Dodge Dependability

"Dependability" is a common enough word today, but it did not begin appearing in dictionaries until the early '30s. It was a word coined by the men who sold the cars that John and Horace Dodge began building in late 1914.

Letters from buyers of those early Dodges praised the car's power and rugged construction, but their most consistent comment was that the car could be depended upon. It did not take Dodge marketing people long to begin talking about the car's "dependability." (The word was coined by Theodore MacManus, who also wrote the famous "penalty of leadership" ad for Cadillac.)

The Dodge brothers were legendary figures in the early auto industry. Born in poverty in Niles, Mich., they amassed enormous fortunes building transmissions for the Curved Dash Olds and engines for Ford Motor Co.

They were stockholders of Ford Motor Co. and John was a vice president of Ford. They would regularly offer improvements to Ford cars -- until the Model T. The Model T was Ford's baby and he would brook no tampering with it. After Henry Ford moved his Model T assembly into the new Highland Park plant, the so-called "glass palace," the Dodge brothers built an assembly plant in Hamtramck which later became "Dodge Main" to build Model Ts for Ford, as demand far outstripped Ford's capacity.

Ford kept adding capacity to the Highland Park plant and the Dodge brothers could see their lucrative assembly business drying up. So in November, 1914, the Dodge brothers began building their own car, which incorporated many improvements they had offered Ford.

John and Horace Dodge were famous for their saloon escapades, drinking and roughhousing. The public announcement that the Dodges would build their own motor car was made at a party in Detroit's fashionable Book-Cadillac Hotel, capped by John Dodge marching up and down the banquet tables, darkening the hall by smashing light bulbs in the chandeliers with a cane.

But "dependability" described the Dodge brothers in their business dealings as well as their cars and they were just as well known for their integrity as for their escapades.

Gen. John Pershing used Dodge cars to chase Pancho Villa and other Mexican bandits back over the border. American troops used three Dodge touring cars to charge bandit headquarters 200 miles south of El Paso, destroying the rebellion without American casualties and making history as the first motorized combat operation by the U.S. Army.

The Dodges played another important role in military technology when French Marshal Joseph Joffre visited Washington in search of an American firm that could make the delicate recoil firing mechanisms for French 75 and 155 cannons, which were the backbone of the Allied artillery effort in World War I. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker called on John Dodge.

Dodge told Joffre and Baker that if the French provided his firm with accurate blueprints and left the project entirely to Dodge management, the mechanism could be produced in any quantity desired. Joffre and Baker did not think it was possible to mass-produce the mechanism and so informed Dodge.

"The hell it isn't," Dodge said.

"I am not accustomed to being spoken to in that kind of language," said Baker.

"The war would be a hell of a lot better off if you were," Dodge shouted back. "Do you want us to do this job or don't you?"

The Dodges did the job and after the war the French Government awarded the Legion of Honor to John Dodge and his 8,000 workmen.

The Dodge brothers had their differences and quarrels, but through most of their lives they were inseparable and they were in death also. They died within a year of each other in 1920.

Their widows asked Frederick Haynes, manager of the Dodge plant in Hamtramck, to run the company. Under Haynes, the company continued to grow and acquired Graham Truck, which became Dodge Truck.

In 1925, the widows of John and Horace Dodge sold Dodge Brothers Motor Car Co. to the New York banking syndicate of Dillon, Read and Co. for $146 million, biggest cash deal up to that time in the auto industry. Less than three years later, the bankers sold it to Chrysler Corp. for $170 million.

The Graham brothers, Joseph B., Robert C., and Ray A., began building trucks immediately after World War I, then joined Dodge Brothers in 1921 after the deaths of John and Horace Dodge in 1920. The Graham truck became the Dodge truck.

The brothers sold their interest in Dodge in 1926 and the following year got back into the auto business by acquiring the financially tottering Paige-Detroit Motor Car Co. from Harry Jewett.

Jewett made a fortune in mining around the turn of the century and decided to try the same in the auto industry. He acquired a car designed by Andrew Bachle which was being promoted by Fred O. Paige. Since Jewett didn't know much about autos, he installed Paige as president of his newly formed Paige-Detroit Motor Car Co. In 1909.

In 1910, having learned a bit about cars, Jewett decided that the Paige car was "a piece of junk" and fired Paige, took over himself and hired a new engineering department to design a new car. Paige sales gradually picked up and the first six-cylinder Paige appeared in 1915.

Paige gained a reputation for graceful styling and good performance. A smaller companion car was introduced in 1922 with Jewett's name on it. It was produced until 1927, when Jewett decided he had had enough and sold the company to the Graham brothers, who reorganized it as Graham-Paige Motors Corp.

The new Graham-Paige had first-year production of 73,195 cars in 1926, topping the first-year record which had been set just the year before in 1926 by Pontiac. (The record was topped again in 1928 by Chrysler Corp.'s new DeSoto.)

Paige was dropped from the car's name in 1930 and became the name of a new line of trucks. The Paige trucks did not sell well and Chrysler Corp. reminded the brothers that they had agreed to stay out of the truck business for five years after they sold out of Dodge. So the Grahams discontinued the Paige truck line and just built the Graham car.

The Graham was an excellent car and its 1932 Blue Streak, with body styling by Amos Northrup of Murray and detailing by Raymond Dietrich, was exceptionally handsome. But the Depression was taking its toll on the auto industry and sales continued a steep downward trend. Ray Graham committed suicide in 1932.

The remaining brothers introduced a Supercharged line in 1934, enhancing its already excellent reputation as a high-performance car, but having only a minor positive effect on sales.

The handsome styling introduced in 1936 did not help much and the company introduced a new body design it called "Spirit of Motion." Because of its unusual front end and radiator grille design, it became known as the "sharknose" and fared poorly on the market. It was widely regarded as too radical, even ugly. "Sharknoses" are now favored by collectors and are worth a couple thousand more than the more conventional '36 and '37 models.

Desperate, Graham purchased the Cord 810/812 dies from Hupp, which was also on its way out of business. The very handsome Hollywood models made with those dies in 1940 and 1941 fetch $4,000 to $6,000 more at auction than the '36.