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Chapter 3 Wheels in his Heart Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
3 WHEELS IN HIS HEART
PRESTON THOMAS TUCKER was born September 21, 1903, at Capac, Michigan, a small town not far from Port Huron. His grandfather ran a plant that made briquettes from the sod in nearby peat swamps and his father, Shirl Tucker, worked in the plant. His mother was just 21 years old, and had married at 19. A second son, William, was born two years later.
“I guess Preston took after his father,” said his mother, later Mrs. Holmes. “Before we moved to Capac, Shirl worked on the railroad at Boyne City hauling out logs. He was mechanically inclined and he was crazy about that railroad.”
When Preston was two years old his father died, following an attack of appendicitis. That left his mother with two small boys to support, her only resources being her own strong will and a provisional teaching certificate from Ferris Institute at Big Rapids, Michigan.
“I started teaching in a country school in Osceola County,” she said. “And I kept on teaching until the First World War. Then my sister, Harriet, who was working in Detroit, wanted me to come there. My sister said I could do better. So I took all my furniture and we moved into a house at Ecorse Road and Fort Street, what is now Lincoln Park. I worked in an office for a while but I didn't like it so I went back to teaching. That meant I had to go to summer school every year to keep up my certificate.
“I worked all the time and it was really kind of funny. I had certain rules that the kids had to be home for meals and be in before dark. Where they were in the daytime when they weren't in school I didn't know, but at nights they were home unless they had permission to go somewhere. I would walk right into a poolroom and take them out. I didn't fool.
“They were pretty good kids, both of them, and about the only trouble I had was Preston always getting his clothes all full of grease and dirt, hanging around garages and used car lots. I used to say, 'How do you think I'm going to keep you clean for school?'
“Keeping him clean was the biggest problem—but Preston thought he was doing something worthwhile and I guess in a way he was. He was never lazy, he was always doing some-thing. Maybe they only paid him a quarter for running errands or helping, but he was never any trouble. When other kids were out playing he was working and learning everything he could from mechanics and car salesmen.
“They both had to have bicycles, of course, and I guess Preston was sixteen when he coaxed me to get our first car. It was an Overland touring and Preston made the deal himself. I think the man's name was White and we gave him $300. It was a good car, shiny, and it looked good and ran good. We had it a year and a half, and then Preston sold it for $300, and he got cash. Next we had a Model T coupe. It cost $300, too, but there was something wrong with it. I told him, 'Preston, you'd better sell it,' and he did, for $350.
“A few weeks later he got a big Chandler touring car. The man wanted $750 but Preston said, 'I'll give you $350.' That was all the money he had and the man took it. I told him, 'You've got to sell it, that car is too big for us.' But by now Preston thought he was quite a mechanic and he said it needed a little fixing before he could sell it. I came home from school one day and there were gears and things all over the garage floor, with numbers on the floor in chalk.
“I said to him, 'What in the world are you doing?' He said he was fixing the transmission. I said, 'You'll never get it back together again,' and he said, 'I will too. I know just how I took the parts out and I've got them all numbered.'
“We finally had to pay a mechanic $64 to get it back together, and I told Preston again, 'I don't want that big car,' so he sold it for $610. Next he bought a Harroun, I think it was. Ray Harroun, a fellow who had some money, started making them in Wayne, and Preston said they were fast and snappy and just what he wanted. He was going to Cass Technical School in Detroit and driving the car to school.
“I told him, 'You know what's going to happen? Some day that car is going to stop right in the middle of the street and you'll never get it started again, and I don't care.' And that was just what happened. That was the end of that car and it was the only one we ever lost money on, but it didn't cost very much to start with. All the time he went to school he worked. For a while he worked in a soda fountain in Detroit, and later he was an office boy at Cadillac."
At Cadillac he was office boy for D. McCall White, one of the top officials, and while there he developed a new technique to expedite his work. Young Tucker made his rounds on roller skates, delivering messages and memorandums with spectacular speed. One day when he skidded around a corner he whammed right square into White, which probably shortened his career at Cadillac, as he left shortly after. Many laughed about this, but Preston was serious; he was concentrating on speed and efficiency.
Tucker was growing up with the lusty new automobile industry, and his idols were the men who drove the thundering monsters that roared around the new track at Indianapolis, where speeds already had passed 100 miles an hour. It was a new era of giants, both men and machines, names that have been engraved indelibly in the history of man's progress toward ever increasing speed, and Preston Tucker dreamed of the day when he could join the pioneers who were making automotive history.
In the early days at Indianapolis almost all the major companies entered cars in the race, and their names are remembered today with reverence by people who love automobiles. Marmon, Duesenberg, Stutz, Mercer, Apperson, Lozier, Simplex and Velie. Driving on the Buick race team were the three Chevrolet brothers, Gaston, Louis and Arthur. It was Art Chevrolet who later worked for Tucker in Ypsilanti and New Orleans. From Europe came Isotta-Fraschini, Opel, Fiat, Sunbeam, Peugeot and Bugatti, and the big German Benz driven by Barney Oldfield. Ralph DePalma was there, and Eddie Rickenbacker, both of whom Tucker later came to know intimately. In 1920 Gaston Chevrolet drove a Monroe designed and built by his brother Louis, to bring in an American-built automobile as winner for the first time since 1912.
