Actually, that’s wrong. They were the Ford men. It was only when Henry Ford disappointed them the second time they changed Ford’s second company into Cadillac. Who were these men?
William C. Maybury
Maybury was a well-connected lawyer who served two terms as a Democrat House Representative in Congress. After that he returned to law practice and became mayor of Detroit from 1897 to 1904. He personally paid some bills of the young Henry Ford and persuaded a few other investors to back Ford in his first company, the Detroit Automobile Company. When Ford failed his investors (“impatient, all about the mighty dollar”) Maybury felt slighted and didn’t participate in any further Ford ventures.
William H. Murphy
Will Murphy was a son of lumber magnate Simon J. Murphy whose holdings included the mighty Pacific Lumber Company in Northern California. Like many rich men at the time, he was fascinated by the newly emerging automobile industry. A friend of Maybury’s, Murphy was the one who put up the money for the aforementioned Detroit Automobile Company. However, unlike Maybury, losing money wasn’t the end of the world for a millionaire’s son, and when Ford proposed building a car to race the famous Alexander Winton, Murphy stepped up with many of the investors from the failed first venture.
Thus was born the Henry Ford Company. Henry Ford won the race, handing Winton a famous defeat, one of but a few. The adulation appears to have gone to the young Ford’s head a bit, so he used investors’ money to tinker around to figure out how to build a faster car. What they wanted, however, was a business like Ransom Olds had built with the money of another magnate, Sam Smith.
Making money was not what Mr. Ford was interested in, though. The investors grew tired of Ford’s inability to focus on building a business, so they fired Ford. As pointed out elsewhere, the Henry Ford Company morphed into Cadillac.
As a sidenote, Will Murphy’s nephew Walter Murphy became one of America’s best known body builders in an era where luxury cars were sold as chassis only, and customers or dealers provided their own custom bodies.
Clarence A. Black
Not much is known about Black, except that he was a city official who ran for mayor against Maybury and lost. Feelings were not too hurt, though, and Black was an enthusiastic participant in both of Ford’s earlier ventures. When Henry Leland persuaded Ford’s investors not to liquidate the company, but turn it into Cadillac, Black became its president and general manager.
When they hired William Metzger, sales took off and Cadillac suddenly went from a small auto manufacturer to one of the Big Two. Black was not ready for that and told Murphy he was in over his head. Murphy then recruited Leland to take over. That was a little tricky, though, because Leland was the operating partner in Leland & Falcauner. Murphy, the man with the checkbook, solved the problem the old-fashioned capitalist way: he bought out Mr. Falcauner and merged L&F with Cadillac. In other words, he simply bought Leland.
The Cadillac investment made Black fabulously wealthy when Billy Durant bought Cadillac in 1909. Being close to 60, Black donated his mansion to Detroit to use as a public library and bought a mansion in Santa Barbara, California so huge and ornate it was used in several Hollywood movies.
Lemuel W. Bowen
Less is known about Lem Bowen than about his house, which still stands on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. President of the Standard Accident Insurance Company of Detroit, his background apparently was in accounting, so he appeared in a few ventures, chiefly as investors’ guardian to keep a watchful eye over the finances of their investments.