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In those days, 35 years ago, a machinist had to know not only how to use his tools but how to make them, if necessary. Mechanical engineering became young Walt Chrysler's life, not his profession. After a year he was able to make the model steam engine which he still shows to his friends. When he was earning 7½¢ per hour he wanted a shotgun; so he made that, too.
After he got his journeyman's certificate, the Ellis shopboy set out to see what other railroad shops, and the western world to which the railroads ran, were like. He got as far as Salt Lake City, where he took a job in the Rio Grande & Western roundhouse. He got married and began studying in the International Correspondence School. Soon came his first big "break," the blown-out cylinder head, now famed among Chrysler admirers, which he and a helper mended in time to send the mail-train out on schedule.
The superintendent, one Hickey, expressed gratitude by not forgetting. Three months later the new Colorado & Southern shop foreman at Trinidad, Colo., was a tireless, driving, hardheaded youngster named Walter Chrysler. Other railroads heard, needed, beckoned. After a bit the superintendent of motive power of the whole Chicago & Great Western system was a new man named Chrysler. "W. P." they called him, aged 33.
The American Locomotive Co. at Pittsburgh needed a works manager. The Great Western's superintendent of motive power, well-paid though he was, concluded that, without executive experience, a mechanical man can get just so far and no further in railroading. Moreover, building engines for sale interested him more than buying engines and keeping them running until they died of old age. He took the Pittsburgh job, at a big drop in salary. The salary did not stay down long.
During his Great Western period Mr. Chrysler lived in Oelwein, Iowa. His mechanical curiosity was aroused by the two or three horseless thing-a-ma-jigs that sometimes moved through the streets, especially on Sundays, chugging and snorting and kicking up dust with a maximum of noise and a minimum of grace. They were called "automobiles" and Oelwein's farmers agreed contemptuously with turn-of-the-century cartoonists that the only difference between an automobilist and a dum-fool was that the dumfool was prob'ly born that way and couldn't help it. Engineer Chrysler gave little thought to Oelwein's farmers and automobilists but he went to the Chicago automobile show of 1905* and stood entranced in front of a beauteous white thingamajig with four doors, a bulbous horn and red leather upholstery. It was the 1905 Locomobile. The salesman said it cost $5,000 cash. Mr. Chrysler had $700 in the bank at Oelwein. He borrowed $4,300 and shipped it home.
Mrs. Chrysler was not very much pleased, especially when she discovered that her husband did not mean to get some good out of so much extravagance by driving it around Oelwein. Instead, what did he do but take it all apart, put it all together and take it all apart again, getting all greasy and wasting his holidays and scratching his head like a perfect crank.