When later in Chicago Tucker brought in men he had known at Indianapolis it wasn't for their prestige that had impressed him as a boy. It was because he knew they were good, and for another reason—he planned one day to build up his own racing team to challenge the road racing champions of Europe, and bring the trophies back to his own country.
But all that was still far in the future. His prized Harroun had let him down, and he had to keep working to help his mother out at home and get money ahead to buy another automobile.
“Preston was pretty good giving money to me,” said his mother. “Both the boys were always good that way. When his friends were out of work Preston always had a job, and the only one I didn't like was when he started working for the police in Lincoln Park."
It wasn't police work that attracted young Tucker as much as the chance to ride motorcycles and drive squad cars on special jobs, like running errands and parades, when they needed extras.
“If I got him off that police force once I must have done it a dozen times,” his mother said. “It was pretty wild and woolly around there then and I was always afraid there would be shooting. After he got married there wasn't much I could do about it because he needed the job to support a family.”
In the summer when he was eighteen, Tucker had met Vera Fuqua, a pretty Detroit girl who worked in the telephone office in Detroit. Up to that time, his mother said he never paid much attention to girls, but they soon started going steady and they were married two years later in 1923, when Tucker was twenty. When they met he was working at Ford, operating a machine.
“I didn't like that,” his mother said, “and I told him, 'Don't you stand at a machine all day. Make them give you a job where you can learn something.' I think he finally got some kind of a checking job.”
Tucker left Ford and went back to the police force, where he was right in the middle of the excitement of Prohibition days. Life with Tucker may have been hectic at times but it was seldom dull, and Vera got a preview one night before they were married when he took her, along with his brother and another girl, to a baseball dance in Lincoln Park.
“Things were wide open,” Vera said, recalling the night. “There were a lot of tough characters who didn't like Preston because he worked with the police, and besides his mother had been giving them a lot of trouble trying to stop cock fights in the downriver section.
“It was about midnight when some fellow started waving a $50 bill in the air and yelling that he could lick anybody in the place, and he was looking right at Preston. I said, 'Nobody's going to fight anybody—I'm leaving right now.'
“All four of us ran down the stairs and got in our car—it was an Oakland—and people were popping up around cars all over the place. We started up Fort Street with Preston driving when somebody started shooting at us and two or three cars came after us. They tried to run us off the road, and when that didn't work they tried to pin us between them.
“I kept watching and telling Preston 'left' and 'right' so they couldn't get up alongside of us. We must have been doing sixty or more and we were coming to a bridge over the Rouge River when Preston said, 'I'm going to try something—don't get scared.'
“He let one car get almost even with us and then swerved clear to the left so the other car had to leave the road or run into the side of the bridge. When I looked back it was plowing into the ditch, but the other car was still right behind us.
“Preston kept driving up Fort Street until he got to Grand Boulevard. There he spun the car around in a sharp left turn and drove right up the middle of the parkway to the Scotten Avenue fire station. I guess I wasn't really scared until it was all over.”
Tucker first joined the Lincoln Park police force officially in 1922 when he was nineteen. He worked eleven months before his mother stooled on him again, and they had to let him go because he was underage. Floyd Crichton, Lincoln Park Chief of Police, was a rookie in the department too at the time, and says he understood why Tucker's mother objected.
“That two-mile stretch of riverfront along Ecorse was one of the toughest areas in the whole country,” he said. “It was a main port of entry for booze from Canada, and more money changed hands there during bootlegging days than anywhere else in the United States. It was a tough district and being a cop was a tough job.
“Pres and I worked together. We rode motorcycles daytimes ten months of the year and squad cars after midnight. Pres was a good cop. There wasn't a damn thing he was afraid of and he could spot a booze runner a mile off. He learned all the tricks of dirty fighting in the police and he could handle a gun. I don't think he ever started a fight, but if he had to he never hesitated.
“In those days they hauled liquor in big touring cars, with the rear springs built up to carry the load. When we saw a car going through town with the rear end riding high we knew they were empty, and when they came back through with the back springs dragging they had a load. The big operators averaged two loads a week, and some loads would bring $3,000 wholesale, retailing up to $10 a gallon. So the boys driving those cars were plenty tough.”
The last time Tucker's mother got him booted off the police force, he took over a gas station that was for lease cheap, because a new road was going in and the station had only six months to go. It was a one-man operation, and when he had to go to Detroit or somewhere on business, his young wife took over.
Putting their first daughter Shirley in the baby carriage, Vera wheeled it about eight blocks to the station where she pumped gas and sold oil and accessories until Tucker got back. He didn't really want a service station except for a base to sell automobiles, but the station paid his overhead and what he made selling cars was clear profit. He was in business for himself for the first time, and he traded and sold everything he could get his hands on.
When his six-month lease expired he went back to the police force, and by this time he was twenty-one and there wasn't much his mother could do about it. She was always afraid there would be some shooting and she was right. A faded, torn clipping from a Lincoln Park paper tells of the day he brought in two armed bank robbers singlehanded.
