Kettering University

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A retrospective: Major Albert Sobey and Kettering’s 90th Anniversary

By Lawrence R. Gustin

             

The founder of Kettering University did not live to see his school named in honor of Dr. Charles F. Kettering. But Major Albert Sobey, the man who launched the school in 1919, would no doubt have been pleased.

“Boss” Kettering’s place in automotive history would be secure if for no other reason than he invented the self-starter, which greatly popularized automobiles. But that was only the beginning. Over the decades, the pioneering scientist and inventor provided General Motors with a huge number of benefits as director of GM Research Laboratories.

When Major Sobey was struggling to build his school, Kettering was often a source of counsel and support. Over several decades, they often had dinner together in the GM executive dining room and sometimes Kettering dined at Sobey’s home. Indeed, near the very beginning, when the institute started a new teaching program for factory foremen in 1920, Kettering was a speaker at the first meeting.

And when GM took over the institute in 1926 and provided new buildings and a new campus, Kettering may have helped engineer that decision from behind the scenes. The decision was announced July 12, 1926.  On that date Sobey’s Flint Institute of Technology became General Motors Institute of Technology, with Sobey as its director. 

“Boss Ket” is a widely recognized name, but who was Major Sobey and how did he get that title? He earned the title in Army intelligence during World War I, but it carried over into civilian life because he lost his clothes. 

At least that was his story. Immediately after his discharge from the Army at the end of World War I, Major Sobey sent his personal clothing to Flint – but it took several weeks for the package to find him. Admittedly frugal, he decided that rather than buy new clothes, he would wear his uniform for a few weeks in his new job as first director of a teaching institute just created by Flint’s Industrial Fellowship League. Students, noting the uniform, began calling him Major and it stuck.

Sobey was born on or about August 7, 1885, in Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts into Lake Superior in Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. At the time the Keweenaw was in the middle of its copper mining boom – which preceded the California gold rush as the country’s first big mining frenzy. Pure Michigan copper was prized worldwide. Towns such as Calumet, Houghton and Hancock, built around mineheads, quickly rose as commercial and cultural centers with big stores, fine schools and substantial music halls and theaters.

Albert’s family lived in a lesser settlement, Boston, today a dot on the map halfway between Hancock and Calumet. When he was four and a half, his father, a shift captain in the mines with a promising future, was killed when a rock fell several hundred feet down a shaft. The tragedy might have doomed Albert to poverty.  But his mother was a hard worker, holding the family together by organizing “free enterprise” business activities. These included Albert and his two sisters making and selling artificial flowers. She also took care of a schoolhouse which included, as a benefit, a house free from rent. At 14, Albert became an apprentice in the Boston mines’ machine shop.  At 17 he was being groomed to become its master mechanic.

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