the front ‘nycels’, long integrated tubes that ended in headlights, Danny would explain each and every advantage of the car’s construction. He was worse with finance guys. He would list the costs of the parts. When engineers questioned its stance—it was a little low—Danny responded “Thirteen inches ground clearance.”

Two weeks after VJ Day Danny invited his entire rolodex of dealer contacts to New York City. There, in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, Danny kicked aside the silk covering and let her gold paint be exposed to the first bursts of flashbulbs. Danny was the first man in the public eye with capped teeth and a permanent tan. You wouldn’t know it, but the blond haired Danny was pushing 70. And the car looked good, too.

No, Danny isn’t that guy. That guy had some drawings and a stock deal. In a way, Danny had less. The car on the ballroom floor couldn’t move. We had welded the wheels to the frame.

But Danny also had more. He had a real company. He was number three in the newly formed Metroliner-Americar Automotive Corporation of America. Metroliner was the wreckage of a company previously known for making cars with hand cranked superchargers. It had been bought out of bankruptcy by a former Big Three executive. Americar was backed by a company that made everything from laundry machines to hand grenades. They didn’t make cars nor pretend to know the first thing about it. What they brought to the table was enormous, heaving, globular and expanding endless cash.

Now the guy that everything went wrong for promised disc brakes, fuel injection, pointing headlights and front wheel drive--as if those were new things. Most of that was available on a 1936 Cord 820—and it was an economic and engineering disaster. Danny hadn’t promised that big of a bill of goods. I know the words ‘fuel injection’ caused him to cringe. When ‘front wheel drive’ could be coaxed out of him, it was always in the context of mañana, another thing for the better version of this car. Getting our car as an automatic was only an implied option.

Danny did say some nutty things about hydromatic, pneumatic something or other—which is to say that he wasn’t beyond lying. Electric curb feelers, anyone? How about a revival of the parkmatic device? Interior instrumentation gauged with a micrometer? At least in print or when cameras were running, he sobered up.



It was 1946 and we had a new car. A new, new car. It would be 1947 before anyone else got a single unit off the line and 1949 before anything anyone was selling was more than a retread or a model developed before the war. We had three years to hit the ground and run and we knew it.

A lot had gone right for us. Danny was a key and keen part of it. Without him, we wouldn’t have had a dealer network in place. He had barnstormed the country for us, following his napkin act up with ten foot drawings and scale models, leaving little toy cars everywhere he went. We had commissioned 50,000 toy cars before we were entirely final on the styling. --We didn’t know it, but it was actually final. Whether we could make it work was our problem.--To Danny’s credit, he told us not to list the scale on the toy. We had light boxes up at gas stations and dealerships—we called them agencies, then—all over the map before we had even decided what engine to put in the thing.

The car at the Waldorf had no engine. Metroliner had gifted us its well tested super charged V-8, called the Silver Streak. And it was a fine engine. But it made our car wildly careen off the road. And it shook with a palsy while idle. Really, it was a truck engine. We wound up using a widely available, but punk, V-6 instead. This engine was on the top of our “must change” mañana list.



Our other advantage was a free factory. Not just free land or tax financing, but an entire free-- although not altogether ready to go-- factory. It was, in fact, the largest building in the world at the time, located in Livonia, Michigan. The building had been constructed by another auto maker for the fabrication of bombers during the war. With the war now over, that firm was claiming that they would never have a use for it. Moreover, they wanted a tax credit for demolishing it. Or they were going to let this two year old, world’s largest building rot into the ground. This may have been a bluff. If it was a bluff, the War Assets Administration called them on it. This is where I came in. I was charged with finding an occupant for the building. I found Metroliner. Metroliner had a previous arrangement with Danny. Initially the Americar people were just going to aid in the conversion of the plant, using some new manufacturing ideas they had picked up from their other businesses. They quickly flipped that plan to being a full fledged partner. In effect, the government had formed the company. Metroliner was a stand alone company. Americar was a newly formed division of a much larger firm. They each owned 30% of the new firm and were co-manufacturing at the plant. The government held the remaining 40% of the stock, which they intended to issue to Wall Street at some later date. As for Danny, although he was our president and public face, he didn’t own even a nickel of it.

