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William C. Ford to Retire From Vice Chairman Post

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From Associated Press

William Clay Ford, a vice chairman of Ford Motor Co., announced his retirement Thursday, ending the Ford family’s third generation in the driver’s seat of the nation’s No. 2 auto maker.

The retirement of the grandson of Henry Ford is effective at the end of the month and was anticipated. Ford, who will be 64 on Tuesday, will remain on the board and as chairman of the its finance and executive committees.

Ford’s son, William Clay Ford Jr., 31, and nephew, Edsel B. Ford II, 40, represent the fourth generation of the family that helped put America on wheels.

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Both are on the board, and the outgoing Ford said he expects both to receive key board assignments within a year.

“I’d like for some member of the family to be in a top position,” he said. He added, however, that the fourth generation should not be rushed into such a job.

“Nature has got to take its course,” he said.

Fortune magazine said in December that Billy and Edsel have been pushing for more power in the operations of the nation’s most profitable auto maker. But, Fortune said, Ford Chairman Donald E. Petersen turned aside notions that they belonged in top management positions simply because they were Fords.

Early this year, Petersen said the cousins were “now coming of age.”

Ford’s retirement came 40 years after he joined the company upon graduation from Yale. He had been elected to the company’s board the year before and worked on Ford’s sales and advertising and industrial relations staffs.

In 1951, he became quality control manager for the Lincoln-Mercury division’s jet engine defense project. In 1980, he was elected vice chairman of the board. He became chairman of its finance committee in 1987.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ford took part in key decisions that pulled the company from financial hard times to the profitability it now enjoys.

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