The fascinating history of American cars . . .one story at a time.
Author: Deb Tracy
I am a reformed attorney who has returned to my first loves, American history and classic cars. Raised in a family of automobile fanatics, my Dad is one of those guys who can look at a set of tail lights and tell you what car they belong to and follow that with a story about one he owned. Forget the “new car” smell, I love the smell of old cars and old garages. My husband (retired law enforcement and former U.S. Marine) and I turned our hobby into a business a few years ago and now happily deal in classic cars and their various parts. We live in rural Nebraska with our amazing teenage daughter and a houseful of border collies.
Minden, Nebraska, hosted a car show around the town square this weekend, and it was a beautiful setting for the gathered classics. Minden is the county seat for the area in which my family homesteaded after immigrating from Germany in the late 1800s, and it has a stately courthouse, a beautifully restored 1891 opera house and other interesting architecture. The gorgeous automobiles posed in front of the buildings just make them look that much better!
1936 Ford with the Kearney County Courthouse in the background. This picture doesn’t do justice to the deep burgundy paint job!
1949 Mercury with suicide doors (courthouse in the background).
1976 Bronco in front of the “Clearman” building.
1964 Chevelle camped out in front of the Opera House.
This 1936 Dodge four-door sedan was hands down my favorite entry. In ’36, the Dodge was powered by an 87-hp six-cylinder L-head and was touted as “The Beauty Winner of 1936.”
I have noticed many reproductions lately based upon the above hood ornament. The jet fighter ornament pictured is part of my own collection, and it is an original. The manufacturer was Univex and a patent was granted on the design of this hood ornament in 1948:
Mine has some other markings on the wing, and I was once told that the inventor, Lucian Ring, put his initials on the ornament in a similar fashion to pin-up artist George Petty whose name appears on the wing of the flying goddess hood ornament he designed for Nash. To be perfectly honest, however, I can clearly see the “L” but I’m not certain it is followed by an “R”.
I am also not too clear on who Lucian Ring was, exactly, I found a short obituary from 1957 that stated he had died at the too-young age of 55 . He lived in Detroit for most of his adult life and was a die cast engineer. There were a number of other patents related to die cast equipment granted to him in the 1940s and 1950s, but the jet fighter was the only hood ornament. It was an aftermarket ornament that could be purchased from vendors like the one in this 1949 advertisement for Economy Auto Stores:
It was advertised as fitting a 1946 Ford and could be purchased for the low, low, low price of $2.49:
An original, like mine, is marked with the manufacturer’s name, Univex, and the patent number 149,443.
A beautiful remnant from the dawn of the jet age, originals are currently selling for around $100 (but beware the reproductions)!
The excerpt below was taken from a 1923 story featuring an interview with Walter Chrysler before THE Chrysler, when he was with Maxwell. It has some interesting facts regarding the state of the American automobile industry in 1923. Notice the complete dominance by Henry Ford at that point in time:
I was driving past the Central Auto Electric building in Kearney the other day and just had to stop and snap a photo of this ’62 Chevy sitting out front and completing a striking tableau:
This building is just about my favorite in all of Kearney and, thankfully, it remains unmolested with ugly “updates”. It was built in 1946 by Bierman’s Auto Electric, and they moved into this building, their new location, the following year. The business handled GM parts, and this incredible double-sided United Motors Service sign still hangs out front.
Bierman’s didn’t just service GM products per this 1945 advertisement with an emphasis on Studebaker:
Bierman’s advertised their shop as the place to take your car if you wanted “action in your battery, pep in your plugs and power in your engine.” Who doesn’t want those things?
This Vietnam-era M-725 ambulance was manufactured by Kaiser Jeep and can be found at the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles.This ambulance was powered by a 6-cylinder 230-ci engine and was capable of transporting 5-8 patients.
“We owe this freedom of choice and action to those men and women in uniform who have served this nation and its interests in time of need. In particular, we are forever indebted to those who have given their lives that we might be free.”
Using a vintage Chevrolet station wagon as a billboard is a genius piece of marketing. What could be a more effective method of getting the attention of the masses?