No tag day for Danny. He was a millionaire several times over. Long story short: his wife wanted him out of the house. This kept him active. As far as the public was concerned, Danny ran the company. He was our Colonel Sanders, Mister Americar.

(Today he could have been a Viagra Pitch-man. What did he eat?)

Danny’s performance at the Waldorf netted us 57,000 pre orders. The first Metroliner rolled off our lines two months later, followed eight seconds later by the first Americar. By the end of the model year, we had captured 17% of the US auto market—from an eight month standing start. It was the most spectacular start up in the history of the industry.

All this, in the middle of a flash depression.

What we were selling was a slightly low slung, slightly small, four door sedan. It had a large, easy to open, slanted fastback hatch trunk and plenty of glass. Being very easy to see out of was one of its selling points. We had loaded the thing with springs and sound proofing. (Dealer Joke: You can run over your kids and not feel or hear a thing.) Its steering wheel and controls were crafted to be just the right size for the average woman’s hand. This was also the reason that the car was a little lower than average. (Not that we were selling it as a woman’s car, at least overtly.) The car was specifically made so that it was a hair too small for cab or police use. It came standard with a stick on the floor. The mechanics were no mystery and it was easy to service. Our upholstery was overstuffed, featuring covers you could clean with a damp cloth. If the car had rolled off the line in 1970, it would have looked right at home: it may have looked foreign, specifically English, what with its wall-eyed front headlamps emerging out of contoured tubes and its curved front chrome grillwork. For 1946, it was oddly a little boxy. It never did fully adopt the bathtub look that every other car of the time had.



What we had was a Buick that we were selling at the Chevy price point. That was our aim. We were almost mandated to be a value brand by the government.

At this point I should mention the paint job. The one in the Waldorf had a candy apple gold. It turned heads: the heads of other car makers. The process, called ‘Pocelinization’, had been gifted to us by Americar’s parent firm. We eventually developed a line of cream pastels which became the trademark of another car company. At any time during our history, 1/4th of our income came from royalties on this paint process paid to us by other auto manufacturers. Perhaps we should have kept it to ourselves, but we were sort of strapped for cash.

As originally envisioned, the Metroliner was a Packard sold at the Cadillac price point and the Americar was a Buick at the Chevy price point. Again, the cash fairy showed up and the Americar and the Metroliner wound up being pretty much identical. Danny’s car was actually more suited to be an Americar than a Metroliner. So what we did is we made the Metroliner a very loaded version of the Americar. When properly equipped, or laden, a Metroliner had an outstanding case of the slows. We called it ‘majestic’ in the advertising.



To say that our car was ‘new’ is something of a misnomer. No one had made cars or car parts for four years. Other than the appointments-- the steering wheel, glass, body and such--there wasn’t a ‘new’ component in our car. It would have been bristling cutting edge in the mid 1930s, based as it mechanically was on Metroliner designs. In its previous incarnation, Metroliner was a technology lagger. Their Silver Streak sedans had been favored by bank robbers needing to make a fast getaway. The Silver Streak was even advertised as ‘the Getaway Car.’ Hand crank turbo chargers weren’t Metroliner’s only throw-back feature. They didn’t come with automatic starts. Given what we had to work with, we did a dreamy job.

We were under considerable pressure from the government not to build Danny’s car. Of course this pressure was exerted right before Danny’s presentation at the Waldorf and right after we had the kinks worked out on what would become the Americar/Metroliner. They wanted us to make an SLC instead.

An SLC, shitty little car, is what the Model T was: a car engineered almost exclusively for speedy mass production. There will only ever be one Model T. Every SLC built since then has essentially been created to compete against used cars. In 1946 we could have sold millions of SLCs, since there effectively weren’t any used cars available. And we would have gone broke.

