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For in the vice-presidents' office sat a set of keen-eyed executives tempered by Chrysler: men like B. E. Hutchinson, Fred M. Zeder, Joe Fields. Their fingers were on the controls of every part of Chrysler Corp.'s complicated mechanism. And in the president's paneled office on the fifth floor of the Highland Park plant sat Kaufman Thuma Keller, the same "K. T." who had made the night foray on the Dodge plant eleven years ago.
While the impetuous Chrysler was wandering from roundhouse to roundhouse in the west at the turn of the century, always able to find a job, always quick to quit it when he had a row with the boss, purposeful K. T. Keller was a high-school boy in Mount Joy, Pa. Symbol of Walter Chrysler's youthful irresponsibility was his big silver-plated tuba, which he played in roundhouse bands, shipped from town to town in friendly cabooses while he rode up ahead in a boxcar with the hoboes. Mark of K. T. Keller's determination to go places was his position at the top of the Mount Joy High School graduating class.
The year Keller graduated (1901) Walter Chrysler lost his tuba, and the month Keller left the Mount Joy High School Chrysler married sweet-faced Della Forker in the Methodist church at their home town, Ellis, Kans. From then on, life was all business for Walter Chrysler. He left the railroad business as a shop foreman for Chicago Great Western, became works manager for American Locomotive Co., got his first job in the automobile business in 1911 (age 36) as works manager for Buick.
From the start, life was all business for K. T. Keller. After putting himself through a business school—on money scraped together in such variegated activities as raising squabs and working in factories—he spent two years in the British Isles as secretary to a lecturer, returned at 21 convinced that his future lay not in a white collar but in overalls. At the Westinghouse Machine Co. plant in Pittsburgh he found what he wanted: two years apprenticeship as a machinist at 20¢ an hour. And in Detroit he found experience in half-a-dozen grimy shops.
"I am a machinist by trade," Keller says today and many a Chrysler man has seen him prove it. So far as Walter Chrysler was concerned, he had proved he was much more than a good lathe-hand as far back as 1916 when President Chrysler of Buick (who had seen Keller's work in the General Motors shops) hired him as Buick's master mechanic.