On a Sunday afternoon he was alone driving a big Hudson squad car when he spotted a car that had been reported stolen from Highland Park, a Detroit suburb. The car was an eight-cylinder Peerless touring, and when he forced it to the curb two men in the front seat had him covered with pistols.
“Just keep right on going and you won't get hurt,” the driver told him.
Tucker went on, but he circled the block and started after the Peerless with his service revolver in his lap and a sawed-off shotgun on the seat beside him. People ran for the curbs as the Peerless sped through the village with the Hudson behind, siren screaming. A little way outside of town the car in front plowed through a light fence and across a field, with the Hudson right behind. Across the rough field they went, through a wooden fence and back onto the highway.
Through the field and down the highway Tucker drove with his right hand and shot around the windshield with his left, while one of the men in the Peerless shot back. At the end of a straight six-mile stretch the Peerless missed a sharp turn and came skidding and sliding to a stop in the soft mud of a plowed field.
Tucker jumped from the Hudson with his shotgun in one hand and his pistol in the other. He ordered the men to throw down their guns and get out of the car. When they got out he threw them a pair of unlocked handcuffs and told them to handcuff themselves together.
One man said he didn't know how. Tucker thought he was reaching for another gun, so he shot him through a shoulder with his pistol. Then they put the cuffs on, and Tucker ordered them back into the car, where he handcuffed one of the men to the steering wheel.
Then he raised the hood of the Peerless and disconnected four spark plugs to hold its speed down, gathered up the two revolvers and made the men drive the car ahead of him to the police station.
After the men were booked, it turned out that they were brothers who reportedly had robbed a bank in suburban Ferndale a few days earlier. Another brother had escaped from prison in Atlanta and sent word through the grapevine that he was coming to Lincoln Park to get Tucker.
“We put in some anxious days and nights,” Mrs. Tucker said. “Preston's grandmother—we called her Ma Preston—was living with us and there were the children. We kept the shades pulled down and every time we heard a car backfire we were scared stiff.”
But the third brother never reached Lincoln Park. He was shot and killed trying to hold up a bank in Cleveland.
Automobiles had got Tucker on the police force and automobiles finally got him off. The touring cars of the day had no heaters, and Tucker decided it was silly to freeze with all that heat going to waste under the hood. So he borrowed an acetylene torch from the Department of Public Works, cut a hole through the dash, and piped hot air in from the manifold.
“It was early spring and the DPW was in hot water as usual that time of year,” said Crichton. “When it thawed, the streets started breaking up and every time some citizen hit a hole he would raise hell with the DPW. So when some taxpayer heard about Tucker cutting a hole in a city-owned squad car with a DPW torch, he was in trouble. They had no authority to lend the torch, and the next thing that would have happened would have been a hearing on destroying public property.”
Although no official action was taken, Tucker was demoted to walking a beat and while on night patrol he won first prize in a contest he hadn't even known was going on.
Passing a tailor shop with his Doberman pup, which he had taken in on a car deal, he heard voices and shouting inside. The door was locked, so he climbed through the transom to investigate. The shouting was coming from a radio and he was just in time to hear the closing announcement on a prize contest!
“And remember, the person who wires this station tonight from the greatest distance will receive free—absolutely free—an incomparable Oriole Super Heterodyne Radio.” Tucker picked up the phone and called the telegraph office to send a wire to the radio station in St. Louis, and a few days later the Tucker household boasted a brand new radio.
Like most of the radios of that time it had a separate power unit about the size of present automobile batteries, and while Vera was delighted with the radio she flatly refused to have all that wire and junk cluttering up her living room. There was a closet off the room, so Tucker took his service revolver and blasted a hole through the wall for the wires.
“Lots faster than going after a drill,“ he explained. “Easier, too.”
“If it wasn't some kind of machinery or something it was animals,” Vera said. “Preston was always bringing home stray dogs and cats. One day he came home for lunch and told me to reach into his pocket. I wouldn't do it, because it could be a squirrel or almost anything.
“He said, Don't be afraid, I've got a present for you. I put my hand in and felt something furry and jumped about ten feet. Then he pulled out a white rat. His name was Pete and he would come when you called him.
“We had just moved into another house and there were mice, and somebody told Preston if there were rats in the house the mice wouldn't stay around. From then on, between the Doberman and Pete, we didn't have any mice.
“The last thing at night we would find Pete and put him in a desk with a hinge top and shut the lid. One night I couldn't find him. I called and called. I was just going to give up and went in to look at Preston Junior, who was a baby then, and there was Pete sound asleep between Preston's legs.
“I grabbed that rat and threw him across the room into the desk and slammed the top down. Pete's tail was sticking out, and from then on it was bent at a forty-five-degree angle. I felt so sorry for that poor rat. But I didn't want him sleeping with the children, so we finally gave him to a little boy in the neighborhood.”
Tucker laughed about it. He couldn't help making deals—swapping and trading were too much fun—and he was a born trader. Very soon he would put this instinct to work in the field where he was destined to make his mark.