Paul G. Hoffman and Harold S. Vance — the receivers who handed back a company

receivers 1933 · president and chairman from 9 March 1935

The rescue: The receivership Erskine left passed to the two sales-and-production men of the 1920s company. Paul G. Hoffman had been the corporation's most successful distributor before he came to South Bend in 1925 as vice president in charge of sales; Harold S. Vance, vice president in charge of production and engineering, had drawn the Detroit operations into South Bend in 1926. As receivers they persuaded the court that the creditors were best served by keeping the company in production: Pierce-Arrow was sold back to Buffalo interests in August 1933, the model line was scaled down, costs were cut through the works, and by December 1933 the company was back in profit, with $5.75 million of working capital and 224 new dealers signed. With the substantial aid of Lehman Brothers, full refinancing and reorganization were achieved on 9 March 1935: a new Studebaker Corporation emerged, with Hoffman as president and Vance as chairman — one of the Depression's notable industrial rescues, achieved, uniquely among the major failures of 1933, without the enterprise being broken up or sold.

The run: The two men who received the wreck ran the recovered company through the second war — the trucks, the engines and the Weasel of the Studebaker section — and into the postwar market. By 1949 both Hoffman and engineering chief Roy Cole had left, and the company's management thinned toward the merger decade. Hoffman's national afterlife is the People section's; in this record his size is the rescue: the distributor who became president of the company he had sold cars for, by way of its receivership.

Sources:

1. Studebaker — "Receivership: March 1933 to March 1935" (the receivership passing to Vance and Hoffman; the August 1933 Pierce-Arrow sale; profit by December 1933 with $5.75 million of working capital and 224 dealers; the reorganization of 9 March 1935 with Hoffman president and Vance chairman, aided by Lehman Brothers); "Consolidation at South Bend" (Hoffman's 1925 arrival as vice president of sales; Vance's 1926 consolidation of Detroit); "The Packard merger" (Hoffman and Cole gone by 1949).
2. Notable People — "The Studebakers" (Hoffman and Vance as the rescue), with Hoffman's later career cross-referenced there.