Our Own Hall of Fame
JAMES J. NANCE
NCR ALUMNUS
Nance Gave Up $286,000 To Meet New Challenge
DAYTON DAILY NEWS, Feb. 17, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
When ex-Daytonian James J. Nance stepped down as head of the Studebaker-Packard Corp., in 1956, he could have made $286,000 by not working at all. But two months later he forfeited the severance pay to unpack his brief case in another executive suite –this time at Ford.
Nance, considered one of the most dynamic industrialists to come out of World War II, needs challenges like most people need breakfast coffee. And he has had them.
Nance wasn’t always a high-salaried executive. But he was almost always an executive. The Ironton native, carrying a diploma from Ohio Wesleyan university (where he was an honor student), came to Dayton in 1924 to train in the National Cash Register Co.’s famed executive development program.
FOUR YEARS later he “graduated” and went to General Motor’s newly-formed Frigidaire division. There, for a salary of $75 a week, Nance directed a $7 million advertising program, helped make Frigidaire a household word and hung on during the depression “perhaps because I worked for so little.”
He was commercial manager when he left Frigidaire—and Dayton—in 1940 to join an electronics firm in Chicago. During World War II, the able, hard-driving Nance served on the War Production board, then joined the General Electric Corp. in 1945. A year later he was named president of GE’s affiliate, Hotpoint, and things started to happen.
NANCE PLANNED and piloted a $60 million facilities expansion that transformed Hotpoint from an electric stove company into a full line appliance producer. He advanced the firm from 10th to third place in the highly-competitive appliance industry in the space of four years. (Business in 1946: $20 million; in 1950 $200 million.)
The self-styled “professional manager” went to Packard as president in 1952, spearheaded the Studebaker-Packard merger two years later and saw his dream of consolidating the four independent auto makers bog down and finally die.
IN THE NEXT two years Studebaker-Packard lost $56 million, but few blamed Nance and when he left it was rumored that he could step into any of half a dozen top jobs including the presidency of Montgomery Ward.
Nance went to Ford to become vice president in charge of marketing at a time when the company, with the addition of the ill-starred Edsel, was turning out a full line for the first time in its 54-year history. Nance was general manager of the Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln division in 1958 when he resigned, giving no reason.
HE SPENT almost two years –as he put it—“minding my own business.”
Then last May the perennial president went back to work, this time as head of Cleveland’s Central National bank (assets of $582 million.)
AT 59, bearish Nance expressed no qualms about switching from manufacturing to banking although his only previous experience was as a director of the Chicago City National bank.
“Instead of leaving industry, I’ll be getting into it more than ever,” he said. “But I’ll be looking at it from the other side of the desk.” And that’s what Nance is doing.
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