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Chapter 4 Birth of a Salesman Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
4 BIRTH OF A SALESMAN
AFTER THE LEASE on the gas station was up and Tucker went back on the police force, he began selling Studebakers on the side. During this time he met Mitchell Dulian, who was factory sales manager for Hamtramck and one of the best automobile salesmen in the business, then or since, setting sales records almost everywhere he worked. Short and dark, always conservatively well dressed, he had smooth strong features that baffled anyone trying to guess his age by twenty years, then or now. He thought, talked and most likely dreamed automobiles, which probably was the secret of his success. Shortly after meeting Tucker he needed a salesman, so he called Tucker, who promptly took the job.
Tucker had been selling cars since he wore knee pants, and smoking cigars because he thought it made him look older. But Dulian gave him his first full-time job as a salesman, where he could try out some of his ideas for selling.
Hamtramck at the time was one of the wildest and most colorful sections of Detroit, largely Polish, with a nationwide reputation for bootlegging and gambling. Boisterous wedding parties often lasted for days, and sometimes the polkas turned into fights, with squad cars lined up to haul guests off to the jug to sleep it off. Old-time cab drivers say that on pay days there would be long lines of waiting customers, two abreast, stretching down the streets and around the corners in front of the prosperous bordellos, which ran three eight-hour shifts. The era of mass production was in full bloom.
“Preston Tucker really surprised me as a salesman, and I had been in the business a long time,” Dulian said. “Within a few days he started selling cars, and it was only a short time before we outsold every other branch in Detroit. He had the gift of knowing what men wanted and what they would pay.
“His enthusiasm and new ideas were endless. We would have parades of our automobiles ending up on some main corner, where Tucker would go into his sales routine just like an old-time medicine man. He would make friends in the big stores and garages, and have them put up posters for our salesroom. Then he would make a deal with the storekeeper or garageman to send us prospects for a commission, and soon he had bird dogs all over town.”
But although Tucker was making more money than he had ever made before in his life, Hamtramck was a long hard drive from Lincoln Park, and he was still just a salesman. He wanted to run his own show. So he left Dulian and went back on the police force for the last time.
But he was just marking time there, because some influential citizens still remembered the stink over cutting holes in the squad car and were just waiting for another chance. Meanwhile, Dulian was transferred to Memphis, where he had two places and needed a manager to handle one of them. He wired Tucker, offering him the job.
“When Preston got that wire I was so tickled I started packing right away,” his wife said. “All the time I was expecting Marilyn, our third baby, and Preston's mother was getting things ready for the doctor.”
Tucker wired Dulian to expect him the next day. He left without even bothering to resign, and the police department gave him a leave of absence. The action was never rescinded, and technically Tucker was still on leave of absence from the force when he died.
“I drove Preston to the Michigan Central depot and saw him off on the train,” Mrs. Tucker said, “and the next day Marilyn was born.”
A few months later Dulian's and Tucker's families moved to Memphis. Meanwhile Dulian and Tucker lived at the Claridge Hotel and had to walk through the park going to the automobile agencies. The one Tucker handled was on Union Avenue.
Memphis had many lively characters in the automobile sales business. It also had the laziest squirrels in the world. Preston easily placed himself at the top among the auto salesmen and was one of the busiest promoters in town. Yet he also had eyes for animals and especially squirrels. Memphis squirrels are so fat that they almost fall out of the trees coming down in the morning for free handouts, and at night they puff and pant climbing back up.
Dulian couldn't understand the parades of squirrels that always followed them through the park until one day he noticed Tucker dropping peanuts as they walked along. But Preston's inner thoughts had not been diverted by the squirrels. He was canvassing the whole automobile-selling field in Memphis, getting a line on how his competitors sold their cars.
When Dulian was transferred again Tucker went with the Ivor Schmidt agency, selling Stutz and other high-price jobs. He had no great difficulty in finding a market for these and made a reputation selling cars other salesmen could not move. Later he moved to the John T. Fisher Motor Company which handled Chrysler. In a very short time he became general sales manager. While selling Chryslers he made a connection with Pierce Arrow.
After two years in Memphis, Tucker was appointed regional manager for Pierce Arrow, working out of the factory in Buffalo, so once again he moved his family to Lincoln Park. He stayed with Pierce Arrow two years, leaving in 1933 to sell Dodges for Cass Motors in Detroit. He never liked to get far from the motor capital of the world.
While still in Memphis, Tucker started what was to become an annual pilgrimage for many years when he went to the Memorial Day race at Indianapolis. There he first met Harry A. Miller, one of the greatest engine designers in automotive history. It was one of Preston's fixed purposes to meet all the old and new pioneers in the automobile business, and Miller was one of the real top-notchers among them. They became close friends, and they made an ideal combination. Tucker, still dreaming of his car, knew a man like Miller could contribute to it, and he believed that Miller could help to design the kind of motor he wanted.
Tucker was by now a recognized leader in automobile promotion and sales. Miller was at the apex of a brilliant career building racing cars that dominated the “500” where Miller engines won more races than any other ever entered. Tucker didn't merely admire the Miller engine; he felt that an adaptation of that engine was what he wanted in his stock car.
