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The Indomitable Tin Goose Chapter 1: Ten Years Ahead of Tomorrow Return to The Indomitable Tin Goose Main Page Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
1 TEN YEARS AHEAD OF TOMORROW
SINCE ADVERTISING developed fixed formulas and not so hidden persuaders, one of the most reliable techniques for selling automobiles has been fashioned around the magic word, “Tomorrow.”
The theory behind the Tomorrow motif probably is that the American public has been conditioned to expect that everything it enjoys today will be hopelessly obsolete tomorrow, so that any product which even hints of tomorrow must at once become highly desirable. The words change but the theme is constant: The Car of Tomorrow—Tomorrow's Car Today!
In more than twenty years, from the early 1930's until late in 1959, only one new automobile designed for mass production has, by the record, fulfilled its promise of being the “car of tomorrow,” and that is the Tucker 48. Now, more than ten years after Preston Tucker flashed briefly across world headlines, features of the Tucker have been adopted one after another by major auto companies. And other features, pioneered by Tucker, are announced impressively as new developments still to come.
Was Tucker actually ten years ahead The record says the industry hasn't caught up yet. Tucker was a man with an obsession; he had a vision of the “car of tomorrow,” and he had it in the late 1940's.
“Car Engines of Aluminum Coming Soon,” said a headline late in 1958, followed by a story on General Motors, warning the iron industry to be prepared for a switch from iron to aluminum engines. GM spokesmen said the engine would weigh up to 200 pounds less, reducing weight throughout the entire car, including the chassis, tires and brakes, and improving weight distribution. The Tucker engine was aluminum ten years ago.
Rear engine? Individual suspension? Air-cooling? Tucker had them all—and until the Corvair, it also had the only true airplane-type engine among the many that had been so publicized. An early brochure illustrated swivel front seats. (Standard seats were used in first models because they were cheaper and easier to get.) Torsion springing? Tucker had it. Not perfect, but few new features are perfect the first time 'round. In addition, the padded dash was a Tucker first.
The company had applied for patents on a steering wheel which would retract in a crash, instead of impaling or crushing the driver's chest, and another patent was for a speedometer that would warn the driver, both visually and audibly, when any given speed was exceeded. Tucker wanted 13-inch wheels before the industry had 14, and announced a 24-volt electrical system before the industry changed to 12.
Popularity of Tucker features was still evident in 1957 when the Cadillac “75” had doors that opened into the roof. The year before, the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories at Buffalo built a model “Safety Car” which included Tucker's padded dash, a curved front bumper to deflect blows instead of taking them head on, and a single driver's seat in the center. Tucker had announced all three more than ten years before.
A highly publicized feature in one '59 model was a tread five inches wider; the Tucker rear tread was five inches wider in 1947. Use of automatic transmissions increased from 25.4 per cent in 1949 to 74 per cent in 1956, with the curve rising rapidly in 1959. Tucker was already tooling for 100 per cent automatic transmissions, reached by Cadillac in 1953, five years later. Speed? There are stock Tuckers on the road today that will do well over 100 without even breathing hard—and on regular gasoline, which wasn't even considered a selling point by anybody important until 1959.
Inevitably the question will be asked: “If the Tucker was so good and so far ahead, why wasn't it built?”
Many answers were advanced at the time, many with convincing evidence to support them. Among the answers:
Tucker was his own worst enemy, and was responsible himself for most of his troubles.
The automotive industry knocked him down to eliminate dangerous competition, working through officials high in government.
Persons tried to convict Tucker to further their own political ambitions.
Or was it only an unfortunate mistake in timing, plunging in the colorful tradition of Ford and Durant and Chrysler, in an era when plunging had gone out of fashion?
The answer is somewhere in the record, but even after the story is told the truth may still be elusive. It may be that Tucker's story is important for only one reason—that it dramatized the end of an era of speculative investment which had brought progress beyond man's wildest dreams, an era which already had changed to an age interested only in security.
Many people remember the fabulous Tin Goose but few, even at the time, knew the circumstances of its birth, or realized the complexity of intrigue which ended its short but spectacular career.
