What Were They Thinking?

A couple of years ago I spent an afternoon with Johnny Pascucci of Johnny P's Classic Cars. What started out as a photo shoot of a DeSoto he was selling turned into an automotive odyssey in his part of central Connecticut. One of the cars he showed me was this 1922-24 Packard Single Six touring car, which was getting new upholstery and a new top at a trim shop near Johnny's business.

At first glance it looks like a quality restoration of a well-cared-for car. Looking a little deeper, though, we came upon this shocker. Where the Packard's single six used to be was a 5-liter Ford small block V8. The V8's torque was amply converted with a C6 transmission, the engine monitored with Stewart Warner gauges, and a modern stereo was thrown in for good measure.

I'm not a real fan of rods and customs. That phase of my enthusiasm peaked when I was about 12, but I still respect the craftsmanship and engineering that goes into modified cars. But this Packard was no ordinary rod. Most rods use a modern drive train from engine to wheel. There's a reason for that. Today's engines are made to operate with certain gear ratios, and the power of modern engines is best handled by up-to-date axles, wheels and tires.

How will this 302 operate, I wonder, with the standard Packard axle, a rear end with a ratio probably around 5 to 1? And how well will the narrow tires put that torque to the ground, even if the wood artillery wheels can get it to the tires? And what's going to stop this car? There are no front brakes, and the rears are typical 1920s external-contracting shoes (okay, that's not a Packard brake, it's on a Hudson, but you get the idea). In 30 years of driving Angus the Hudson I've learned that stopping is a privilege, not a right.

Perhaps the owner just wanted a no fuss, stock-looking antique car with an automatic transmission. Then wouldn't a Pinto drive train, like that used in the Shay Model A Fords, be just the ticket? Probably we'll never know unless someone's seen this green Packard driving around in the middle of Connecticut.

Oldsmar

We all know that Ransom Olds left Oldsmobile while his curved-dash model was at the height of its popularity, thence to found Reo. But Reo, too, held his interest for but a few years. Though he remained on Reo's board until the 1930s, after 1912 he had little involvement with cars. Where did he go then? Well, Oldsmar, of course.

I'd heard of Oldsmar, Ransom's Florida real estate development, before, but this past April, while in Florida for another reason, I realized I was quite close by. With two fellow historians I set out to explore.

The first thing we saw on arrival in Oldsmar was the former building of Oldsmar Bank, now the Public Library. Built in 1919, it's the oldest public building in town. The library was closed, it being a Sunday morning, so Stanton (left), Arthur (right) and I set out in a version of "Where's Ransom?" Stanton and Arthur are both architects, and quickly realized that Oldsmar houses dated from as early as 1918-19 to more recent times. Was there, we wondered, an Olds mansion somewhere in town?

On our way to the waterfront we came upon an impressive stucco residence with porte cochere. Could that be Ransom's house, we wondered? It was the only one that looked worthy of a twice-over auto magnate. On our way back, we saw a woman washing a pickup truck, so Stanton asked about Mr. Olds. She led us inside, to consult the owner of the house, who told us that Olds came to Florida in 1913, purchasing 35,000 acres on Tampa Bay. He envisioned a model community where residents could grow vegetables, a town of "Health, Wealth and Happiness." He built a power plant, a 60-room hotel, and bought a tractor company he moved to town and renamed Oldsmar Tractor Company. Alas, the predicted boom did not come, and Ransom soon left. Population dropped to 200 people and growth did not return to Oldsmar until the 1980s. The center of town holds only modest commercial buildings of the 1950s and '60s. Today's business district is on the main road outside of town. As everywhere in Florida, though, development is fast approaching.

Where had Ransom Olds lived? Not in the grand house in which we stood, we learned. It had been designed and built for him, but he never occupied it. When it was finished in 1924, he had left town. While in Oldsmar, it seemed, he lived in a more modest frame house across the street.

Are there Oldsmobiles in Oldsmar? The only ones we saw were on street signs and the banners on State Street. The only interesting cars we encountered were a first-generation Mustang, a Nissan convertible up on blocks, and an aged Willys Jeep in the garage of our guide to historic Oldsmar.

You can read more about Oldsmar history here, and the Florida Memory Project also has lots of historic photos of Oldsmar.

