LANSING, Mich. – The long, sad goodbye is almost over for Leo Jerome, a car guy if there ever was one.

Selling Oldsmobiles has been Jerome’s life for four decades. One of the dealerships he owns sold 5,000 Olds models in a single year. Last month the 61-year-old Jerome suffered through the brutal indignity of selling one Oldsmobile.

Just one.

“It’s over. We’ll just fade away in the sunset,” Jerome said, putting to words the prolonged death rattle of a proud, 107-year-old car company that will be no more after the current 2004 model year.

Businesses collapse all the time and, as history has shown, so do car manufacturers -Studebaker, Packard, Nash, Hudson and hundreds of lesser-known names such as Kissell, Peerless and Marmon. Some, like the Cluts, never – and perhaps thankfully – made it into production.

But in Lansing, Mich., the hometown of Oldsmobile, the car’s passing into the realm of memories and museums is painful. T-shirts boast that the wondrous mechanical creation of Ransom E. Olds predated Chevy, Dodge and Ford. Prominent landmarks, like the downtown home of minor league baseball’s Lansing Lugnuts, bear the Oldsmobile name.

Oldsmobile was the first mass-produced car with an automatic transmission. It was the first with a speedometer and the first modern car with front-wheel drive. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1907 visit to Lansing, rode down Michigan Avenue toward what is now Michigan State University, sitting in the backseat of a 1907 two-cylinder REO.

The 1949 Rocket 88 inspired a blues song written by Ike Turner. A young George W. Bush returned to Midland, Texas, in the 1970s, driving an Olds Cutlass. Now Oldsmobile, once the nation’s fourth-largest automaker, is the oldest carmaker to fold.

“I don’t care what GM says … Oldsmobile will never die!” reads a defiant bumper sticker on display at the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in downtown Lansing.

“We had customers who over the years bought 25 Oldsmobiles and families who bought 50,” Jerome said in his office at Story Olds, on the eastern edge of Lansing. “Oldsmobile was everything here. You didn’t drive a Cadillac. You drove an Oldsmobile, and there was peer pressure to do that.”

Years of imports and the pronounced inability of Oldsmobile to respond to the competition changed that. General Motors Corp., in the throes of a company-wide reorganization, announced in December 2000 that it was pulling the plug on the car touted as “not your father’s Oldsmobile” when, in the harshly judgmental eyes of the public, it was precisely that.

Once-loyal customers had turned to the Toyota Camry, the Lexus, BMW and other imports. Selling Oldsmobiles, which had been a losing proposition for years, soon became the automotive equivalent of running an old Kmart.

Oldsmobile dealers attended their last convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association in Las Vegas this month. When GM announced plans to phase out the Oldsmobile division, there were 2,800 Olds dealers nationwide. About 1,500 already have stopped selling the vehicles, while the rest are preparing to sell other brands.

Car dealers now resemble the shingles of law firms. Jerome’s Oldsmobile dealer is Story Oldsmobile Nissan Suzuki Kia.

“This isn’t one of those things where the workers showed up one morning and are told, out of a clear blue sky, that this won’t be here after this afternoon. There has been a sense over a long period of time that this was coming,” said Charles Ballard, an economist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

General Motors had already begun producing other vehicles, such as Cadillac and Pontiac, at area assembly lines that formerly produced only Oldsmobiles.


“If GM were to leave, that would be catastrophic. But that’s not the case,” Ballard said. “There is some wistful connection to the name Oldsmobile, and for some people there is a big adjustment.”


Still, this is not so much economic blow as it is an emotionally wrenching transition.

Most dealers have worked through the four stages of grieving – denial, anger, depression and acceptance. Jerome, a big and gregarious man, is close to acceptance but within shouting distance of depression.

In the spring his dealership – or store, as he calls it – will begin selling Chryslers and Jeeps. It won’t be the same.

“I’m having a hard time because my loyalty is with Oldsmobile,” said Jerome, whose wife’s family started the business in the 1950s. “You know how it is. You may have flunked out of Michigan State, but you still want them to win.”

On a recent Saturday, Jerome walked through the showroom with six highly polished vehicles, only one of which was an Olds. He approached a customer he remembered, one whose family has bought five Oldsmobile products from his dealership. This time, Sue Cordes of nearby Williamston, Mich., is buying a Nissan.

“I’m having little misgivings about buying foreign,” Cordes said, “but they (Oldsmobile) aren’t even revising their cars anymore.”

“See what I mean?” Jerome said.

In a few weeks the transition to Chrysler will be complete and the 60 remaining Oldsmobiles in his lot of 220 cars will be gone.

“This is like some guy running over my dog and coming over and saying “Sorry, here’s 10 bucks.’ Well, I don’t want 10 bucks. I want my dog back,” Jerome said.

“This is our 50th anniversary here and I’ll tell you what I want – I want to sell the last Oldsmobile in the country.”

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(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.

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ARCHIVE PHOTOS on KRT Direct (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): Oldsmobile

AP-NY-02-22-04 0608EST