Wall Street and Later Years
In the 1920s, Durant became a major "player" on Wall Street and on Black Tuesday joined with members of the Rockefeller family and other financial giants to buy large quantities of stocks, against the advice of friends, in order to demonstrate to the public their confidence in the stock market. His effort proved costly and failed to stop the market slide. By 1936, the 75-year-old Durant was bankrupt.
After the fall of Durant Motors, Durant and his second wife lived on a small pension provided by Alfred P. Sloan on behalf of General Motors. He suffered a stroke in 1942, which left him "a semi-invalid", and managed a bowling alley in Flint, Michigan until his death in 1947. He was buried in a private mausoleum at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Durant was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1996.
Durant Park in Lansing, Michigan is named after him.
Read more about this topic: William C. Durant
Famous quotes containing the words wall, street and/or years:
“Me in my vow’d
Picture the sacred wall declares t’have hung
My dank and dropping weeds
To the stern God of Sea.”
—Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65–8)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I see the callus on his sole,
The disappearing last of him
And of his race starvation slim,
Oh, years ago—ten thousand years.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)