The Rest of the Edsel Affair
by
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In the last year of the 20th Century, and 20 years after The Edsel Affair, notes, emails and phone calls became surprisingly frequent, many of them begging a follow-up. Virtually all came from Edsel owners who, admitting their suggestion was not entirely altruistic, thought the first book was not altogether “fair.”
“Fair,” meaning not telling the full story -- from beginning to end -- not telling what happened to the Edsel before it happened. Well, at the time, I really didn’t know the full story because I did not and would not ever have, in my position, access to what happened before -- and what happened after hadn’t happened yet!
Nevertheless, I re-read the book, listened again to recorded telephone conversations and radio newscasts, watched TV commercials and went through a huge stack of correspondence -- all in hopes of finding something overlooked.
Then, one day I ran across a large envelope I didn’t remember having ever seen. In fact, I KNOW I had never seen it because I would not have waited quite this long to write about it. The contents consisted of a couple inches of carbons…mostly carbons of inter-company memos written by executives between November 1957 and December 1959! The envelope was hand-addressed to me, but there was no accompanying letter. I like to think I know who authorized sending the package but, of course, I never will.
So now, you can peruse more background material than has been available. It should surprise, amaze and, perhaps, even comfort you. It appears that, too late, the Company did everything it could to save the Edsel and its dealers, perhaps things that should never have been proposed in the first place. Then we will bring the Edsel affair up-to-date.
It is a fascinating story, a glorious, but poorly planned, headline-grabbing failure. As originally envisioned five years earlier by Jack Davis, Ford’s veteran VP of Sales, Edsel very probably would still be a member of Ford’s family of fine cars. But it was re-planned by a young status climber, a stranger to sales, and sponsored by his soon-to-retire VP boss. His program seems now to have been carelessly studied and approved by the executive committee, then shoved into a three-month introduction delay by at least one top executive.
While an impatient public waited to see the highly publicized car, the Country entered a mini-recession. Exactly one month to the day of Edsel’s introduction, the U.S. lost a space race to Russia‘s Sputnik which did more to this Country’s ego than one could imagine. These two historic events helped the motoring public forget its dream of “two cars in every garage.”
Edsel was to become a costly and embarrassing business investment for Ford and more than a thousand chance-taking dealers and investors. It has become an expensive hobby for others and now, fifty (5-0, FIFTY!) years later, it is an interesting bit of automobile history that will be retold for years to come.
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About the Book
The Rest of The Edsel Affair is the second of two books that tells the story, from a highly publicized beginning to a barely noticed ending, of the Edsel automobile, introduced by Ford Motor Company in 1957. The Edsel was unusual in that it introduced a vertical front design with wide, horizontal tail lights. The engineers designed brakes that could be tightened by reversing the car while pumping the brake pedal (still a feature of cars today) and shifting the transmission by pushing buttons on the steering wheel.
C Gayle Warnock, the Division’s Public Relations Director and responsible for the car’s public introduction, told the first part of this interesting story in The Edsel Affair published in 1980. Now, he returns with the rest of the story, beginning with why and when the car’s abolishment was first recommended to the Company’s Executive Committee, and who made the suggestion. The author then traces the beginning and the rapid growth of the three Edsel Clubs, the popularity of the car as a “collectible” and the car’s Golden Anniversary party in Dearborn, MI in 2007.
The Rest of The Edsel Affair is entertaining and reads like a personal letter from home. Even if you don’t have an Edsel, or ever heard of it, you will enjoy the surprising details and enduring stories in this historical tale.
About the Author
Warnock’s first effort appeared in his home town weekly when he was 13 and he never stopped writing. He applied for his first job, never applied for another. His first was with the Marion, IN Leader-Tribune, then to the United Press in Indianapolis. He was a political reporter for The Chicago-Tribune when Ford Motor Company hired him for its Public Relations office. He moved to company headquarters to become PR director of the Edsel Division. Disappointed after the car’s introduction, he went to International Tel & Tel in New York, then to McCann-Erickson advertising agency, then to Boston as PR and advertising director for Raytheon. Asked to return to Ford to organize and manage the Ford Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, in succession, he became manager of Ford’s New York PR office, director of PR for the Cougar automobile and finally a vice president of Philco-Ford, in Philadelphia. He retired to Arizona where, two years later, he returned to Ford as a PR consultant. In addition to “The Edsel Affair,” in 1980, he wrote “Innocents, Incidents and Indiscretions” (1996), as funny as it sounds and still in print.