Powel Crosley, Jr.

Powel Crosley Jr. was born on September 18, 1886, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Charlotte Wooley (Utz) (1864–1949) and Powel Crosley Sr. (1849–1932), a lawyer. Powel Jr. was the oldest of the family's four children. Crosley became interested in the mechanics of automobiles at a young age and wanted to become an automaker. While living with his family in College Hill, a suburb of Cincinnati, 12-year-old Crosley made his first attempt at building a vehicle.

Crosley began high school in College Hill and transferred to the Ohio Military Institute. In 1904, Crosley enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, where he began studies in engineering but switched to law, primarily to satisfy his father. He dropped out of college in 1906 after two years of study.

Crosley began work selling bonds for an investment banker; however, at the age of twenty-one he decided to pursue a career in automobile manufacturing. The mass-production techniques employed by Henry Ford also caught his attention and would be implemented by his brother, Lewis, when the two began manufacturing radios in 1921.

In 1907 Crosley formed a company to build the Marathon Six, a six-cylinder model priced at $1,700, which was at the low end of the luxury car market. With $10,000 in capital that he raised from investors, Crosley established Marathon Six Automotive inexpensive automobile, in Connersville, Indiana, and built a prototype of his car, but a nationwide financial panic caused investment capital to dwindle and he failed to fund its production.

Still determined to establish himself as an automaker, Crosley moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he worked for Carl G. Fisher as a shop hand at the Fisher Automobile Company. Crosley stayed for about a year, but left after he broke his arm starting a car at the auto dealership. After recovering from his injury at home in College Hill, Crosley returned to Indianapolis in 1909 to briefly work for several auto manufacturers, including jobs as an assistant sales manager for the Parry Auto Company and a salesman for the National Motor Vehicle Company. He also volunteered to help promote National's auto racing team. His next job was selling advertising for Motor Vehicle, an automotive trade journal, but left in 1910 to move to Muncie, Indiana, where he worked in sales for the Inter-State Automobile Company and promoted its racing team.

Crosley married Gwendolyn Bakewell Aiken (1889–1939) in Hamilton County, Ohio, on October 17, 1910. They had two children. After his marriage, Crosley continued to work in automobile sales in Muncie to earn money to buy a house, while his wife returned to Cincinnati to live with her parents. The young couple saw each other on the weekends until Crosley returned to Cincinnati in 1911 to live and work after the birth of his first child. Gwendolyn Crosley, who suffered from tuberculosis, died at the Crosleys' winter home in Sarasota, Florida, on February 26, 1939.

Crosley married Eva Emily Brokaw (born in 1912) in 1952. She died in 1955 in Cincinnati.

Pinecroft

Pinecroft, Crosley's two-story, 13,334-square-foot (1,238.8 m2), Tudor Revival-style mansion and other buildings on his estate in Mount Airy was designed by New York-based architect Dwight James Baum and built in 1928–29. Crosley's daughter, Marth Page (Crosley) Kess, sold the property after her father's death in 1961, and the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor acquired the property in 1963. Saint Francis Hospital bought a portion of the property north of the Crosley mansion in 1971 and built a hospital, which was renamed Mercy Hospitals West in 2001. The land surrounding the home has been subdivided into parcels, but the Franciscan Sisters have used the mansion as a retreat since the early 1970s. Pinecroft was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.