On the lighter side - brief history of J. C. Whitney
08-10-2001, 09:39 PM
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On the lighter side - brief history of J. C. Whitney
Some of you younger snotty nosed kids probably don't know why they are, but I'm sure you "mature" folks who ever tried to keep your minimal transportation running in your younger high school or college days are well aware of them. Here's an interesting history.
----------------------
Feature: The Company That Just Wouldn't Fade Away
Even though kids today work on CD collections instead of cars, J.C. Whitney's auto-parts 'bible' is still alive and well.
BY STEVEN COLE SMITH
Sad to say, but Winky the Cat has bitten the dust.
A staple of the J.C. Whitney & Co. catalog for nearly 30 years, Winky was a stuffed, white toy cat with red-bulb eyes that wired up to your brake lights and turn signals. Winky disappeared from the catalog in 1987, and consequently disappeared from the rear-window shelves of cars across America, where Winky's eyes would flash with each press of the brake pedal, just like the federally mandated third brake lights do now on newer cars.
Gene Geiger, purchasing manager for the Chicago-based company, says that it wasn't Winky who died, but his inventor, "an elderly man on the East Coast who would buy the stuffed Winkys, poke out the eyes, replace them with bulbs and wire them up for 12-volt."
One day, Geiger received a phone call. It was the daughter of Winky's creator. She informed Geiger of her father's death and said she didn't want to keep making Winkys. "Toward the end, we were only selling a few thousand Winkys a year anyway," Geiger says, though that seems like a lot of electrified cats.
So Winky joined the German shepherds with bobbing heads, dashboard dolls that danced the hula, mirror muffs, fuzzy dice and--just a few years ago--curb feelers in the long and growing list of items retired from the Whitney catalog. Again, don't blame Whitney. "We stock whatever people want, and people just stopped buying that stuff," Geiger says. You can still find a few agreeably cheesy items in the Whitney catalog, but now the big chromed "barefoot accelerator pedal" literally shares space on the same page as the "horsepower evaluation software for IBM personal computers."
J.C. Whitney is changing, but change at Whitney is often glacier-like. The company was founded in 1915 on the south side of Chicago by Israel Warshawsky, a Lithuanian immigrant who began salvaging junk cars and selling the parts, priding himself on wringing every usable nut and bolt from a vehicle.
The business was called Warshawsky & Co. Its growth was sudden and dramatic, spurred by World War I--during which Warshawsky injected himself and his firm into the Liberty Bond campaign. He staged bizarre stunts. At a Chicago fund-raising rally, Army tanks smashed cars supplied by Warshawsky. At a vaudeville theater, Sophie Tucker saluted the recycling efforts with a song called, "I've Got a Car That Warshawsky's Turned Down."
Warshawsky & Co. continued to prosper through the Great Depression, when few Americans could afford new auto parts. By 1933, Warshawsky began publishing a catalog for its salvaged parts. Covers declared: "The century's greatest VALUES!" He offered Ford Model A cylinder heads for $3.15.
This was about the time Israel's son, Roy, was graduated from the University of Chicago. Joining his father at the firm, Roy decided in 1937 that the catalog should be expanded to include new parts and accessories and that it should be distributed beyond Chicago to encourage a mail-order business. Although the company has always been known in Chicago as Warshawsky & Co. (and still is), Roy gave the catalog a different name: J.C. Whitney & Co. "In those days, you needed a less ethnic, Anglo-Saxon name," says Whitney vice-president John Armstrong.
But why J.C. Whitney? No one knows--not even Roy's family, which still owns the company. "We can't get it out of him," says Carol Warshawsky Steinberg, Roy's daughter and chairman of the board. There's some evidence that "J.C." may stand for "Jesus Christ," and "Whitney" may be some sort of nickname Roy had in college. But like "Rosebud" was to Citizen Kane, it seems the "J.C. Whitney" name will remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of the automotive-parts industry.
