Land and Legacy of R.H. Grant
• The Centerville-Washington Twp. Historical Society is planning an exhibit featuring the Chevrolet centennial and Richard H. Grant. They have published a book titled “The Land and Legacy of Richard H. Grant” telling of his days as president with full coverage of his life and rise to the head of the company.
Henry Ford was selling cars nearly as fast as he could build them, but Chevrolet and General Motors wanted to be No. 1. It took someone from Dayton, Ohio to get that done.
Business writers of the 1920s and ’30s called him “America’s No. 1 Salesman” and, given the fact that Chevrolet out-sold Ford in 1928, it was a fitting moniker for Richard H. Grant Sr. better known as R.H. Grant.
In an unusual twist, Grant worked for Chevrolet and General Motors for almost 30 years and never moved from Dayton.
“He got on the train on Sunday evening and went to Detroit, and then he got back on the train on Friday and came home for the weekend,” said his grandson, Rick Grant.
Grant was born in 1878 in Ipswich, Ma., and educated at Harvard, but his business career started when he came to Dayton in 1904 to join the sales team at National Cash Register. Grant then left NCR for Delco Light Co., selling for Charles Kettering and Col. Edward Deeds and developing a lifelong friendship and business relationship with Kettering.
1920 brought General Motors into the picture with their purchase of Delco Light Co. and they soon merged Delco with Frigidaire, and when the dust settled, the top salesman for NCR and Delco was now the president of the new company.
His tenure with Delco-Frigidaire was relatively short, about three and a half years, when GM came calling.
In need of someone to drive sales past Ford, they persuaded Grant to lead the Chevrolet sales team. In just a few years, the struggling Chevrolet brand passed Ford, and their sales were growing 65 percent faster than Ford.
“He lead Chevy past Ford in 1927, but that year is sort of an asterisk,” Grant said. “Ford was switching to the Model A, but Chevy still beat them handily in 1928 and then for the next few years, the two companies traded the No. 1 spot back and forth.”
In 1929, Grant was named vice-president of sales for the General Motors and under his leadership, GM dominated the automotive market, with volume of more than $26 billion. Rival Walter P. Chrysler said, “If it were not for Dick Grant, I wouldn’t have to work so hard.”
A great motivator, Grant also knew a lot about taking care of his sales staff.
He was also known for his many quotes, often called “Grantisms.” About his team, he said, “A salesman, like the storage battery in your car, is constantly discharging energy. Unless he is recharged at frequent intervals he soon runs dry. This is one of my greatest responsibilities of sales leadership.”
His most famous quote is: “When you hire someone smarter than you, it proves that you are smarter than they are.” He also said, “Quote the price without a quiver” and on the lighter side, “Carry an order blank in your nightshirt pocket in case you walk in your sleep.”
When asked if his grandfather was a “car guy,” Rick Grant instantly answered, “No.
“He knew where to put the key, and how to put a car in gear, but he never worked on one, or had any interest in it. He wasn’t mechanical, but he understood exactly what people wanted in a car,” he said.
“He would go to the designers and tell them that if a car had this, he could sell more of them. That’s where he and Kettering worked together, Kettering ran the engineering and helped develop the new cars that he sold,” Grant said.
Grant retired from Chevrolet in 1944, but was a member of the GM Board of Directors well into the 1950s.
Grant had acquired controlling interest in Reynolds and Reynolds Co. in 1939, recognizing the need to introduce a uniform accounting system for the automotive industry that R&R was already serving with business forms. Grant’s son, R. H. Grant Jr., became president of the company.
R. H. Grant Sr. also left a lasting mark on the community, unrelated to automobiles. He was a gentleman farmer who ran Normandy Farms, a 780-acre estate, mansion, and dairy farm in Washington Twp.
“He really loved the dairy farm business,” Grant said. “He knew which cows were producing and exactly how much milk was produced every day. He had a fleet of trucks for Normandy Farms Dairy that delivered over 500 bottles of milk daily to homes and businesses.
“As a kid, he used to let me ride in the delivery trucks, and back then, milk really tasted good,” Grant added.
The milk was pasteurized and bottled in his modern plant and was nonhomogenized and known for its high butterfat.
After his death in 1957, the Grant Estate was divided into parcels that includes Normandy United Methodist Church in the mansion, Grant Park, Normandy Elementary School, Grant Life Nature Center and residential housing.
Grant’s family donated the 45-acre tract of land to the park district that was later named Richard H. Grant Park.
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