The eccentric Miller would have commanded respect in any machine shop in the world. Of medium height, quiet and soft spoken, his sharp, pointed mustache was part of his pride and personality. His quiet way of giving orders contrasted sharply with the more volatile Tucker. One of Miller's chief aversions, Tucker said, was adjustable wrenches, and whenever he found a man using one he would take it away from him and bring him a set of end wrenches, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He would tell the man: “Use a wrench that fits! If you haven't got one then get one.” If he found the man afterwards using an adjustable wrench again he might fire him, if he happened to be in a bad mood. Miller knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it, and these were qualities also possessed by Tucker. They were friends until Miller's death in 1943 from cancer, when he was sixty-eight years old.
Miller was credited with introducing aluminum bodies for racing cars, front drive and four-wheel drive racers, aluminum alloy pistons, superchargers, downdraft carburetors and four-wheel hydraulic disc brakes. Six racing cars he built for the Gulf Oil Company had rear engines with four-wheel drive. While Miller was working on the Gulf job, Tucker met Edward (Eddie) Offutt, who was considered one of the best engineers in the business by the racing fraternity at Indianapolis. Offutt later went with Tucker in Chicago, and was chiefly responsible for the final Tucker engine.
Miller's first complete race car was entered in the Vanderbilt Cup race in 1906, and Miller Specials are still racing today. The original Miller engine was taken over by Fred Offenhauser, who sold out to Meyer-Drake. (The Meyer in “Meyer-Drake” was Louis Meyer, only three-time winner of the “Jop” except Wilbur Shaw and Mauri Rose, coming in first in 1928, 1933 and 1936.) Offutt worked with Meyer-Drake on the Offenhauser engine, a direct descendant of the original Miller engine and still top dog on the tracks.
“Harry and Preston were just alike in a lot of ways,” Mrs. Tucker recalled, “and it was simply maddening. One day we were driving to Indianapolis from Pittsburgh to see the race and the radio in the car wasn't working right.
“They stopped by a gas station in some little town in Ohio and Edna—Mrs. Miller—and I had to sit there drinking pop half the afternoon while they took that radio all apart. There wasn't one place to get anything to eat and all we could do was sit. They had parts spread all over the fenders and the hood, but when they finally got it back together it worked.”
Miller and Tucker, Inc., was formed in 1935 to build racing cars and marine engines, and their first job was building ten cars for Henry Ford, with souped-up V-8 engines. They set up a plant on West Lafayette Street in Detroit where Offutt was a frequent visitor. Many of Tucker's ideas for his own automobile came from his association with Miller, which continued after the Ford contract was finished some months later and Tucker moved to Indianapolis. Miler set up a place there where Tucker often stopped in to talk shop, and they worked together on various projects until Miller's death.
After the Ford contract was finished Dick Cott, who owned the Dodge dealership in Detroit where Tucker had worked, opened the Packard Indianapolis agency on Meridian Street. Tucker went there as general manager, later becoming a partner. He finally was living in Indianapolis, his Mecca for years, and the Packard agency developed into a big operation. Tucker began to live in a style that matched his position.
First they rented a big house in Williams Creek, an exclusive suburb, with a series of decorative pools which the younger of the five children used for swimming, and a gymnasium complete with a basketball court. But the rarefied atmosphere was too stuffy for Tucker, who bought a small farm near Noblesville, about twenty miles away.
While selling Packards, Tucker, as usual, would trade for anything. He would take in jewelry, watches, furs, dogs, horses—anything which he could later sell to make a profit.
One day a bus pulled into the yard and out came a German with twenty-six dogs and put on a show for the kids. Tucker had just sold the German a Packard touring car, taking in the bus and twenty-six Dalmatians and English setters, a dog act the German had been working with circuses. After the show they drove the bus back to the garage to sell and took the dogs to the farm, where Tucker hired a man to take care of them until they got possession of the farm two weeks later. When they moved in there were still more dogs, which the German had told them they could expect almost any day now.
Around the house was a wire fence with a top rail of two-by-fours, and any time of the day they could see a line of dogs walking along the top of the fence. The children set up a wagon-wheel tire, and the dogs kept jumping back and forth through it. When Mrs. Tucker opened the back door to shake out a dust mop, dogs would start jumping over the handle.
“One week-end when we were gone I guess the setters found out they were bird dogs,” Mrs. Tucker said. “When we got back there were only twenty chickens left in a flock of fifty-seven blooded White Rocks that came with the farm. I told Preston he had to start getting rid of all those dogs.”
Some they sold, others they gave away until they were down to a few Dalmatians. Then Tucker took in a five-gaited horse on a trade and the children rode all over the countryside until the horse was entered in a show. Tied in an improvised stall, Rex kicked the hell out of a prize horse in the next stall, and was finally sold to somebody who had more time to take care of him.
“Preston really felt bad about selling Rex,” Mrs. Tucker said. “When he went to the pasture that horse would gallop clear across the field and take a handkerchief out of his pocket. He followed Preston around like a big dog.”
The magnetic quality in Tucker attracted animals as well as men. He had the knack of making friends because he accepted people at their face value and instilled confidence in others. It was instinctive with him—and it earned him a host of friends among the Midwest farmers and auto workers who recognized him as one of their own. Paradoxically, this same open, expansive quality was to make enemies for him when he moved in the world of high finance—a world in which cunning and reserve and polish were highly prized and where he was regarded as something of an interloper.