Regardless, J.C. Whitney flourished under the strong hand of Roy Warshawsky. He hired Armstrong in 1973 to computerize the company. Shortly after Armstrong arrived, a longtime employee asked him if he'd seen the official Whitney chain-of-command chart. Armstrong said he hadn't. "So the guy grabbed a piece of paper, drew a box on it, and inside wrote Roy's name. 'That's it,' he said. And how true that turned out to be--700 people in the company, and they all reported to one man," says Armstrong.
"That's the way he ran it. He made all the decisions. He had an endless menu of ideas--eight of ten which weren't any good, but the other two were fantastic. And those two kept us going."
In February 1991, Roy suffered a serious stroke. Today, at 79, he is essentially wheelchair-bound and often unable to communicate. The company had been set up so that if Roy became incapacitated, control would pass to his two daughters--Carol, who lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, a professor at Cornell University, and Ilene Shaw of Chicago--and to Roy's wife, Sarita. The three combine for one stockholder vote, which means, Armstrong says, "that they win every decision by a vote of one to zero."
Carol, the youngest daughter, had taken a particular interest in the company, so she became chairman. During her college years, she often worked at the family business, sometimes in the catalog advertising department.
"I remember the first piece of copy I had to write for the catalog," she says. "It was for this little scantily dressed Kewpie-doll air freshener. I thought, 'What in the world can I say about this?' From a woman's point of view, I found it completely offensive. But somehow, I found something to say about it."
Carol says her father was never embarrassed by the stuff he sold. "I think it was a point of pride with him that when he heard a passing car's horn play 'Yankee Doodle' that he had probably sold the driver the horn." Horns were, in fact, a big part of the business because Roy liked them. There are still at least 25 horns in the catalog, including one of his favorites, an electric horn that plays 102 pre-programmed songs, ranging from "Bridge Over Troubled Water," to "How Dry I Am."
J.C. Whitney is, and always has been, privately held, so little financial information is made public. Roy, in fact, never much liked the media, sometimes hanging up on reporters when questions became too personal. Asked in 1975 by Car and Driver about the average price of an order, he snapped, "That's strictly my business."
Clearly, though, it's a big company. About 30 years ago, Whitney bought a huge red-brick seven-story warehouse from Commonwealth Edison, the local power company. From its 700,000 square feet of storage, Whitney services about 8000 orders a day. Each order averages two-and-a-half items. Items in the catalog range from 89-cent spark plugs to $1549 remanufactured Ford V-8 engines. You do the math.
Armstrong recalls a pivotal moment for the company. "I can remember Roy's first million-dollar week. He was literally jumping with joy--'I did it! I did it!' Now, a million-dollar week means nothing to us." Some 60 percent of catalog sales now come from customers who order by telephone and use credit cards, which encourages spur-of-the-moment purchasing.
Other things have changed, too, and not all for the better. Postage on each catalog now costs nearly 50 cents. "When I came here 20 years ago, we could print it and mail it for that," Armstrong says. For the 40 million catalogs Whitney sends out each year--and that includes a number of specialty catalogs--annual postage is $16 million.
Printing the catalogs isn't cheap, either, even though it doesn't cost as much as you might think. All the design, layout, and copywriting is done in-house, and the catalogs are printed by the same companies that publish phone books.
Bob Courtright, vice-president for advertising, says the best customers--as decided by the value and frequency of their orders--get a new full-sized catalog, about 230 pages, every month. They also get sales catalogs and maybe some specialty catalogs, with parts for Volkswagens or motorcycles. "They should get something in the mail about every two weeks," Courtright says. "Other customers may get a catalog every few months. Others, once a year." Whitney plans to increase the number of specialty catalogs, Courtright says. "We can't afford to keep sending the full catalog to customers who might only be interested in one part."
Even aside from the lamentable retirement of items like Winky the Cat, the Whitney catalog has changed. In the search for new business, and to counter the competition from more and more local discount auto-parts stores, Whitney's inventory of about 65,000 items now includes many that are non-automotive--and some that are quite far afield. For example: An ultrasonic insect repeller ($14.95). A portable "virtual reality" big-screen TV that looks like a set of electric goggles ($699.95). Tents. Bicycles. Lawn-mower blades. A page of "home security" items.
