Early life
Iacocca was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to Nicola and Antoinette (Perrotto) Iacocca, Italian immigrants who had settled in Pennsylvania's steel making belt. Iacocca graduated from Allentown's William Allen High School and Lehigh University in neighboring Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a degree in industrial engineering. He is an alumnus of Theta Chi Fraternity. After graduating from Lehigh, he won the Wallace Memorial Fellowship and went to Princeton University, where he took his electives in politics and plastics. He then began a career at Ford Motor Company as an engineer. Eventually becoming dissatisfied with that job, he switched career paths at Ford, entering the company's sales force. He was quite successful in sales, and he moved up through the ranks of Ford, moving ultimately to product development.
Iacocca was married to Mary McCleary in 1956. McCleary died in 1984 after a decades-long struggle with diabetes. Both before and after her death, Iacocca became a strong advocate for better medical treatment of diabetes patients, who frequently faced debilitating and fatal complications. Iacocca married his second wife Peggy Johnson on 17-Apr-1986 and they were divorced in 1987. He had his marriage to Peggy Johnson annulled after 19 months of marriage. He married a third wife, Darrien Earle, in 1991. They were divorced 3 years later in 1994.
Chrysler
Iacocca started as Chrysler's chairman, and began a heavy restructuring of Chrysler. At the time Iacocca took over, Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy, as it was focusing most of its money on large, fuel thirsty cars that the public didn't want due to a fuel crisis at the time. First, Iacocca announced plant closures, job layoffs, and his plans for the company. His next move was cutting several large models, which were heavily unprofitable, and put the subcompact Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon into production. The Omni and Horizon became instant hits, selling over 300,000 units each their debut year, showing what was to come for Chrysler - yet somewhat ironically the Omni and Horizon had been designed by the European division of the company which Iacocca had axed in 1978.
Realizing that the company would go out of business if it did not receive a significant amount of money to turn the company around, Iacocca approached the United States Congress in 1979 and asked for a loan guarantee. While it is sometimes said that Congress lent Chrysler the money, it, in fact, only guaranteed the loans. Most thought this was an unprecedented move, but Iacocca pointed to the government bail-outs of the airline and railroad industries, arguing that more jobs were at stake in Chrysler's possible demise. In the end, though the decision was controversial, Iacocca received the loan guarantee from the government.
After receiving this reprieve, Chrysler released the first of the K-Car line, the Dodge Aries and Plymouth Reliant in 1981, compact automobiles based on design proposals that Ford had rejected during Iacocca's tenure there. Coming right after the oil crisis of the 1970s, these small, efficient and inexpensive, front-wheel drive cars sold rapidly. In addition, two years later Chrysler released the minivan, based on a proposal of a key engineering executive Hal Sperlich who joined Chrysler after being dismissed by Ford; to this day, Chrysler leads the automobile industry in minivan sales[citation needed]. Because of these three cars, and the reforms Iacocca implemented, the company turned around quickly and was actually able to repay the government-backed loans seven years earlier than expected.
Iacocca was also responsible for Chrysler's acquisition of AMC in 1987, which brought the profitable Jeep division under Chrysler's corporate umbrella. It also created the short-lived Eagle division, formed from the remnants of AMC. By this time, AMC had already finished most of the work with the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which Iacocca desperately wanted. The Grand Cherokee would not be released until 1992 for the 1993 model year, at which time Iacocca left Chrysler.
"Return" to Chrysler
In July 2005, Iacocca returned to the airwaves as Chrysler's pitchman, along with stars such as Jason Alexander and Snoop Dogg, to promote Chrysler's "Employee Pricing Plus" program; the ads reprise the "If you can find a better car, buy it" line that was Iacocca's trademark in the 1980s. In return for his services, Iacocca and DaimlerChrysler agreed that his fees, plus a $1 donation per vehicle sold from July 1 through December 31, 2005, would be donated to the Iacocca Foundation for diabetes research.
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