It was in 1944 that I first met Preston Tucker. I was covering the automotive beat for United Press in Detroit. The town was buzzing with rumors. Who would be the first to get back into production with a postwar dream car? What would it be like?
Henry Ford II was dashing over the country making speeches. Maybe in Cleveland they were planning a three-cylinder radial engine in the trunk, while in Baltimore it might be a V-8, or maybe an engine placed crossways in the middle. Automotive writers in Detroit knew Ford was either sending up trial balloons, or just plain having fun and stiring up excitement. They knew the first postwar Fords would be so close to the last 42's that it would be hard to tell the difference. But at the desk at United Press headquarters in New York, they went crazy.
“Need Ford Folo Soonest,” they telegraphed, refusing to believe that Henry II was romancing, and that he didn't expect to be taken seriously.
Charles E. Wilson, then president of General Motors, held press conferences in which he flew into huge rages under skillful needling by reporters. He would almost turn purple, and then burst out with a story which GM probably wouldn't otherwise have released for weeks or months. Still, it was about the only usable copy that came out of GM at the time. An approach through regular channels usually ended weeks later in the office of a third vice president, and by the time a story could be cleared it would be dead anyway.
A purely personal problem was that I had a tough man to follow in the job. My immediate predecessor had been Anthony G. (Tony) De Lorenzo, later a vice president of GM, a clean, fast writer who rated tops among the big wheels of United Press in New York and Chicago. De Lorenzo was further esteemed for having Harry Bennett fenced off out at Ford. where he constantly got exclusives that other automotive writers never got close to.
The biggest annoyance to automotive writers was the Fisher brothers, who up to that time had been the softest touch in the entire history of public relations. All they wanted was not to get into the papers. So all their head PR man had to do was to go in once a month or so with an armful of newspapers and magazines and say:
“See you weren't in this or this or this,” and the brothers would beam happily.
But even the Fishers contracted the fever. They were beginning to sound off too, though it was obvious they were badly out of practice. In self-defense I launched a one-man campaign to smoke out the Fisher brothers, writing a continuous series of nasty stories that somebody, sooner or later, would have to answer. The campaign finally paid off with a press conference in the luxurious tower offices in the Fisher Building.
“We don't know what we're going to do yet,” one of the brothers said, “but it'll be something big.”
This was the background with an auto-hungry public avid for news, when Ray Russell, a Detroit engineer and one of my best listening posts, suggested:
“Why don't you go and see Tucker? I hear he's got something.”
I called Tucker, made an appointment, and drove out a few days later to Ypsilanti, the town where he lived. Tucker received me in his office and practically the first thing he said was that he was developing a completely new design for a car. He dropped this bombshell quietly, explaining that he couldn't say much right now and asking me to keep in touch with him, since he hoped to have something more definite within a few months.
At first sight he was the typical small manufacturer so common around Detroit—well groomed, outwardly prosperous and self-assured. He talked readily and easily, but with reserve, in the manner of a man who commanded attention and expected it. From time to time he would refer to something important he had to hold back now but would reveal when the right time came. I caught no suggestion of the fanatic, yet in the animation of his expression, and the intensity of his brown eyes, I found the promise of a man who was going somewhere. Tucker acted as though he had something that would revolutionize the automobile industry, and his enthusiasm was contagious.
At the time he maintained offices in a large two-story building back of his home, with a small shop space on the ground floor, offices along one side and drafting rooms on the second floor.
It was so crowded people were stumbling over each other. In a large metal building about a block away he had a lot of heavy machining equipment and a fairly large force turning out some kind of military equipment which, as was usual at the time, was very hush-hush.
On my next visit to Ypsilanti some months later, he gave me considerably more information, showing me working drawings, sketches and an assortment of parts that later served as props in prelimary stages of his campaign to get backing. The assortment included cast aluminum suspension arms, blocks and heads of Miller engines and related parts.
Tucker invited me to stay for dinner. I met his wife and some of the kids who wandered in and out. Dinner was informal with only a suggestion of the hysteria I later found was normal around Tucker. Mrs. Tucker was relaxed, friendly and informal, a mother of five children, a superlative cook and practiced hostess. Of medium height with brown hair, she impressed me as an unfailingly efficient woman who could handle a busy husband and a flock of demanding children with calm dispatch. The dinner couldn't have been better—man's fare, with the accent on meat and potatoes—and I knew that good food had its place in Preston Tucker's affections, together with family and automobiles.