To prosper, Whitney must diversify, says Gary Rovansek, the company's president. Rovansek, a 30-year veteran of the mail-order business, was hired early this year because of his marketing expertise. It's his first job in the automotive industry.
As a Chicago native, though, Rovansek was well aware of the Warshawsky legacy, still represented in the city by an enormous old retail store that takes up an entire city block in south Chicago. In his younger days, Rovansek was a customer, buying custom parts for his 1950 Oldsmobile.
But kids don't customize cars today in the numbers they once did, or even perform the repair work themselves anymore. Today's cars are too sophisticated. So are the kids. "I have two sons in their twenties, and I never see them working on their cars the way I did," Rovansek says. Emphasize did, past tense. Rovansek says he now drives a new Mercedes C-class, "and I can barely figure out where to pour in the windshield-washer fluid."
All of which contributes to the cause for alarm at J.C. Whitney. John Armstrong sent the company's customer data off for analysis, and this is what he learned: "Our average customer is . . . average. Average for the U.S. population. Average income, average age, average, average, average.
"And that's of concern to us because if the average population is aging, then so is our customer base. Our customers used to be the guys who were 18, or 20, or 22, and when they went to bed at night--if they didn't have a girlfriend--they took our catalog. Now, that's not so much the case."
Changes in the mail-order business in general are also causing stress for Whitney executives. "Ten years ago," Armstrong says, "the mail-order business was reliable, if somewhat slow. Now comes the companies like L.L. Bean and Land's End, and they've spoiled the customer. They've so sophisticated him that we're having a hell of a time keeping up."
Customers of those state-of-the-art companies telephone in an order and it arrives in the mail a couple of days later. "This same guy calls us and orders a radar detector--he probably doesn't need it in a couple of days, but he expects it."
Says Rovansek, "People want that instant gratification. They want it as quick as possible. So we have to work on our service."
And while changes are underway at Whitney's downtown Chicago office building, not much is different at the original Warshawsky & Co. retail store, where six creaky old buildings are connected and business is carried on behind a big neon sign that store manager Bob Whaley maintains just as it was when it was erected in the 1940s.
Inside the rambling building, there are no "virtual reality" big-screen TVs for sale. This store, open seven days a week--as it has been for decades--is for people trying to squeeze a few more miles out of their old Monte Carlos and Granadas. Before the executives moved to comparatively luxurious offices in the Ludington Building downtown, before the warehouse operation moved to the immense structure on the banks of the Chicago River, this is where it all happened. "The store is run like a poor stepchild," Armstrong says, "but it's a national landmark, whether the government recognizes it as such or not."
Up front, several of the vintage automobiles from Roy Warshawsky's impressive, confoundingly eclectic collection are on display. The collection ranges from an Amphicar to an enormous, 1920s-era triple-decker bus that Roy bought not long before his stroke. He paid something in the neighborhood of $300,000 for it, some $225,000 more than he had expected to ante up.
"But Roy always got auction fever," says his business manager, Tom McGuinness, who was often dispatched to buy cars Roy had heard about. "He'd say, 'Get it as cheap as you can, but don't come home without it.'" Roy favored big town cars made in the 1930s, so he once sent out thousands of letters to collectors, asking them if they knew of any town cars for sale. This, of course, resulted in an immediate and substantial increase in the price of town cars.
The 900 employees at Whitney, many of whom Roy knew personally--there was no mandatory retirement age, and he would try to keep older employees around on a part-time basis when possible--clearly miss him. But life, and business, go on: Roy's old office is now occupied by the computer that controls the store's operation. Efficient, perhaps, but you can bet the computer never had two good ideas out of ten.
That J.C. Whitney remains in the hands of the Warshawsky family is, at least, encouraging. "I like the fact that there's this continuation," says Carol. Likely, it won't end with her. "Our eldest son, Daniel, knows that one surefire way he can get me to let him stay up later is for him to keep asking me questions about the history of the company."
Carol wants to capitalize on that history, and she hopes to see more nostalgia items in the catalog.
Winky The Cat, perhaps? Don't be surprised.
