MANUFACTURING: Champion

Studebaker Corp. has a neat biography. Founded in 1852 by two bearded brothers who made wagons, it is the U.S.'s oldest vehicle maker. Its net sales once reached $166,000,000. It once employed famed Knute Rockne as a sort of supersalesman. When the company failed in 1933, after three years of refusing to admit the existence of Depression I, its grand old man, President Albert R. Erskine, went home and shot himself. Later, under former Vice Presidents Paul Hoffman and Harold S. Vance, it became the first automobile company to reorganize under famed Section...

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