After dinner Tucker and I went to his den, which featured easy chairs and a fireplace, and returned to automobile talk. He didn't have any printed literature, but asked me to see two of his associates in Detroit, who had a large brochure in color in their offices near the General Motors Building. I talked with them and saw the brochure, which told a pretty impressive story. But Tucker still asked me to keep it under wraps for the present, saying he had various deals in progress and didn't want to break it prematurely. I sensed then the superlative drive and daring of the man.
“There's one deal with a plane company that looks like it's just about ready to go,” Tucker said. “If the story gets out now it might kill the deal. Even if this one doesn't go I've got others on the fire, and sooner or later we'll get it off the ground. But the deal has to be right.”
I told Tucker I would keep it under wraps until he was ready.
Tucker's story interested me just as it was later to interest countless thousands of people in a dozen or more languages. So after I left United Press I called him occasionally to see what progress he might be making, even though I was no longer looking for automotive copy. A year or so later I left a public relations job with a Detroit advertising agency to free lance full time and again was looking for stories, so I continued to keep in touch with Tucker.
In the summer of 1945 he said he was ready. He called me in and I wrote the story, which featured an illustration in color done by an artist working for him at the time. The picture spelled “S-P-E-E-D,” even standing still. There were some photographs of parts, a few simple line drawings I did and others done by an artist I had worked with in the agency—Mike Such, now in Hollywood. The story was bought by Pic, which scheduled it for January, 1946. To supplement the check from Pic I sold rewrites to various science and automotive magazines that wouldn't jump Pic's release date, and didn't compete in its field. Purely as an accommodation to Tucker, I also wrote press releases for newspapers when the Pic story hit the newsstands in December.
At that time, all over the country, people and companies were trying to get into production of new items, or whatever they had been making before the war. Some parts and services were impossible to get and most of them were in short supply. Raw materials, patterns, castings, machining—everybody was having a rough time.
So when I wrote “off the drawing board into the production stage” high in the first paragraph I assumed, by the time the story was published some months later, that Tucker would have the castings and other stuff he said had been ordered. Many of the stories I was handling at the time followed the same pattern—as soon as they got parts and materials they were in business, and the situation was getting steadily better. When I finally realized there weren't any castings or even patterns I was at first resentful, but later had to admit that, from Tucker's standpoint, there was nothing either dishonest or immoral at the time in referring to something that was still on paper as fact. In the years that followed I learned that to the irrepressible Tucker, with his boundless optimism and self-confidence, anything he had decided to do was already a fact, for all practical purposes, and there was no point in complicating things with a lot of tiresome detail and explanations.
In the months that followed, Tucker called me occasionally to help him out with press releases and publicity, covering my expenses for trips to Chicago, Washington and New York. It became a choice between giving up free lancing or deserting Tucker. He made me a good offer but laid it on the line: if he won, I would win, and if he lost I couldn't expect to more than break even, if that. I like long shots myself, and further, I felt a personal obligation to do whatever I could to make a reality of the fantastically ambitious promotion that I had inadvertently launched.
Almost a year passed before I fully realized the excitement I had stirred up with my Pic story. I had asked the magazine to forward any inquiries direct to Tucker, and the forwarded letters threatened to overflow his office. Tucker said that more than 150,000 letters and telegrams had been received.
On the strength of this response, Tucker threw his campaign into high gear. He had been working quietly more than two years trying to get private financing for a car that was still (as I learned later) largely on paper. He had his faults, as I was to learn, but they were more than counterbalanced by his good qualities, which included genuine enthusiasm, tolerance, belief in himself and the future, and a thirst for knowledge that never faded.
What I found was a man who by his abilities, his vision, his determination, his self-confidence was destined vitally to affect the whole history of automotive design. He knew what he wanted and what the public wanted. That he had shortcomings could be taken for granted. But that he had the right sort of imagination there could be no question. He was the type of man about whom myths collected. These myths would grow and become misinterpreted but they would not be easily forgotten.