To receive your own J.C. Whitney catalog, call the company at 312-431-6102.
----------------------
Feature: The Company That Just Wouldn't Fade Away
Even though kids today work on CD collections instead of cars, J.C. Whitney's auto-parts 'bible' is still alive and well.
BY STEVEN COLE SMITH
Sad to say, but Winky the Cat has bitten the dust.
A staple of the J.C. Whitney & Co. catalog for nearly 30 years, Winky was a stuffed, white toy cat with red-bulb eyes that wired up to your brake lights and turn signals. Winky disappeared from the catalog in 1987, and consequently disappeared from the rear-window shelves of cars across America, where Winky's eyes would flash with each press of the brake pedal, just like the federally mandated third brake lights do now on newer cars.
Gene Geiger, purchasing manager for the Chicago-based company, says that it wasn't Winky who died, but his inventor, "an elderly man on the East Coast who would buy the stuffed Winkys, poke out the eyes, replace them with bulbs and wire them up for 12-volt."
One day, Geiger received a phone call. It was the daughter of Winky's creator. She informed Geiger of her father's death and said she didn't want to keep making Winkys. "Toward the end, we were only selling a few thousand Winkys a year anyway," Geiger says, though that seems like a lot of electrified cats.
So Winky joined the German shepherds with bobbing heads, dashboard dolls that danced the hula, mirror muffs, fuzzy dice and--just a few years ago--curb feelers in the long and growing list of items retired from the Whitney catalog. Again, don't blame Whitney. "We stock whatever people want, and people just stopped buying that stuff," Geiger says. You can still find a few agreeably cheesy items in the Whitney catalog, but now the big chromed "barefoot accelerator pedal" literally shares space on the same page as the "horsepower evaluation software for IBM personal computers."
J.C. Whitney is changing, but change at Whitney is often glacier-like. The company was founded in 1915 on the south side of Chicago by Israel Warshawsky, a Lithuanian immigrant who began salvaging junk cars and selling the parts, priding himself on wringing every usable nut and bolt from a vehicle.
The business was called Warshawsky & Co. Its growth was sudden and dramatic, spurred by World War I--during which Warshawsky injected himself and his firm into the Liberty Bond campaign. He staged bizarre stunts. At a Chicago fund-raising rally, Army tanks smashed cars supplied by Warshawsky. At a vaudeville theater, Sophie Tucker saluted the recycling efforts with a song called, "I've Got a Car That Warshawsky's Turned Down."
Warshawsky & Co. continued to prosper through the Great Depression, when few Americans could afford new auto parts. By 1933, Warshawsky began publishing a catalog for its salvaged parts. Covers declared: "The century's greatest VALUES!" He offered Ford Model A cylinder heads for $3.15.
This was about the time Israel's son, Roy, was graduated from the University of Chicago. Joining his father at the firm, Roy decided in 1937 that the catalog should be expanded to include new parts and accessories and that it should be distributed beyond Chicago to encourage a mail-order business. Although the company has always been known in Chicago as Warshawsky & Co. (and still is), Roy gave the catalog a different name: J.C. Whitney & Co. "In those days, you needed a less ethnic, Anglo-Saxon name," says Whitney vice-president John Armstrong.
But why J.C. Whitney? No one knows--not even Roy's family, which still owns the company. "We can't get it out of him," says Carol Warshawsky Steinberg, Roy's daughter and chairman of the board. There's some evidence that "J.C." may stand for "Jesus Christ," and "Whitney" may be some sort of nickname Roy had in college. But like "Rosebud" was to Citizen Kane, it seems the "J.C. Whitney" name will remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of the automotive-parts industry.
Regardless, J.C. Whitney flourished under the strong hand of Roy Warshawsky. He hired Armstrong in 1973 to computerize the company. Shortly after Armstrong arrived, a longtime employee asked him if he'd seen the official Whitney chain-of-command chart. Armstrong said he hadn't. "So the guy grabbed a piece of paper, drew a box on it, and inside wrote Roy's name. 'That's it,' he said. And how true that turned out to be--700 people in the company, and they all reported to one man," says Armstrong.