This particular wagon is advertising the Comstock Windmill Festival which is actually a music festival that takes place in the rolling hills of a Nebraska pasture, this year from June 10-12.
The ’54 Chevy wagon was powered by a 6-cylinder 235.5-ci “Blue-Flame” engine and was available as a One-Fifty or Two-Ten Handyman or the Bel Air Townsman:
Rural Nebraska is home to the friendly “finger wave” as well as amber waves of grain, but you’ll need to drive awhile to find the type of waves that will allow you to use that surf board. As we say in Nebraska, “Long time, no sea.”
My last post contained a description of the lavish 1917 St. Louis Auto Show, and one of the many cars on display at that event was a Ben-Hur. The Ben-Hur Motor Company had introduced its new automobile to the public at the 1916 Cleveland Auto Show the previous December, and, coinciding with the St. Louis show, it had just opened a showroom in that city at 3308 Lindell Boulevard.
The company had gone to great lengths to create a luxurious showroom experience. The walls were finished in cypress up to a balcony that ran all the way around the room. In the center stood a 700-year-old Italian fountain. The floor was imported hand-painted Welsh tile, and the light fixtures were also imported from France and Austria. There were silk draperies and even a restroom for ladies that included a telephone and a writing table. The real showstopper on display, however, was a chariot, patterned after the description used in the novel of the same name, “Ben-Hur”.
Obviously, the owners were hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the novel by General Lew Wallace and the Klaw and Erlanger stage production of that story. The national tour of that production ran for more than 20 years, beginning in 1899, and was seen by more than 20 million people. In order to properly portray the famous chariot race, the producers came up with an ingenious plan to show the contesting horses running at top speed before thousands of excited spectators. The chariots were each “pulled” by four horses, and each horse was provided with a separate treadmill, 27 inches wide, on which to run. The treadmills were chains of stout hickory slats, 4 inches wide and covered in rubber and canvas, resting on ball-bearing wheels. This all sat on a heavily braced sub-stage erected two and a half feet below the footlights. To add to the illusion of speed, a fan was concealed in the bow of each chariot to blow the clothing of the drivers and an intricate electrical device below each wheel threw dust into the air. Immense panoramas, 32-feet high and 2000 feet in length, were painted with cheering Romans and revolved from right to left on massive cylinders.
Not only was the chariot in the Ben-Hur showroom patterned after the one described in the novel, that chariot was one that had actually been used in the stage production. No expense was spared in the design of the showroom, and, using the tagline, “There is only one best way to do a thing, ” only the best products were chosen during the manufacturing of the Ben-Hur as well. These specifications appeared in a 1917 advertisement:
AXLES. Timken – front and rear.
CARBURETOR. Float feed automatic, with dash adjustment.
EQUIPMENT. Stewart-Warner Speedometer. Six months Warner electric clock, oil pressure gauge, ammeter, instrument lamp, transmission-driven tire pump, Moto-meter, extra wheel on carrier in rear, special ignition and lighting switch with theft-proof lock. Full set of tools, jack and tire repair outfit, spot light.
IGNITION. Bosch high tension magneto – manual advance.
GASOLINE SYSTEM. Stewart Warner vacuum feed.
LIGHTING AND STARTING. Westinghouse two-unit system.
TIRES. 35 X 4 ½” Miller (geared-to-the-road” on rear).
TRANSMISSION. Selective sliding gear, 3 speeds forward, and reverse.
TOP. Genuine Pantasote.
UPHOLSTERING. Genuine hand-buffed leather. Best long-drawn curled hair and resilient steel springs.
WEIGHT. 3100 pounds.
WHEELBASE. 126 inches.
WHEELS. 34” Goodrich special artillery type, or 34” Kelly wire wheels.
Prices ranged from $1875 for a 4-passenger roadster to $2750 for a 7-passenger touring sedan. Ben-Hur also placed an emphasis on service in their ads: “Uninterrupted day-in-and-day-out use of your car-regardless of who is to blame for accidents, breakages, etc. That is what we intend to give Ben-Hur owners” because “the owner is right.”
All of this luxury and service had a hefty price tag, and one the company was apparently unable to pay using a factory with a capacity of only twenty cars per day. The wheel fell off the company’s own financial chariot, so to speak, and it was in receivership by May of 1918.
