Found, re-typed and submitted by Timothy Mooney ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Ward's Auto World', May 1996, "Witness to Automotive History", page 37. photo at lower right, see chapin1.jpg =============================================================== AMC's Roy Chapin Roy D. Chapin Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of American Motors Corp. from 1967 to 1977, joined AMC in 1954 when the corporation was formed with the merger of Nash and Hudson. He gave up the CEO title in late 1977, but stayed as chairman until he retired on October 1978. His father founded the Hudson Motor Car Co. "Perhaps the easiest decision I ever made was the purchase of Jeep from Kaiser in 1970. I tried to buy it when George Romney (later Michigan governor) and Roy Abernethy were running AMC. Romney and Edgar Kaiser couldn't get along. I was running the international operations under Abernethy and I was following Jeep around. When they put up a plant, I followed with a Rambler plant because it worked like a charm. Where Jeep was, there were roads and gasoline. Abernethy didn't go for the idea and the first thing I did when I became chairman and got a little money was to buy Jeep. We got it for a song, about $75 million... The toughest time was when our president, Bill Luneburg, and I took over. We were out of money and we had to do something to overcome the immediate problems. We had no time to think about long-range problems. Obviously, we managed to solve immediate considerations... Before I became CEO, it was decided to put the Marlin sporty model on a large Ambassador chassis. Dick Teague, the designer, and I thought it looked alot better on the smaller Rambler chassis. In retrospect, I wish we had insisted on the Rambler because the Ambassador spoiled the whole concept of the car."