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Where's Charlie? C.E. himself learned his production lessons early. Born in Minerva, Ohio, where his parents were schoolteachers, he had a childhood which many another boy would envy. The buff brick Wilson house was flanked by the homes of two locomotive engineers. They were his heroes who told him all about railroading and let him ride in their cabs.
From the time he saw his first light bulb, he wanted to be an electrical engineer. He sped through a four-year course at Carnegie Tech in three years, and at 18 went to work for Westinghouse Electric Corp., at 18¢ an hour. By the time he was 22, he had married (on $80 a month) and had designed Westinghouse's first motor for auto starters.
He always had his eye on the auto industry because "it's a dramatic business, you know." After World War I, he joined Remy Electric Co., a General Motors subsidiary, as chief engineer and sales manager. In nine years he was a G.M. vice president; five years after that he became Bill Knudsen's right-hand man. In 1940, when F.D.R. tapped Knudsen to direct defense production, Vice President Wilson stepped easily into the great Dane's shoes. Since then he has had two big projects: 1) mobilize G.M. for war (tanks, planes, jet engines, etc.), and 2) reconvert it for peace.
Team Play. Four months ago, completing the second job and anticipating this year's big thrust toward a competitive market, he gave his corporate team a transfusion of new blood. Dapper, grey-mustached Harlow ("Red") Curtice, 55, the man who had put Buick back on its feet (TIME, Sept. 20), was made an executive vice president and became the man widely regarded as Wilson's heir apparent—a not entirely comfortable spot, considering corporation rivalries.
Biggest and bluffest of the four executive vice presidents is balding, 61-year-old Marvin E. Coyle, known as "Mr. Facts & Figures." (Others: Ormond E. Hunt, 65, specialist in production problems, and Albert Bradley, 57, financial expert.) Last month Mr. Coyle went to Washington, where a Senate committee wanted to talk with him about G.M. profits (which hit an astronomical net of about $450 million last year). Neither apologetic nor apoplectic, Witness Coyle pointed out that G.M.'s prices had not been out of line, that there had also been "profits for the customer." He asked the Senators to step outside. There, he had parked a 1929 Buick and a 1948 Chevrolet. The Chevvy, faster, more powerful and a bigger & better car, actually sold for fewer dollars than the Buick.
In his shakeup, Wilson also juggled around the men who make the cars, the five car-division vice presidents, who are, in effect, big manufacturers on their own. They are: Cadillac's Jack Gordon, 48, crack engine man, who worked ten years on the new Cadillac engine; Chevrolet's W. F. Armstrong, 49, a cherub-cheeked man who is nervously cheerful about his big job of staying ahead of Ford; Buick's Ivan L. Wiles, 50, a tall, greying statistician who moved up from comptroller into Red Curtice's job; Oldsmobile's Sherrod E. Skinner, 52, a dark, heavyset, prim engineer; and Pontiac's Harry J. Klingler, 59, lean, angular and eager, a bow-tied salesman who always has one more funny story up his sleeve when Wilson runs out.