Originally our deal with the government was to produce some number of undefined SLCs which we would sell at a 5% mark-up (or a demographically low price point), each one of which would be counted against the unknown cash value of our factory. In some mythical time in the future, selling ‘X’ number of these cars would result in us owning the factory free and clear. We were, of course, free to become profitable first. And that’s the entirety of the deal. It was my full time job to figure out what this deal amounted to. To be honest, I wanted to negotiate the SLC part into nothingness. We had put thousands of people in Livonia back to work—in a flash depression. We have a car that should sell, if they let us sell it.

Just to put a fine point on this, I did not at the time work for Metroliner-Americar. I was an employee of the War Assets Administration: the non rent collecting landlord of the world’s largest building. Don’t tell me what the agreement means. I wrote the agreement. And Congress passed it!

As for whom I am having problems with, they don’t have faces or names. They are holdovers from Truman’s shock teams, the ones he used to bust defense contractors during the war. I don’t know if I prevailed on them or not. I did blow in a call to Livonia’s local congressman. For some reason, right before Danny’s presentation, the waters suddenly parted.

We did do a mock up of an SLC, just to placate the faceless buttinskis. It was a Jeep we had stapled a car body around. We called it ‘The Torpedo.’ It was good for a laugh, after which we sent it to the room where all the bad ideas are. Never to be seen again, I hoped.

Our 1946 success deodorized a number of problems. Metroliner and Americar did not get along. Right off the bat, Metroliner did not want to use the line technology that Americar was bringing in and insisted on another system—one made by a competitor of Americar’s parent. Per their agreement, Americar had to pay for it. What we wound up with is a factory with two separate lines, using two different methods, two different assembly orders, both of which made the same car. The hairs on the back of my neck started going up right here.

Metroliner’s sweet deal forced Americar to kick in 50% on all capital expenses. This included dealerships, which Metroliner wanted to build and then lease back to franchisees all over the country. This was a fairly typical incentive for dealers at the time, but the kicker was that these dealers were for Metroliner at the specific exclusion of Americar. Just because Metroliner could get away with this does not mean that it should have.



I speak of them as if they are people. In the case of Metroliner, it was a person named Goose Beowulf. Goose had been in charge of buying rubber for one of the Big Three and had worked his way up to Director of Sourcing before buying out Metroliner. Without him and Danny, we wouldn’t have even had parts. He had connections for metal stamping, glass and electronics. When our V-8 proved unworkable, it was he who found the punk V-6. He was a very calm man. He had a photographic memory. Other than welding, he was an expert at all parts of the assembly process. He inspired loyalty and you couldn’t ask for a more dedicated, humanistic, hands on manager if you dreamed him up. His people loved him.

Fuck his people. Goose was singularly the most imperious person I had ever met; the kind that only attends meetings he calls. He wandered the plant in a white suit with a black string tie. Under his arm was a swizzle stick—or was it a riding crop? As for his experience, Goose’s plants were fairly worthless as car assemblies. (They had not produced a car since 1936.) Due to their proximity to other clustered defense plants, they were quite golden to the contractor the government had assigned them to. There never was any question about converting his plants back to civilian use. It wasn’t going to happen. The War Assets Administration had figured that swapping Goose an interest in the Livonia white elephant was something of a steal. The big looming issue was that Goose had never really run Metroliner at all. He had simply made a timely real estate investment in some idle plants. It was hoped that the Americar people would help him out. But he wasn’t playing nice. The man was permanently possessed of an “us verses them” mentality that he specifically pointed in the direction of Americar, who he viewed as an asp in his blankets.



Americar never met ‘a problem’, only ‘an opportunity’. They were masters of innovation on the fly, improving every single process and machine, even those that weren’t theirs, by a double points percentage during our first year. Our 1947 models were mechanically designed and bankrolled by Americar, on its own, on its dime, completely remote from us--and it plugged in with few hitches. I don’t know what aliens they were holding hostage in their R&D department. Given that they did work for all of the auto manufacturers, they had broad exposure to various tricks and were, to put it nebulously, creatively active in the art of reverse engineering. Along with the cash, they were a cornucopia.