"That's the way he ran it. He made all the decisions. He had an endless menu of ideas--eight of ten which weren't any good, but the other two were fantastic. And those two kept us going."
In February 1991, Roy suffered a serious stroke. Today, at 79, he is essentially wheelchair-bound and often unable to communicate. The company had been set up so that if Roy became incapacitated, control would pass to his two daughters--Carol, who lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, a professor at Cornell University, and Ilene Shaw of Chicago--and to Roy's wife, Sarita. The three combine for one stockholder vote, which means, Armstrong says, "that they win every decision by a vote of one to zero."
Carol, the youngest daughter, had taken a particular interest in the company, so she became chairman. During her college years, she often worked at the family business, sometimes in the catalog advertising department.
"I remember the first piece of copy I had to write for the catalog," she says. "It was for this little scantily dressed Kewpie-doll air freshener. I thought, 'What in the world can I say about this?' From a woman's point of view, I found it completely offensive. But somehow, I found something to say about it."
Carol says her father was never embarrassed by the stuff he sold. "I think it was a point of pride with him that when he heard a passing car's horn play 'Yankee Doodle' that he had probably sold the driver the horn." Horns were, in fact, a big part of the business because Roy liked them. There are still at least 25 horns in the catalog, including one of his favorites, an electric horn that plays 102 pre-programmed songs, ranging from "Bridge Over Troubled Water," to "How Dry I Am."
J.C. Whitney is, and always has been, privately held, so little financial information is made public. Roy, in fact, never much liked the media, sometimes hanging up on reporters when questions became too personal. Asked in 1975 by Car and Driver about the average price of an order, he snapped, "That's strictly my business."
Clearly, though, it's a big company. About 30 years ago, Whitney bought a huge red-brick seven-story warehouse from Commonwealth Edison, the local power company. From its 700,000 square feet of storage, Whitney services about 8000 orders a day. Each order averages two-and-a-half items. Items in the catalog range from 89-cent spark plugs to $1549 remanufactured Ford V-8 engines. You do the math.
Armstrong recalls a pivotal moment for the company. "I can remember Roy's first million-dollar week. He was literally jumping with joy--'I did it! I did it!' Now, a million-dollar week means nothing to us." Some 60 percent of catalog sales now come from customers who order by telephone and use credit cards, which encourages spur-of-the-moment purchasing.
Other things have changed, too, and not all for the better. Postage on each catalog now costs nearly 50 cents. "When I came here 20 years ago, we could print it and mail it for that," Armstrong says. For the 40 million catalogs Whitney sends out each year--and that includes a number of specialty catalogs--annual postage is $16 million.
Printing the catalogs isn't cheap, either, even though it doesn't cost as much as you might think. All the design, layout, and copywriting is done in-house, and the catalogs are printed by the same companies that publish phone books.
Bob Courtright, vice-president for advertising, says the best customers--as decided by the value and frequency of their orders--get a new full-sized catalog, about 230 pages, every month. They also get sales catalogs and maybe some specialty catalogs, with parts for Volkswagens or motorcycles. "They should get something in the mail about every two weeks," Courtright says. "Other customers may get a catalog every few months. Others, once a year." Whitney plans to increase the number of specialty catalogs, Courtright says. "We can't afford to keep sending the full catalog to customers who might only be interested in one part."
Even aside from the lamentable retirement of items like Winky the Cat, the Whitney catalog has changed. In the search for new business, and to counter the competition from more and more local discount auto-parts stores, Whitney's inventory of about 65,000 items now includes many that are non-automotive--and some that are quite far afield. For example: An ultrasonic insect repeller ($14.95). A portable "virtual reality" big-screen TV that looks like a set of electric goggles ($699.95). Tents. Bicycles. Lawn-mower blades. A page of "home security" items.
To prosper, Whitney must diversify, says Gary Rovansek, the company's president. Rovansek, a 30-year veteran of the mail-order business, was hired early this year because of his marketing expertise. It's his first job in the automotive industry.
