EDMONDS, C. Crawford

EDMONDS, TURNER

Posted By: Sharon R Becker (email)
Date: 11/11/2014 at 03:31:06

The Globe Gazette
Mason City, Cerro Gordo County, Iowa
Saturday, December 28, 1940, Page 16

THEY STARTED HERE
No. 40 in a Mason City Series of Success Stories

C. Crawford Edmonds, Sales Executive

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All of the attributes populary symbolized by a square jaw and a determined set of broad shoulders have combine in C. Crawford Edmonds, Mason City youth who made good, to bring him to the high position he now holds as central regional sales manager for the Buick division of General Motors corporation.

Mr. Edmonds was promoted to this capacity just a year ago following a career in the sales department of the company that has seen him in charge of major [illegible] sales operations for Buick in Pittsburgh and Chicago and prior to that in various important capacities throughout the middle west. As director of the central region, he is responsible for Buick sales in highly important Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and parts of New York state, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, having under his wing the operation of five sales zones of the company.

He has had long experience in the automobile industry, dating back to the day in 1924 when he decisvely severed his connection as a professor at business administration at the Univesity of Michigan to go into the automobile field.

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He took a job as car distributor at the Buick zone in Battle Creek, Mich. Not long after that, in 1926, the former Mason Cityan was transferred as assistant zone manager to the Buick zone in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he soon was made zone manager and where he remained until 1932.

Rather than suffering from the curtailment efforted by the industry in the following year, he was given an important promotion to themanagership of the Cincinnati zone where he remained two years, then being transferred to Pittsburgh.

Under his management in the smoky city, Buick sales climbed to substantially above national average and the man who started out as a car distributor in Battle Creek was looked upon as one of the top field executives in the Buick organization.

It was natural then, when it became necessary to fill the important post of managership of the Chicago zone, the sales volume of which ranks second only to the New York area, C. C. Edmonds was picked as the man.

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During these moves, the Buick organization was expanding its total operations, its sites volume climbing from 70,000 cars in 1934 to approximately 300,000 this year. Changes and expansion in the Buick sales organization created a new central region last year and the important job of heading this region was assigned to Edmonds.

Crawford Edmonds was born in 1893, the son of Arhur J. and Sarah Edmonds. As a boy he attended Garfield school here. When his father, a railroad man, moved to Sioux City in 1900 on a new assignement, young Crawford went along and was promptly put in public schools at Sioux city.

He was in his second year in high school there when his father again was transferred by the Milwaukee to Madison, Wis., where the boy finished high school and attended the University of Wisconsin. He was graduated from the University in 1915, but remained during the following year to take post-graduate work.

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While in school he worked during vacations at Mason City, Sioux City and Madison as an engine wiper, machinist apprentice and machinist.

Although young Edmonds, following his father's footsteps, had always wanted to be a railroad man, he reversed his decision after he finished school with a Ph. D. degree and took a job with the Maxwell Motor company at Detroit where he worked on the factory assembly line and in various other manufacturing departments before going on the road for Maxwell in a sales capacity.

From 1917, and from then on until 1919, he engaged in war work as an inspector of ordnance at Watertown arsenal, Boston, Mass. At the end of the war he accepted a post as a professor in the school of commerce as the University of Oregon, where he remained until 1920. In that year he accepted a post as professor in the school of economics at the University of Michigan, remaining four years before joining the Buick organization.

While Edmonds is a worker and devotes most of his time to his joh, he enjoys golf, is a prolific reader and says, "he still likes to work with with machinery." He was married to Olive E. Turner of Watertown, Wis., in 1915 and they now live at 213 Bradley street, Flint, Mich., the headquarters of Buick.

Photograph courtesy of Globe-Gazette

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, November of 2014

Cerro Gordo Biographies maintained by Lynn Diemer-Mathews.
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