They were also spineless. Their lead managers vacillated in orientation between strings of kids with rich uncles and those who got their jollies counting paperclips. Sometimes you got this in the form of the same man-child. A collection of whimsical astrologers guided their actions via memorandum telegrammed from Stockton. Was Americar a lab experiment?—A hobby? It was rather pricey for a learning experience—and I don’t care how big they were.

As for Danny, he played referee, at least to the degree that a 70 year old man is capable of. Danny explained it with “There’s always high drama in the car business. Especially at the point where all you have to fight over is red ink. Hell, Hupp and Buick got kicked out of their firms before the first car rolled off. Olds left Oldsmobile. Even Henry Ford got kicked out of his first company. Now they just have to fight. Don’t get in love with either of them. There’s a fairly good chance someone we don’t even know now will wind up running the thing.”

For 1947 our models were entirely mechanically redone. We didn’t touch the bodies, but everything inside was brand spanking new. As opposed to the punk V-6, we now had a quite proprietary peppy snub straight six. Not that we were about to reclaim the Getaway Car title, but Majestic was firmly banished. Our intention at this point is to really load up the Metroliner and really strip down the Americar. Then the cash fairy strikes. Once we ran the numbers, the economics struck that we could load up both cars for the price it would take to do just one. Either both or none. We do both. The last step in the assembly process is sticking the badge on. What is a Metroliner or an Americar depends entirely upon what we have orders for.

Goose is not pleased. He wants an additional model that will be sold exclusively at Metroliner dealerships. Frankly, it seemed a reasonable request. For snicks, we stick a hand crank supercharger in the car and re-brand it as the New Silver Streak. It’s an unannounced mid year introduction. Weirdly, we sell 10,000 units with a back order for 2500 that we can’t fill because we ran out of supercharges. Two weeks after its introduction, the New Silver Streak is involved in its first bank robbery. A blow up of the photograph featuring the bullet riddled car is presented to Goose, who hangs it proudly behind his desk. It does get some wheels spinning.



The sports car just came together from there. Could we build a small car around our old V-8? Danny and Goose like the idea. Americar chimes in, showing off “materials.” Materials is a code word for something that isn’t metal. Most of it is what we now call plastics. At the time they were called ‘resins.’ One month later, Goose’s crew is burning up the horn, tracking down camel leather and walnut—no, mahogany—and aviation instrumentation. In the other room, Danny and I are examining two prototype car bodies. This is the way our firm should have worked all along.

Goose has thrown a further complication into the works, because he can, because this is now his idea. He wants to call the thing ‘Marlin’ and give it a two tone blue/grey paint job. Yeah, he showed us the fish. One of the bodies we are looking at, commissioned before the whimsical fish idea erupted, is orange and made out of essentially fiberglass. The other is made out of Fadar, originally created during the war as a vulcanized rubber substitute—which Americar’s parent happens to hold patent to. Putting two colors in fiberglass is expensive but not impossible. Fadar is naturally dull black, as if anything about it could be called natural, and cannot hold paint. Fiberglass will cost us a left nut and has a six month lead time. The world’s supply of Fadar is available to us for the cost of transportation.

Both Danny and I know the extent to which Goose isn’t going to back down on his ‘Marlin’ concept. Danny’s solution: “Do both. We can knock it off-- make a STH, a skateboard to hell, by sticking the cheaper body and cheaper interior on it. Let Goose have Metroliner sell its 13,000 mink-lined rocket wombs to bald headed old men at the caviar price and Americar will sells its 60,000 of the Fadar to punks at the Champaign of Beers price. Punks love cars like this.”



Sometimes contempt is a wonderful thing. Goose green lights both cars. He even names the Fadar one “Getaway."

At this point I do work for Metroliner-Americar, or rather the holding corporation. As for my role as landlord of the world’s largest building, it has been privatized, with its responsibilities transferred to me. I now negotiate with me as to the terms of our factory ownership arrangement. You will have to forgive me for considering the SLC issue closed.

A week after the Marlin and her demented twin are given the go, I am invited to a meeting in the central banquet hall of the Lake Lawn Lodge, in Delevan Wisconsin. At the head of the table is the pie-faced, six foot three, three hundred pound CEO of the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. On one side of me is the treasurer of Studebaker. On the other side of me is the head of Americar’s parent, a former Secretary of War. Across from us is the president of Hudson Motors. To his right is the president of Packard. To his right is the president of Willys-Overland. To his right is the taxi cab magnate Checker/Yellow. Clustered opposite of Nash’s head are representatives from Hupmobile’s remaining bond holders, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds and a secretary from Durant Canada, which everyone calls Third Empire for some reason. With us are three observers from the Securities Commission, the Undersecretary of Labor and five government economists.

My bratwurst was delicious. Our firm has tripled its sales and has 13% of the US auto market. None of the others present even have 10. The Americar is the number five best selling automobile in the country. The Metroliner is number eight. I was feeling pretty flush until the economists started talking.

It seems the Big Three had spent the last eighteen months applying for a raft of patents. They were going to tie up our parts suppliers for years, perhaps forcing us to retool. Any new parts we get would come with a royalty payable to the bigs. And if we opted out, all our current parts would hit the ceiling in price. It was a typical move that the bigs used against us independents. Their—unthinkable—vision of the future didn’t include us. The Securities people had issued the bigs a ‘guidance warning’, however…

The subject now was: merger. Between us, we had enough parts and systems to make cars. Individually, all of us depended on the bigs for at least 30% of our systems. Like my firm, most of the others also supplied systems to the bigs. Kissing off that income, in our case 25%, was one of the realized costs to any merger.

How far did it get? Studebaker and Packard are willing to sell out for cash and assumption of debt. Hudson, Nash and Willys-Overland want a merger. Hupmobile is here to sell assets. The cab guy and the baseball guy want parts deals. Third Empire was never specific about their objectives, filing for liquidation early on in the process. All of this I can safely ignore. Americar’s parent then offers the proposed merged firm the cash to buy Studebaker and Packard, as well as its stock in us. The government will write off its 40% holding in us in return for compliance with structured displaced employee compensation. (Suddenly, I don’t feel like such a big shot.) Manufacturing will be centered in our Livonia plant, Overland’s Toledo works and Packard’s Detroit assembly. Metal stamping and steel works will be centered in Neenah, Wisconsin, primarily, at the Undersecretary’s advisement, in order to offset the loss of assembly jobs in Milwaukee and Kenosha. Labor loss to the industrial sector is 123,000. Displacement is another factor. That’s taking things pretty damn far, if you ask me.



None of this happened overnight. The deal kept boomeranging back, each time with less and less feathers. If it had worked out, there wouldn’t be a big three. I’m not saying that there would have been a big four, but we would have been the strongest player.

The upswing of all this is that Metroliner was now besides the point to its two principle backers. Goose was thrilled, warbling on about how “Now I have the type of freedom I need to really operate!” Apparently he was unfazed that both of his fairy godmothers had it in writing that they wanted to leave him at the orphanage.


On the other hand, 1948 was a banner year for us. Our market share sunk to 12%, but we were actually considerably more profitable. As a completely unforeseen byproduct of our two separate production systems, we were able to churn off a lot of short run modifications to our model. We had a station wagon, a coupe, a convertible and even a legitimately supercharged sedan model. For a company with only one model, we had a lot of models. When introduced, the Metroliner Marlin was very well received and swiftly sold out its 13,000 allotment, helping Metroliner to start to see the black part of the accounting ledger. Marlin didn’t look like any car we made. It looked like a race car. Because it was a race car. The Getaway was held off until 1949. There was a new whiter Fadar and we were getting a deal to remake the interiors of it and the Americar. End of the year scorecard had Americar as the fifth most popular model in the US market and Metroliner in tenth place as a model, but fifth place as a brand.



