(5 of 8)
Vance leads a quiet, 9-to-5 business life, a quieter home life with his wife and two young sons (two older daughters are married). He is no hail-fellow-well-met with Studebaker's dealers, and knows very few of them. He goes in for no sports, is uninterested in the arts, usually reads whodunits, which serve to put him to sleep (usually by 10). His only hobby is a 200-acre farm outside South Bend, which he runs like the chairman of the board; he ever wields a hoe or plows a furrow himself. Though he is an Episcopalian (but no steady churchgoer), he is a prime backer of nearby University of Notre Dame, whose ex-president, Father John J. Cavanaugh (once a Studebaker employee), considers Vance "my favorite heretic."
Underneath the calm exterior, however, the Vance mind operates like a finely tuned engine. "He is always concerned with the hard core of facts," says Father Cavanaugh. "never bothered by the trivial things that worry most mortals."
"That's All Right." Called to Washington last year to head a committee on mobilization, Vance waded through the trivia of bureaucracy, turned out a notable report recommending more stand-by arms plants, smaller stockpiles of military end-items (TIME, Jan. 19). Once he told Defense Secretary Robert Lovett: "Bob, I understand that the Army has 60,000 trucks in Texas just sitting around." The Army investigated. Within weeks Studebaker got a cancellation order for more than $100 million worth of military trucks. "That's all right with me," said Vance. "We don't want to make things that are not needed."
His final mobilization report, published three weeks ago, made so much sense that last week President Eisenhower asked Vance to take on the job of mobilization boss, once held by General Electric's Charlie Wilson. Vance turned it down, chiefly because there was no one ready to move into his job at Studebaker.
"I Am to Blame." Vance runs Studebaker's 25,000-man organization with no committees of any kind. Says he: "Committees call for compromise and compromise is not solution. I solve the company's problems with the men directly responsible for them. If anyone is at fault I am to blame." Vance's decision is final. Once, after he had threshed out a thorny production problem and decided on a course to follow, one executive was still not satisfied: "I don't want to argue with you, but—" Vance briskly cut him off: "Well then, don't."
Vance seldom writes a memo, does most of his business by phone, which he always answers himself. At Studebaker, even the lowliest production worker can dial 496 on a company phone and hear a polite voice at the other end: "Yes, sir. Mr. Vance speaking."
Vance is Studebaker for an excellent reason: he knows more about it than any other man alive. It was Vance, with his old friend and associate Paul Hoffman who saved the company during the Depression and thus added the most successful Chapter to a history that began in 1852.