Albert Russel Erskine

Albert Russel Erskine (January 24 1871 – July 1 1933) was an American businessman. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, he worked in a number of manufacturing industries before joining the Studebaker motor car manufacturing firm in 1911. He served as Studebaker's President from 1915 until the firm encountered severe financial problems in 1933, when he committed suicide by shooting himself in Madison County, Alabama. He is buried at the Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville.

During his period of office at Studebaker, he encouraged the firm towards the production of small, sporty but economical cars on the European model, in particular the Erskine series. He also wrote a history of the firm. His downfall lay in his failure to cut production and costs quickly in response to the slump of 1929 and 1930, which led to an insurmountable cashflow crisis. In 1930, he had declared a dividend of $7,800,00 which was five times the actual net profits of that year. In 1931, he paid a dividend of $3,500,000—also out of capital—a ruinous procedure which he unsuccessfully sought to correct through a merger with White Motor Company. [Maurice D. Hendry "Studebaker: One can do a lot of remembering at South Bend" in Automobile Quarterly, Vol X, No 3, 1972, p. 244]

In addition to his business work, Erskine served on the Board of Trustees of the University of Notre Dame, where his son Albert, Jr. studied. The university awarded him an honorary LL.D. in 1924. He took a strong interest in college football (a later Studebaker brand, the Rockne, was named after Notre Dame's football coach of the time), and initiated the Albert Russel Erskine Award for the best team of the year. The winner was chosen by a panel whose methods are, in essence, still used to select the champion team. He was instrumental in a grant of $10,000 that the Studebaker Corporation made to Harvard University in 1926, to set up the Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research, which remained active through much of the 1930s.

External links

* [http://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/studebaker/biographies.htm Brief biography of Erskine] , with a photograph of him
* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8795633 Brief biography with image of Erskine]
* [http://archives.nd.edu/faculty/e.htm Page from Notre Dame archives detailing Erskine's involvement as a trustee of the university]

References

*Erskine, A. R. (1924). "History of the Studebaker Corporation". South Bend IN: Studebaker Corporation.