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:
“When all this is over, you know what I’m going to do? I’m gonna get married, gonna have about six kids. I’ll line ‘em up against the wall and tell them what it was like here in Burma. If they don’t cry, I’ll beat the hell out of ‘em.”
—Samuel Fuller, U.S. screenwriter, and Milton Sperling. Samuel Fuller. Barney, Merrill’s Marauders (1962)
“The street is full of humiliations to the proud.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)