As a Chicago native, though, Rovansek was well aware of the Warshawsky legacy, still represented in the city by an enormous old retail store that takes up an entire city block in south Chicago. In his younger days, Rovansek was a customer, buying custom parts for his 1950 Oldsmobile.
But kids don't customize cars today in the numbers they once did, or even perform the repair work themselves anymore. Today's cars are too sophisticated. So are the kids. "I have two sons in their twenties, and I never see them working on their cars the way I did," Rovansek says. Emphasize did, past tense. Rovansek says he now drives a new Mercedes C-class, "and I can barely figure out where to pour in the windshield-washer fluid."
All of which contributes to the cause for alarm at J.C. Whitney. John Armstrong sent the company's customer data off for analysis, and this is what he learned: "Our average customer is . . . average. Average for the U.S. population. Average income, average age, average, average, average.
"And that's of concern to us because if the average population is aging, then so is our customer base. Our customers used to be the guys who were 18, or 20, or 22, and when they went to bed at night--if they didn't have a girlfriend--they took our catalog. Now, that's not so much the case."
Changes in the mail-order business in general are also causing stress for Whitney executives. "Ten years ago," Armstrong says, "the mail-order business was reliable, if somewhat slow. Now comes the companies like L.L. Bean and Land's End, and they've spoiled the customer. They've so sophisticated him that we're having a hell of a time keeping up."
Customers of those state-of-the-art companies telephone in an order and it arrives in the mail a couple of days later. "This same guy calls us and orders a radar detector--he probably doesn't need it in a couple of days, but he expects it."
Says Rovansek, "People want that instant gratification. They want it as quick as possible. So we have to work on our service."
And while changes are underway at Whitney's downtown Chicago office building, not much is different at the original Warshawsky & Co. retail store, where six creaky old buildings are connected and business is carried on behind a big neon sign that store manager Bob Whaley maintains just as it was when it was erected in the 1940s.
Inside the rambling building, there are no "virtual reality" big-screen TVs for sale. This store, open seven days a week--as it has been for decades--is for people trying to squeeze a few more miles out of their old Monte Carlos and Granadas. Before the executives moved to comparatively luxurious offices in the Ludington Building downtown, before the warehouse operation moved to the immense structure on the banks of the Chicago River, this is where it all happened. "The store is run like a poor stepchild," Armstrong says, "but it's a national landmark, whether the government recognizes it as such or not."
Up front, several of the vintage automobiles from Roy Warshawsky's impressive, confoundingly eclectic collection are on display. The collection ranges from an Amphicar to an enormous, 1920s-era triple-decker bus that Roy bought not long before his stroke. He paid something in the neighborhood of $300,000 for it, some $225,000 more than he had expected to ante up.
"But Roy always got auction fever," says his business manager, Tom McGuinness, who was often dispatched to buy cars Roy had heard about. "He'd say, 'Get it as cheap as you can, but don't come home without it.'" Roy favored big town cars made in the 1930s, so he once sent out thousands of letters to collectors, asking them if they knew of any town cars for sale. This, of course, resulted in an immediate and substantial increase in the price of town cars.
The 900 employees at Whitney, many of whom Roy knew personally--there was no mandatory retirement age, and he would try to keep older employees around on a part-time basis when possible--clearly miss him. But life, and business, go on: Roy's old office is now occupied by the computer that controls the store's operation. Efficient, perhaps, but you can bet the computer never had two good ideas out of ten.
That J.C. Whitney remains in the hands of the Warshawsky family is, at least, encouraging. "I like the fact that there's this continuation," says Carol. Likely, it won't end with her. "Our eldest son, Daniel, knows that one surefire way he can get me to let him stay up later is for him to keep asking me questions about the history of the company."
Carol wants to capitalize on that history, and she hopes to see more nostalgia items in the catalog.
Winky The Cat, perhaps? Don't be surprised.
To receive your own J.C. Whitney catalog, call the company at 312-431-6102.
08-10-2001, 10:16 PM
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Thanks, Ray, that was a fun read. I'm just a young whipper-snapper of 35, but I remember ordering plenty of things out of the Whitney catalog w. my Dad when rebuilding my brother's Spitfire, among other things.
