On March 21, 1941, Joseph Graham told Graham company stockholders that the time had come for Graham-Paige Motors to “permanently retire from manufacturing complete automobiles.” As author and historian Jeffrey Godshall put it, his pronouncement amounted to an obituary for the Graham marque, but the company by no means folded up and returned to dust that day.
While we automotive enthusiasts know Joe Graham and his two brothers, Robert and Ray, primarily for their auto and truck ventures – starting in the late Teens with Graham Brothers trucks, eventually bought by Dodge, and continuing in 1927, when they bought Paige-Detroit and began building Graham-Paige (after 1930, just Graham) automobiles – the brothers Graham and other Graham-Paige directors had over the years invested in other businesses tangentially or not at all related to automobile production, and those investments would end up keeping Graham alive, in some form, to the present day.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s instead go back to that March day in 1941. After a wildly successful debut year, Graham-Paige battled through the Depression with a number of tactics: partnering with Reo to minimize body tooling costs, supercharging its six- and eight-cylinder engines, and going full streamline moderne with its sharknose design in the late 1930s. The company even explored a merger with Hupp, Reo, Auburn, and Pierce-Arrow that never came to be. Its last attempt at marketing a Graham-badged automobile – building cars from old Cord 810/812 dies in partnership with Norman de Vaux and the folks at Hupp – showed some promise, but ultimately proved too expensive. Graham-Paige shut down auto production at its plant on Warren Avenue in Detroit in September 1940 and Joe Graham, the last of the brothers still in the auto business, never wanted to see the company waste its money on automaking again.
Photo courtesy Nissan.
(We should mention here that while Graham turned to building cars on another automaker’s tooling in the late 1930s, another automaker was getting its start by using old Graham tooling at about the same time. For $390,000, Nissan bought the body tooling for the Graham Crusader, a model that Graham-Paige discontinued after 1936, along with the engine tooling and rights for the 224-cu.in. Graham six-cylinder engine. Production of the resulting Nissan 70, above, lasted through 1943.)
So, sworn off of building cars, Graham-Paige sold off its remaining parts inventory to Dallas Winslow (the same man who bought the rights and trademarks for Auburn and Cord) to focus on its other operations – tractors, mostly. It then leased out 600,000 square feet of its million-square-foot Warren Avenue plant to Chrysler, which used the space for building war materials. Graham-Paige also sought out military contracts and used its 400,000 square feet to produce cylinder heads and other engine parts, along with machine gun parts.
The company also had a number of investments and subsidiaries, among them Warren City Tank and Boiler Company in Warren, Ohio, which in January 1944 would come under the direction of Joe Frazer, formerly with Chrysler and Willys-Overland. Frazer wasn’t about to sit out the coming post-war auto market, so with Joe Graham semi-retired from the company, Frazer angled his way from Warren City to the presidency of Graham-Paige by September 1944 and immediately announced that the company would return to the automobile business.
Frazer hired both Dutch Darrin and William Stout to explore designs for postwar Graham-Paige automobiles, but he needed financing, which he found in a partnership with Henry J. Kaiser, who wanted to leverage his success at wartime shipbuilding into postwar automaking. The two met in July 1945 and quickly hammered out a business plan: Graham-Paige and the Henry J. Kaiser Company would each go halfsies on a new corporation – Kaiser-Frazer. While both companies would remain independent entities, they’d share manufacturing, distributing, and sales operations to reduce expenses.
While some sources state that some of the earliest Frazer-branded cars were built in the old Graham-Paige plant on Warren Avenue in Detroit, that seems unlikely, given that Kaiser-Frazer put so much investment into refitting the Willow Run bomber plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, as an automobile factory. However, the earliest Frazer-branded cars – those built from June 1946 through January 1947, almost 9,000 of them total – were indeed products of Graham-Paige Motors. Then on February 5, 1947, facing certainty that it wouldn’t be able to cover its capital obligation to Kaiser-Frazer, Graham-Paige decided to bow out of auto production again, this time for good. The company sold its auto assets to Kaiser-Frazer for 750,000 shares of stock, and it once and for all de-listed itself from the Automobile Manufacturers Association. Joe Frazer remained president of the company, but his influence would wane over the next few years and after a heated battle with Kaiser in 1949 his role was reduced to consultant and figurehead.
No longer in need of the Warren Avenue plant, Graham-Paige sold it in 1946 to Chrysler, which then updated it and built De Sotos and Imperials there until 1961. Graham-Paige’s farm implement business continued for a few years longer, operating out of a plant in York, Pennsylvania, but the company changed its name from Graham-Paige Motors to Graham-Paige Corporation and re-focused its primary business to real estate and other non-manufacturing investment.
One of those real estate investments proved key to the company’s long-term future. In 1960, six years after Joe Frazer retired, Graham-Paige bought Madison Square Garden, the sports and entertainment venue that served as the home to the New York Knicks and New York Rangers (both of which Graham-Paige also owned), and after a couple years the company again renamed itself, this time the Madison Square Garden Corporation.
The company’s subsequent history is one of mergers and other corporate moves. Conglomerate Gulf and Western bought the Madison Square Garden Corporation in 1977 (and briefly tried to build an electric car in 1980), restructured as Paramount Communications in 1989, and then became a part of Viacom in 1994. Viacom, in turn, sold Madison Square Garden to Cablevision, which eventually spun off the venue and the sports teams as the Madison Square Garden Company.
The folks at Madison Square Garden likely neither knew nor cared when, in 1967, a group of enthusiasts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, incorporated the Graham Motor Corporation to produce a replica Graham Hollywood based on Glenn Pray’s Cord 8/10 and powered by a Kaiser-built Jeep V-6. According to Godshall, the project went nowhere.
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