1949 started better. We were now on TV. Ellery Queen drove our car on his TV show and talked about it during the program. Actual stand alone Americar dealerships started to sprout up from gas stations and garages and used car lots. We raised the price on Marlin and it still sold out. Metroliner was sliding, but after a mid-year re-pricing of itself at the Americar point, recovered. Then Americar’s parent announced that there would be no 1950 for them. We could take the car, the brand, the money and shove it. That left us scrambling to preserve the car and its dealerships. Our Getaway was a small, four seater with a distinct Americar family resemblance, from the interior, to its bullet back window, to the nycel front head lamps. It looked like the Americar’s insect little brother. The Getaway, which was now a one year only orphan car, sold 98,756 units before the world’s supply of Fader was exhausted---and was the damn Car of the Year.



1950 comes and we are playing musical brands with our one car that is several cars. Americar is now the Metroliner Americar, at least as a sedan. Everything that isn’t a sedan is a Metroliner something else. Metroliner Marlin is burning up race tracks. Metroliner Americar Silver Streak, one of those stupid knock offs, is also burning up race tracks. Marlins sell out all 13,000 by February. By March our entire production capacity is taken up by back orders for Metroliner Americar Silver Streaks. Not that we had any capacity remaining, but we were not able to find a new body for the Getaway. Certainly it wasn’t a perfect situation, however, having to build cars that are already sold is about as good as it gets. We weren’t exactly giving the Streak away, either.



In the middle of this Goose lets loose with his bomb: he has renegotiated our SLC agreement with the government. There is a new deal that places this SLC on the floors of a nationwide department store. He intends to sell this car under three names: Getaway, Metrocar and Transtate. The Transtate will be available only in the hardware area of the department store and will feature that store’s tires, wipers and battery. Danny talked him out of using Getaway, which instead became Econoliner, but that’s the best he could do as far as shooting it down was concerned.

Obviously, there were a number of factors in the ethers, the outcomes of which we could not have known. As Goose guessed, sales for the Silver Streak might have tapered off by the end of the year. (They didn’t.) We honestly didn’t have a clue as to what the government or Americar was going to do with our stock. Wanting to own the company outright was a legitimate goal on Goose’s part.

What Goose did know going in was that Nash had just released an SLC, called the Rambler, which had a lot of hot type about it in the press. With parts changes, possible re-tooling and source price increases in the offing, being in a market that you specifically have a limited mark up in is at best silly. Moreover, the department store idea had been done before. Department stores may offer financing, but they do not take trade-ins. They let the cars sit and then unloaded them at clearance, always. This drove the dealers nuts.

What he could not have known was that Henry Ford II was dedicated to reclaiming the top sales slot and was poised to flood the market with his own SLC. GM had caught wind of this and was about to follow suit.

Not that any of this really mattered, once we saw the car.



It wasn’t The Torpedo. The Torpedo had four doors, two wipers, arm rests, real back seats and a good V-6. This thing had none of that. It was a bad two door with a motorcycle engine. The windows in back did not roll, were permanently up. As opposed to back seats, it had a pair of barely padded hinged plywood boards. Mind you, this was at a time when cars were starting to sprout wings and chrome. The hubcaps were tin yamikas that covered only the center of the non white walled tires. It didn’t even have a trunk lid. You had to load the trunk by folding away the back seat.

Danny was his most serene, dashing self in demonstrating to Goose the glaring design flaw he had found in the prototype. And he knew that it was one that Goose could do nothing about. This should have, rationally, scuttled it then and there. One by one, Danny had every female employee of our firm try to load a pair of grocery bags into the trunk. None of them—not fat, not slim, not tall, not short--could do it. I was less cerebral in my protest. The first line of the second paragraph of my resignation letter read “You can’t do this.”

From then on, this was the only car Metroliner would make. Should Danny sell 400,000 of them, the factory and all of the government’s stock were his, free and clear.

He didn’t come close. In 1953 the government forced Metroliner to merge with the defense contractor that had previously assumed its factories, and exit the car business. The plant in Livonia, now nicely equipped as a car assembly, was sold at a giveaway to the firm which had first put it up.

Six years. Four hundred million dollars. Poof!