Slips Loose

James Scripps Booth was an accomplished artist, though largely self-taught since he dropped out of prep school after tenth grade. The son of newspaper publisher George Gough Booth and newspaper heiress Ellen Scripps, James was also enamored of automobiles, so much so that he resolved to invent his own. Drawing his contraption in 1908, he was able to make it a reality in 1912, the Bi-Autogo, a three-seat motorcycle with training wheels, powered by a massive V8 engine. Only one was built, as the vehicle was nigh unmanageable.

Retreating to the other end of the automobile scale, James signed on to the cyclecar craze that swept the United States in 1914. Started with the Bédélia in France, the movement touted light, economical transportation for two, usually tandem seating with motorcycle power. Cyclecars had the virtue that one didn't need a garage, nor a driveway. James's Scripps-Booth Rocket, powered by a V-twin Spacke engine and driven with a long belt (missing in this view), was in tune with the cyclecar idiom, and was gone just as quickly, since by 1915 a Model T Ford, a real car, sold for just $440, less than the price of most cyclecars.

Then James decided to build a real car of his own. He hired William B. Stout, later to build an all-metal airplane in the 1920s that led to the Ford Trimotor and his own radical Stout Scarab in 1935, to design it. The Scripps-Booth Model C, a jaunty little runabout with a stylish German silver radiator, Houk wire wheels and powered by a Sterling four-cylinder engine, arrived in February 1915. Initially the cars were troublesome, earning the nicknames "Scraps-bolts" and "Slips-Loose," the latter perhaps a malady of all belt-drive vehicles and a hang-over from Rocket days. Eventually the bugs were worked out, but fully one third of production seems to have gone overseas. James the artist did all the advertising illustrations, helping to move, by accounts, some 6,000 cars by 1916. A V8 model appeared that year, but James disliked the implicit retreat from the light car idiom, nor did he care for the change to a Chevrolet 490 engine that summer. Fed up, he resigned in October, after which the company was sold to Billy Durant, who was in the process of taking back General Motors with the trojan horse of Chevrolet. Within a short time the Scripps-Booth was a faceless and unwanted GM marque with Northway engine in an Oakland chassis. It was euthanized in 1922.

James, however, was not through with automobiles. He designed another light car, the low-riding DaVinci, but was unable to interest anyone in producing it. When Stutz introduced the low-slung Safety Stutz in 1926, James sued, claiming that Stutz's Fred Moscovics had stolen his design. Eventually, in 1935, James won, but all his award money went for legal fees. By then he had already returned to the cyclecar idea, with the DaVinci Pup, a tandem-seat, driver-aft car with belt drive, but the market held no demand for such a vehicle. Ironically, belt-drive of a sort has finally hit the mainstream with continuously-variable transmissions.

The solitary Bi-Autogo survives, owned by the Detroit Historical Society but now on loan to the Owls Head Transportation Museum in picturesque Owls Head, Maine. Owls Head also has a Rocket cyclecar belonging to Detroit Historical, as well as a Model C roadster of its own. The DaVinci Pup was given by James to Detroit Historical, where it remains in storage. The only DaVinci car was given by James's widow to Northwood University in Michigan, but has since been sold to a private collector. An active Scripps-Booth Register tends to the needs of surviving cars and their owners. Now and then, you can find Scripps-Booth cars at Hershey.

An Old-Fashioned Fourth

Our town does not have a 4th of July parade; we do our parading on Memorial Day. It was the same in the village where I grew up, so it was with great excitement that when I was six we started spending our summers - or at least the beginning of July - at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.

The Wellfleet parade was - and is - a fully civic affair, with all walks of townfolk involved. Floats can be patriotic, political, moral, religious or promotions for town businesses, from restaurants to banks. The selectmen always had a float and even summerfolk join in, fully aware that they're both a nuisance and a foundation of town's economy. Bunting abounded on Main Street buildings, and horses led the parade, followed by antique cars - even a Stanley Steamer. Wellfleet claims its founding as 1620, so Pilgrim hats are always in fashion. It's a shellfish town, embodied by this oysterman who makes popular perennial appearances.

People climb to the rooftops to watch the marching bands, and in earlier days soldiers from the nearby National Guard camp joined the line of march. Sometimes the spectators' cars were more interesting than those in the parade. That night, there were fireworks over the harbor, not always done these days, I'm told. One tradition that's long gone is the bonfire on the evening before. Townfolk spent weeks building a tower of railroad ties, filling it with tires and topping it off with an old outhouse. It lit up the sky, and burned for days. Today the EPA would put a stop to it, but Wellfleeters ceased the tradition long ago, when they ran out of outhouses.