Jesse Jones, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, was a rugged Tennessean who was hard to meet and harder to know. Joseph Washington “Jeeps” Frazer was President of Willys-Overland, a scion of the Virginia Washingtons and Nashville Frazers; but this and more wouldn’t get him in to see Jesse Jones at Commerce. Seeing Jones required more powerful strategy.

On an urgent mission to Washington for his Jeep-building company, Joe Frazer had arrived one morning in 1943 and parked himself in Jones’s outer office, despite repeated warnings that the Secretary wasn’t likely to arrive until evening—if at all. Finally at 7PM, Jones breezed in, saying he was too busy to talk to anyone and heading for his private office.

“Mistah Jones,” J. W. Frazer boomed in deepest Southern drawl: “One Robertson County boy jus’ cain’t do that to another Robertson Country boy!” Jesse Jones, arrested in mid-stride, wheeled and beheld his well-tailored visitor, and beckoned Joe to his office. There the two of them spent the next hour contemplating business, life, bourbon and branch water. Frazer reemerged at 8PM with Jones at his heels: “No problem at all, Jay-dubya, glad you stopped by…y’all come back and see me again, heah?”

Robust of build with flashing blue eyes, Joe Frazer was typical of the gregarious, hard-driving professionals who surrounded Walter Chrysler. It is not surprising that he flits in and out of history, not only of Chrysler Corporation, but many of the associated makes and companies now part of Chrysler’s heritage.

—Excerpted from “Chrysler People: Joe Frazer,” written for Forward, the Chrysler historical magazine, September 2000.

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In April 2012, Joseph Washington Frazer (1892-1971) will be inducted, belatedly, into the Automotive Hall of Fame, with his erstwhile partner, Henry J. Kaiser, co-founders of the world’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer during 1946-48. This article is updated from the obituaries I wrote for JWF on his death in 1971. For more on Frazer, see my book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit.

Seeing an opportunity to run his own company, Frazer took control of moribund Graham-Paige in 1944, and two years later merged its automotive interests with a new corporation he and Henry Kaiser had formed, leasing and then buying the gigantic ex-bomber factory at Willow Run, Michigan. During Frazer’s 1946-48 presidency, Kaiser-Frazer was the fourth largest car producer in the world, and ranked eighth in production by make, ahead of all other independents. He stepped down as an active officer in 1949. The company never again recorded a profit.

By the 1950s Joe retired to his beloved Newport, from where he had commuted back and forth to Detroit much of his working life. One of the things he was proudest of, when I knew him in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was being the only living man at that time with over 100,000 cars bearing his name.

A few of us were fortunate enough to visit him in his last years, I mainly to prepare my first book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit. But of all the companies he worked for, he spoke most warmly of Packard. “It was catastrophic,” he said, “that this grand old company went down the drain the way it did. It shouldn’t have happened—didn’t have to happen. The loss of Packard was one of the great tragedies of the industry.”

Joe Frazer had another characteristic probably associated with his aristocratic Southern upbringing: he was a gentleman. He never spoke ill of anyone, even those who had disappointed him badly. His grasp of history, his continued interest in and perception of the industry even at advanced age, his humor and wit, and most of all his kindness us car nuts, to whom he opened his doors as fellow lovers of the automobile, made him, in our eyes, a beloved figure.

There’s an old song about the “Giants of Old.” How fortunate the auto industry was to have had men like this in its glory days. Joe’s memory lives on with those who knew him, but his favorite aphorism will serve for all those who did not: “Security is but an illusion; repose is not the destiny of man.”

Concluded in Part 3…

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In April 2012, Joseph Washington Frazer (1892-1971) will be inducted, belatedly, into the Automotive Hall of Fame, with his erstwhile partner, Henry J. Kaiser, co-founders of the world’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer during 1946-48. This article is updated from the obituaries I wrote for JWF on his death in 1971. For more on Frazer, see my book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit.