John D. Hertz: Patron of Taxis and Buses

by Daniel Alef

Overview

Although John D. Hertz established what is now known as the Hertz Car Rental, a company with annual revenues exceeding $8 billion, his great success in business began with another company sporting a yellow motif. Hertz founded yellow taxi cabs and built it into one of the largest franchise operations in the world with prosaic yellow cabs--a color he selected after consulting experts at the University of Chicago--running through the streets of nearly every American city. He also established cab and truck manufacturing operations which he subsequently sold to General Motors. The proceeds of the sales of these companies made him one of the wealthiest men in America. He used his wealth in partnership with Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers and mega financier Floyd Odlum to acquire other companies including RKO. And as many of the wealthy tycoons of the 20th century, Hertz dabbled in horse racing, with one of his thoroughbreds, Count Fleet, winning the Triple Crown. B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, called the Hertz story "one of the most inspiring and most illuminating romances of modern American business." [1,753-word Titans of Fortune article].

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608041626
Publisher:	Titans of Fortune Publishing
Publication date:	05/18/2009
Series:	Titans of Fortune
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

Daniel Alef has written many legal articles, one law book, one historical anthology, Centennial Stories, and authored the award-winning historical novel, Pale Truth (MaxIt Publishing, 2000). Foreword Magazine named Pale Truth book of the year for general fiction in 2001 and the novel received many outstanding reviews including ones from Publishers Weekly and the American Library Association's Booklist. A sequel to Pale Truth, currently entitled Measured Swords, has just been completed.

Read an Excerpt

Yellow cabs are as prosaic to America as black taxis are to London. In 1915, John Hertz formed Yellow Cab in Chicago and painted his taxis yellow after the University of Chicago determined it was the most distinct color at a long distance. In a single decade, yellow cabs sprouted from Chicago to more than 1,300 American cities.
B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, called the Hertz story "one of the most inspiring and most illuminating romances of modern American business."
Born in 1879 in Ruttka, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Slovakia, Hertz immigrated to the U.S. with his parents when he was 5, and settled in Chicago. When he was 12, Hertz ran away from home, sold his school books for pennies and took on odd jobs to survive. It is unclear whether he ever returned. He sold newspapers and ran errands as a copy boy for an editor of the Chicago Morning News, later the Chicago Record. Hertz subsequently became a sportswriter and was later promoted to assistant sports editor of the Record.