HAROLD CHURCHILL
THE comeback champion of U.S. business so far in 1959 is a horn-handed engineer who has a word of Art Shay advice for every faltering firm: "You must compete in areas where you are prepared to compete." With this credo, Harold Eugene Churchill, 56, climbed to the presidency of Studebaker-Packard Corp. and led the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. Unlike other auto chief executives, Churchill does not compete as a supersalesman or financial whiz. He came up as an oldtime, dirty-fingernail mechanic, who still loves to tinker under an open hood. Realizing that S.P. could not battle model-for-model against the Big Three, he put all his mechanical skill into a single car —the compact, chrome-clean, low-priced (from $1,925) Lark. The results: S.P. has produced 126,000 Lark '59s (v. 50,000 Studebakers of all kinds a year ago), lifted first-half sales to $210 million (v. $71 million), earned $12 million (v. a first-half '58 loss of $13 million).
All his working life, Harold Churchill figured that the way to compete was to produce an "ideal" small car, but it took him many years to do it. He got into Studebaker 33 years ago as a half-trained engineer (two years at Western Michigan University), gained a name as "the guy who did everything." He was one of the three men who engineered the "economy" '39 Champion (priced as low as $675). During the war he began turning out the famed tanklike Weasel for the U.S. just 50 days after the company got the order. He filed more than 50 automotive patents, but he still had not produced his "ideal" compact car.
THE chance finally came when Churchill was elected S.-P.'s do-or-die president in 1956. Out rolled his austere, cheap ($1,795) Scotsman. That car missed, but it taught Churchill that U.S. buyers want more than a stripped-down version of a costlier car. So he built a new car, presided over every mechanical detail, hustled out to the plant at any hour of day or night when a decision was needed. The Big Three have been working on their compact cars for a year or more. The Lark was driven into showrooms just seven months after the decision to build it, because, says Chief Engineer Gene Hardig, the company has no tangle of committees to worry about. "I just call Church and get a decision."