***If you have any actual photos of a Ben-Hur automobile, please contact me at americancarhistorian@gmail.com***
What fun it must have been to attend those early automobile shows, so full of pomp and circumstance and a staggering variety of automobile brands. I recently discovered a story about the Tenth Annual St. Louis Automobile Show which took place in 1917 and encompassed six floors of the Overland Building at Locust and 23rd. The decorating scheme was plants, vines and flowers, with each floor having a different motif such as palm trees on one floor and peach blossoms on another. One night of the show fell on Washington’s birthday, so all of the exhibitors and their salesmen were appearing in full evening dress, American flags were added to the decorations, and an orchestra was present to play patriotic songs. It was estimated that 10,000 people dressed up and stepped out to attend the festivities. Can you picture it?
The first floor of the show was reserved for a truck display. Here is the list of cars that were displayed on the other five floors. How many do you recognize?
One brand that stood out to me was the Ben-Hur, possibly because my husband has watched the movie by the same name at least a hundred times. More on the Ben-Hur automobile next time!
I spent entirely too much money on this old piece of canvas, but I just couldn’t resist this scrap of automotive history:
So when was this antique advertising piece in use? The Hudson Super-Six was introduced in 1916, but the Essex Super-Six did not make its appearance until 1927. The Essex name was gone by 1933, so that leaves a pretty small window for this vintage piece. I was also able to track down this 1928 newspaper advertisement for the original owner, the Freeman L. Larson Hudson-Essex dealership:
Note that the salesman would bring the car right to your door for a test drive.
Hudson used its tried and true marketing technique of setting speed and endurance records to sell the Essex. In March of 1927, it was reported that an Essex had set a new record for the third time in a matter of a few weeks. Timed by Western Union and observed by San Antonio newspapermen, the Essex ran for 24 consecutive hours at the local speedway, traveling 1218 miles and averaging 50.75 miles per hour. Thus the Essex was christened the car that would run “50 miles an hour all day long”.
The Essex was reasonably priced and outsold all other sixes in 1927.
The Terraplane was introduced as an Essex model in 1932 and was so popular, the Essex name was dropped the following year.
Having not lived through the 1950s myself, a decade that my Dad assures me was the greatest time to be alive, ever, in the history of the world, I did not realize what an enormous issue hubcap theft was during that period of time. Losses, in terms of dollars, were staggering. In just Los Angeles, motorists were victimized to the tune of $250,000 a year, and, across the U.S., insurance companies were out an incredible $17 million dollars for the year 1955 alone. That is approximately $165 million in 2021 dollars! Hubcaps were stolen for personal use, for resale and sometimes just for kicks by the juvenile delinquents your parents warned you about. The papers were filled with photos of detectives surrounded by piles of recovered hubcaps:
As seen in most of these photos, it comes as no surprise that Cadillac caps were frequently targeted by thieves. The wire-spoke versions were especially sought after by those with sticky fingers.
The spinner caps pictured in the foreground above (so named because they look like fishing spinners when turning) were also highly prized by thieves and cost around $17.10 apiece in 1957. Some newspapers reported that teenagers were creating custom caps by combining the centers of Oldsmobile spinner caps with Buick caps.
The above 1956 photo was taken in Lubbock, Texas. A crackdown on the theft of car parts resulted in thieves discarding the stolen goods all over town and made the police station look like an “automobile accessories firm”.
Louisville detective with a pile of recovered caps.
Pomona, California detectives surveying recovered loot.
After recovering the stolen hubcaps, police had the unenviable task of trying to find the rightful owners. This proved to be almost impossible as the caps had no identifying markings.
