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Moran forces his salesmen to wear maroon jackets, and some have quit rather than do so (chuckles Moran: ''They'd give anything to get out of those red jackets'') He usually fires any salesman who cannot consistently make $250 a week in commissions, but just being around Moran seems to endow most of them with a profitable touch of blarney.
A customer recently mentioned his wife's name to a Moran salesman in the course of looking at a car. "Helen!"' cried the salesman rapturously. "That's the dearest name in all the world to me because that happens to be the name of my wife." "There's the Monster." Moran—whose own wife is Arline—lives in a sprawling, nine-room ranch house in Lincolnwood. a Chicago suburb, with Arline and the three children (two girls, a boy). He has three motorboats. a summer home in the country and a winter home in Florida, and a 30-ft. by 60-ft. swimming pool that he shares with youngsters once a week, hiring a lifeguard to watch over them. He likes to watch himself on one of his six TV sets, greets his twice-weekly taped appearance with "There's the monster." After a scant breakfast. Moran drives to his office in his four-door hardtop Ford Galaxie. riffles through the mail on his 12-ft. desk, then begins his daily tour of his auto empire. He pops into the new-car showroom, opening new-car doors to make sure the interior is clean, checks to see how sales are going. In the service department, he leafs through service orders to see if there is any pattern of complaints that suggest a weakness in a new car. He even drops into the repair waiting room, applying his sunny personality and speeding up someone who has an appointment with the dentist. Says Moran: "There's a million things that nobody asks about but me." Moran, who neither smokes nor drinks, keeps in top shape by leaving the office every day at 2 p.m. for a half-hour. 44-lap swim at the Illinois Athletic Club.
He draws a $150,000 salary from Courtesy Motors, but that is not all he makes.
"If you're in the automobile business today," he says, "and your only profit is in selling new cars, you aren't going to make money. You have to be in insurance, financing, the whole ball of wax." He owns Grand Insurance Corp.. Grand Acceptance Corp., a finance company that will handle one-third of Courtesy's financing by year's end. and Grand Finance Corp..
a small loan company. He also runs Courtesy Lease-Save Plan Inc.. which rents out about 1.200 cars and trucks, took in $1.300.000 in 1960. From these corporations Moran draws another $24.000 a year.
Life to 30 Days. Jim Moran got into business when he was only eight, selling soda pop to Sunday baseball crowds near his home in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. When his father died in the Depression, the twelve-year-old boy took a paper route and an after-school job in a service station to help his mother and sister pay the bills. He never got to college.