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.
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.
Speaking of auctions, we are SO TIRED of online auctions and cheerfully headed off to a live auction in Belleville, Kansas, the other day. We picked up a lot of good stuff including this vintage GM accessory:
It is a tissue box, made by Auto-Serv in the 1940s.
It was sold as an official GM accessory, and this is how it appeared in the 1948 Chevrolet accessories brochure:
Tissue dispensers were mounted under those gorgeous chrome-covered dashes:
Photo credit: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Although tissue dispensers can still be purchased today, as with most everything, they can’t compete with the early versions in terms of quality and style. Some other examples from GM:
1952 Chevrolet accessories brochure
1955 Chevrolet accessories brochure
1956 Chevy accessories brochure
You could also purchase aftermarket versions as trumpeted in this 1947 advertisement:
Finally, I have to include this photo. Another bidder rolled up to the auction in this awesome 1939 Chevy truck:
While it had loads of patina, there was no tissue dispenser!
In case you haven’t heard, BigIron Auctions has been chosen to liquidate the inventory of Chevyland USA via online auction April 15-May 6, 2021. Chevyland USA was a museum located one mile east of the I-80 exit at Elm Creek, Nebraska, just down the road from me. It was opened in the 1970s by LaMonte Hollertz, a local farmer and car collector, and BigIron has posted a sneak peak on YouTube. They will also be hosting an open house on the premises April 29-May 6 – see you there!
1915 Cadillac at the Louwman Museum. Photo credit: Alf van Beem, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
When Cadillac introduced its new V8 engine in the fall of 1914, it was a momentous occasion and one that reverberated throughout the automobile world. Foregoing the six-cylinders being utilized by the competition, Cadillac’s new power plant was a 60-hp 314-ci L-head engine (3-1/8” bore and 5-1/8” stroke) that was capable of traveling 16 miles on a gallon of fuel. It was such an impressive accomplishment that one paper reported, “If they had had automobiles in the olden time, Cleopatra, Xerxes, Charlemagne, Caesar, Napoleon and Washington would have had eight cylinder Cadillacs.”
Cadillac went to great lengths to keep the development of this new engine a secret, and I found a story from a few years later, 1918, that described the Cadillac team’s efforts to conceal and camouflage. I didn’t want to leave out any of the interesting details, so this article from the March 10, 1918, edition of the New York Sun is recreated here in its entirety. Enjoy!
Building That First Cadillac 8
Great Secrecy and Some Camouflage Had Detroit Manufacturers at Sea
An interesting bit of “new news of yesterday” is contained in a story now first told by an official of the Cadillac Company about the designing and building of the eight cylinder V type engine which was introduced by the Cadillac in this country as an automobile power plant in August, 1914.
D. McCall White, designer of the engine and now vice-president of the Cadillac Company, came to this country from England incognito and was introduced as “Mr. David Wilson of the Phoenix Manufacturing Company.” With one assistant he went to various manufacturing companies in the East, where patterns were made and parts built to his specifications. For the most part the work was done in obscure shops. As an example of the precautions taken the forked connecting rods were manufactured in one place and the straight connecting rods in another, so no one would associate them and gain a possible clue.
The first crankcase casing was made in a small foundry in Worcester, Mass., at about midnight, and the sand was cleaned out of the casting in the light of automobile headlights in the yard behind the building.
The parts were shipped to Detroit separately. The cylinder blocks made the journey in a Pullman car.
The assembling continued day and night for several weeks in an old one story shack on the banks of the Detroit River several miles from the Cadillac factory. The only approach to the building was through a devious alleyway. The few persons who knew the secret and worked on the engine when they visited the hidden workshop left their cars several blocks away on a main street and never approached the building in groups. All of the windows in the little shop were frosted and armed men guarded the building day and night.
Out of the many thousands of men employed by the company perhaps twenty-five knew the secret. The drafting was done behind locked doors in a downtown office building and at night the drawings were locked in a vault.
The first engine was finished at about five o’clock one afternoon. Mr. White and a number of other officials were present when it started to turn over on its own power for the first time. They all stood around the engine with a feeling that a big job had been completed. “Here is the quietest demmed engine in Detroit,” is the way Mr. White, with a far away look in his eyes, is said to have voiced his feelings.
When the car was tested it was driven only on the back streets of Detroit. When the test driver thought he saw anyone looking at him suspiciously he opened the cutout on one side and to all appearances was driving a four cylinder car. The idea prevailed in the automobile world that the Cadillac had something up its sleeve, and as a sort of camouflage a unique four cylinder engine was actually built. It had long cylinders and many strange features. The building of this four cylinder engine was covered up just enough so that it would be sure to leak out, and it did.
The Bronco is back but, no surprise, I vastly prefer the originals. This outstanding first-generation example in Grabber Blue dates to the very beginning, 1966:
Ford Motor Company launched the 1966 automotive year in August of ’65 by unveiling a completely new line of 4-wheel-drive utility vehicles called Broncos. Designed to operate on or off the highway, the Bronco was available in an open roadster, a fully enclosed roomy wagon, and this short-roof utility model.
It was described as looking much like the jeeps that Ford built 250,000 of during World War II. Initially powered by a 6-cylinder 170-ci 105-hp engine with a 3-speed manual synchronized transmission, the 289 V8 became an option within a matter of months. A three-passenger bench seat was standard, but options included twin bucket seats and a rear two-person bench seat.
March of 1966 advertisement for a Bronco with a 289 V8.
Contemporary news sources referred to the Bronco as the Mustang’s little brother which, frankly, didn’t make much sense until I found an explanation by Donald Frey, Ford Division General Manager, who said, “The Ford Bronco has been designed to join the Mustang in providing modern, active Americans with driving adventure as well as practical transportation.” Frey and Ford correctly predicted that utility vehicles were gaining in popularity with Americans, cars that could “serve as a family sedan, a sports roadster, a snowplow, or as a farm or civil defense vehicle.” Sure, but you would also look pretty cool tooling around in this:
I just discovered that there used to be a dealership for Lambert Automobiles in Kearney, Nebraska:
Kearney Foundry was located at the corner of 18th Street and Central Avenue. It is a very old building, but still standing. Notice the street paved with brick . . .
. . .and the architectural detail on the south side of this industrial building from the gilded age:
The Foundry repaired all kinds of machinery, gasoline engines and steam engines. One 1911 advertisement boasted that their gas engines could do the work of four men on the farm. The notice featuring Lambert automobiles appeared earlier, in 1908. The Lambert was notable for its friction drive transmission:
The patented friction transmission had no clutch, u-joints or gears to strip. According to one 1907 story, a simple rotary engine drove a drive shaft at the other end of which was a large aluminum disk. A fiber-faced wheel was applied at a right angle to transfer power to the axle. Moving the fiber-faced wheel in or out from the center gave the desired speed or a complete reverse. Here is a diagram from the patent:
Apparently, one local purchaser of a 20-hp touring car “backed the machine clear over the hill north of town, which is a feat that is not easy with other machines”. Another story out of Kansas claimed the owner of a Lambert stopped the automobile, weighed down with five passengers, in deepest sand half way up a hill near Palmer, just to see if the car was able to start up again. The car did start and dug its way up the hill, gaining speed the whole way. Maybe all of these attempts to test the friction drive is why Lambert issued this advertisement:
Under “Friction Drive” it says, “It is impossible to break or injure it by carelessness or stupidity.” I don’t know about you, but I know lots of guys that could rise to meet that challenge.
