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"More Than You Promise." When they set up their village smithy and wagon-building shop in South Bend 101 years ago, brothers Clement and Henry Studebaker had just $68 to their name. But soon they and three other brothers were cashing in on the nation's great push westward making covered wagons for the pioneers and carts and carriages for the local trade. "Always give the customer more than you promise," was their motto, "but not too much, or you'll go broke." One of the company's first formal contracts was brief and to the point :
"I, Peter Studebaker, agree to sell all the wagons my brother Clem can make (Signed) Peter Studebaker."
"I agree to make all he can sell. (Signed) Clem Studebaker."
They landed Army contracts, and soon Studebaker wagons were rolling into battle at Gettysburg and other Civil War actions. Custer made his last stand on the Little Big Horn separated from his supply tram of Studebakers. In the Boer War, Correspondent Winston Churchill was captured with a Studebaker wagon. Orders poured in from all over the world, and by 1887 the company was touting itself as "The Biggest Vehicle House in the World," with annual sales of $2,000,000. Its most popular buggy was the high, wide & handsome "Izzer"—so called to distinguish it from a has-been, or a "Wuzzer." In 1910 Studebaker entered the auto business by buying control of Detroit's Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Co. Though Studebaker didn't know it, E-M-F's most valuable asset was in the person of a young man named Harold Vance, who started there that same year as a 15¢-an-hour mechanic's apprentice.
The Clerk Said No. The son of Samuel W. Vance, a Port Huron, Mich. circuit court judge, Harold Vance got through high school with average grades, went to work for his father's law partner after his father died. He tried for an appointment at West Point, but flunked the entrance exams and went to work for EMF.
He moved up fast because of his ability to grasp complicated situations, make calm, correct decisions and stick to them under pressure. Once, Studebaker's Treasurer Albert Russel Erskine wanted to install a new accounting system in EMF; Vance objected that it wouldn't work. He half expected to be fired. Instead, when Erskine became president, he made Vance assistant treasurer. Vance moved to South Bend in 1919, slowly worked up every rung of the Studebaker ladder. By the time depression struck, he was production vice president and a director, while Paul Hoffman, now president of the Ford Foundation, was vice president in charge of sales.