Fed-up members of the public began looking for theft-prevention ideas. Some were innocuous, like the removal of hubcaps between the hours of sunset and sunrise. In Illinois, that was the policy of at least one parking lot facility in order to protect the hubcaps on the cars parked there overnight. Unfortunately, a woman called police to report stolen hubcaps even though the “thief” had left the following note on her car: “Sorry. Bosses orders to take off all hubcaps. Open at 9 AM tomorrow. (Signed) Morris.” Other solutions were much more dangerous, even potentially deadly. Some owners strategically installed razor blades as an unwelcome surprise for pilferers. In Louisville, an even more dangerous situation was created when owners began standing guard over their automobiles with shotguns at night. One man who had been a frequent victim of theft lied in wait with his shotgun and when a car stopped and the occupants approached his car, he fired into the side of their car in order to “mark it for identification”. To be fair, I would be hard-pressed to think of a more effective theft deterrent than the business end of a shotgun.
With razor blades and shotgun shells taking the situation from bad to worse, authorities began looking for a better solution and hit upon engraving. Engraving hubcaps with identifying marks provided a way to prove ownership which made caps easier to reunite with owners and also made them less desirable to steal in the first place. Los Angeles was reportedly able to decrease hubcap theft by 40% in the first year after instituting an engraving program. The identifying marks used varied from city to city. Ft. Lauderdale used a number devised by the police department that consisted of the year of the make of the car, the first letter in the name of the car and the last three digits of the serial number. Other jurisdictions, like Louisville, engraved license numbers and then provided stickers to place in the window as an additional deterrent. Engraving was performed either near the valve stem opening or along the outer lip and it reportedly only took a couple of minutes to engrave all four caps.
Nashville Police Chief watches his hubcaps get engraved as part of “Operation Hubcap”.
Ft. Lauderdale patrolman supervises the engraving process.
Engraving was usually offered as a free service and was often a joint effort between insurers, law enforcement, service stations and local clubs. In Shreveport, the mayor declared “Automobile Accessories Theft Prevention Week” after someone lifted hizzoner’s caps while he was watching a football game. In that city, the license number of the car was engraved by a local safety club called The Regents.
In Tampa, service stations regularly engraved hubcaps while the car was up on the grease rack. In Alliance, Nebraska, stamping was used in place of engraving, and Stickney’s would perform the service for free along with a tire safety inspection:
It is funny, though, I have personally handled approximately a gazillion hubcaps from that era, and I have never noticed engraved markings on any of them (if you have one, send me a photo)! Hubcaps aren’t as popular as they were back in the fifties, but I wonder how many juveniles today would even know how to remove one. After all, they do say the most effective anti-theft device today is a standard transmission.
Sources:
Berg, Don. “Police Round Up $700 Worth of Hubcaps Stolen By Boys.” Ft. Lauderdale News, 9 April 1957, p. 3.
“Drive Launched To Halt Thievery of Hubcaps.” The Shreveport Journal, 11 Oct. 1957, p. 8-B.
“Fancy Automobile Hubcaps Are Strong Lures For Local Thieves.” Longview Daily News, 25 Mar. 1954, p. 3.
“Hubcap Engraving System Starts Today.” Ft. Lauderdale News, 10 Feb. 1957, p. 1-B.
“Hubcap Roundup.” The Pomona Progress-Bulletin, 8 Feb. 1954, p. 12.
““Hubcap Thieves Facing Risk of Shotgun Blast.” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], 3 Mar. 1957, p. 1.
“Loot Being Abandoned.” Lubbock Evening Journal, 5 March 1956, p. 1.
Miller, James. “Your Car Can Be Stolen.” The Miami Herald, 14 Feb. 1954, p. 5-F.
“Police Recover 48 Hubcaps; 3 Youths Held.” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], 2 Sept. 1954, p. 2-1.
“Police Push Hubcap Branding.” The Minneapolis Star, 1 Nov. 1957, p. 15A.
“Rounding Up Teenage Gang In Auto Accessory Thefts.” The Herald-Press [St. Joseph], 21 Aug. 1957, p. 1.
“Service Stations Start Engraving Hubcaps To Thwart Thieves.” Nashville Banner, 1 Oct. 1957, p. 10.
Stickney’s Inc. Alliance Daily Times Herald, 4 Apr. 1957, p. 4.
“‘Stole’ Hubcaps for Safekeeping.” Des Moines Tribune, 23 Aug. 1955, p. 1.
Vallery, Val E. “Police Start Marking System To Curb Car Accessory Thefts.” Plainfield Courier News, 16 July 1958, p. 21.
