John De Lorean

John Zachary De Lorean (January 6, 1925 – March 19, 2005) was an American personality, engineer, and executive in the U.S. automobile industry, and founder of the De Lorean Motor Company. He was most well known for developing the Pontiac GTO muscle car, and the De Lorean DMC-12 sports car, which was later featured in the movie Back to the Future.

Childhood

John Zachary DeLorean was born on January 6, 1925 in Detroit, Michigan, the eldest of four sons of Zachary and Kathryn Pribak DeLorean. The DeLoreans lived in a small house at 17199 Marx, near the corner of Six Mile Road and Dequindre in Detroit?s Near East Side. It was a three bedroom abode in a tough, lower-middle-class neighborhood.

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January 6 - 1925 - Detroit, Michigan

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A millwright by trade, Zachary DeLorean was an immigrant (from either Bucharest, Romania or the Alsace-Lorraine region of France - reports differ). Born youngest of thirteen boys, he came to America when he was fourteen, spending time in Montana and Gary, Indiana before moving to Michigan. When John was born, he had employment with the Ford Motor Company foundry in nearby Highland Park. His limited command of the English language, combined with his almost total lack of education relegated him to toil at menial and low paying appointments at the factory. When no work was to be found at Ford, he occasionally took jobs as a carpenter around town. At 6'1", 220 pounds (100 kg), he was a formidable man, and was known around the neighborhood as something of a drinker and a brawler, and for common bouts of familial abuse. Despite his propensity for drunken violence, John enjoyed spending time with his father working on the Model A in the yard, and simple woodworking projects that Zachary would undertake.

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Millwright - Immigrant - Bucharest - Romania - Alsace - Lorraine - France - Montana - Gary, Indiana - Ford Motor Company - Highland Park - Model A - Woodworking

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John's mother Kathryn was also an immigrant, one of Austrian descent, and was employed mainly at the Carboloy Products Division of General Electric through much of John's early life. She would also take work wherever it could be found to subsidize the family's meager income. She generally tolerated her husband?s erratic behavior, but during several of the worst times of Zachary's violent tendencies, she would take her sons to live with her sister in Los Angeles, California and would stay there for a year or so at a time.

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Austrian - Los Angeles, California

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The DeLoreans certainly did not live in opulence, but in depression-era terms, things undoubtedly could have been much worse. There was never a lack of food or clothing around the house, and the family was able to afford a few small luxuries like the music lessons that helped John earn scholarships to the better schools in Detroit.

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In 1942, Zachary and Kathryn were divorced, and John subsequently saw little of his father, who moved in to a boarding house only to become a solitary and estranged full-blown alcoholic. Several years after the divorce, John went to visit him, and found his father so impaired by drink that he could barely communicate.

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Divorced - Alcoholic

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