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Chapter 22 “This Car is Real Dynamite” Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
22 “THIS CAR IS REAL DYNAMITE”
SHORTLY AFTER the parade the first in a series of suits was filed in Federal Court asking that a receiver be appointed, asserting the corporation was “in danger of financial collapse,” and charging Tucker officials with mismanagement.
A few days earlier a stockholders suit was filed by a New York dealer on the strength of 100 shares bought a few days before, Tucker attorneys said, for the sole purpose of filing the suit. These and succeeding suits set the theme for the charge, repeated across the country, that “no car of any kind, other than the experimental car, has been produced.”
That this could be taken seriously by a court anywhere that newspapers existed seemed unbelievable. Tucker cars had been driven and displayed all over the country only a short time before during the accessories program. It was even more fantastic in Chicago, where the seven Tucker cars in the employees' parade made headlines in every newspaper in town.
Before the summons had been served in the receivership action Tucker called a closed meeting at the plant, attended by about 1,000 dealers. During the meeting a U.S. marshal arrived to serve the summons, and with him came an associate of the attorney who filed the action. This man tried to crash the gate. Tucker threw him out personally, flashing a deputy sheriff's badge he had acquired some time before during a political campaign.
Dealers were urged to pay on their notes so the company could continue operating; a few wrote out checks and others promised to send them in later. Two days later another suit was filed, charging Tucker with illegal arrest for tossing out the attorney, Julian C. Ryer.
While the plant was closed Phil S. Hanna, financial and automotive writer for the Chicago Daily News, went to see for himself what the situation actually looked like. He wanted to know whether Tucker was close to production as he claimed, or if he was just putting on a show as claimed by SEC.
“The first thing that strikes the eye,” Hanna wrote, “is literally several acres of wheels, tires, body stampings, engines, frames and all the related parts that go to make up an automobile. You see hundreds of cylinder blocks, bell housings, radios, batteries and shock absorbers.
“I counted 58 finished car bodies in the assembly line. Work was stopped on these a week ago when the Securities and Exchange Commission moved in to investigate financing of the company.
“In another bay of the big factory close by I counted 90 finished engines.
“There are small mountains of cartons containing smaller parts for the automobile in the receiving room, a huge stack of sheet metal and a battery of shelves half a city block long containing steel bars and rods.
"In the forefront of the mammoth factory, on the Cicero Ave. side, conveyers and new welding machinery, part of the assembly line, appear ready to resume operations at a moment's notice.
“In another big room I saw about 30 Tucker workmen putting cars together and tuning them up. These men are working for free, and since the closing of the plant have assembled six cars.
“I talked with two of them, Eddie Offutt and Dan Leabu, who told me that they were working 'for free' because they have faith in Tucker and believe the SEC investigation will prove 'political.'
“One of the men took me out in a new Tucker which was just being completed. Then he took me out in a chassis equipped with Tucker's new automatic transmission.
“I had no stop watch to check acceleration but from a standing start we got up to 60 miles an hour faster than I can recall having ridden before.
“The car backed up rapidly.
“Coming and going into the plant are scores of Tucker dealers from all over the United States. I heard no disgruntled con-versation.
“I saw the offices which the SEC claimed to have cost $110,000. The walls are covered with imitation woodwork in wallpaper. Cost of remodeling was $10,600 and air conditioning $7,500, according to books shown me.
“The Tucker plant, according to what I saw, appears ready to start production of cars.”
About three weeks after the plant was shut down for the investigation, Tucker had money from the accessories program and from partial payments by dealers on close to $5,000,000 in notes, held by the company as payment for franchises. The receivership suits were no longer making the front page, and seemed to be accepted as one of the hazards of being in business.
With some of the heat off, Tucker decided to start operating again even with SEC in the plant, hoping he could prove to the government that he could go ahead if they would just get off his back. So the latter part of July the plant reopened, recalling about 300 production workers, only a fraction of the force that had been working before the investigation started.
With enough money to pay for parts and materials on a piecemeal basis, they started putting more automobiles together. Neither Tucker nor any of the men working on the cars ever pretended the production line would turn out 1,000 cars a day, or even 100, though production people in the plant said 100 a day could be run through with a big enough force. Tucker called it a “pilot production line,” which it was. It would get enough cars built to shake out the bugs, and show what changes were needed when they were ready for a faster, bigger line.
The Securities & Exchange commission said it was a “mock production line.” The difference seemed to be a matter of semantics.
Tucker believed that Thomas Hart, the SEC regional administrator, was motivated by some personal grudge, though he could never understand what it could have been. Tall, solemn and taciturn, Hart seldom smiled in public, and whenever Tucker was mentioned he seemed to stiffen with rage. Comparatively obscure as an official, Hart exercised tremendous power behind the scenes, and he was the moving, directing force behind SEC's continuous and unrelenting campaign against Tucker and the corporation. To Hart there seemed to be no gradations between right and wrong, and he pursued his methodical, painstaking investigations of Tucker with almost missionary zeal.
In August, while the SEC was working in the offices and a short force was trying to assemble cars in the factory, there came the first public recognition of the automobile by an acknowledged authority on cars. It was a story in the August issue of Mechanix Illustrated by Tom McCahill, who probably has a wider following among automobile fans than any other writer in the country. McCahill wrote:
“Tucker is building an automobile! And, brother, it's a real automobile! I want to go on record right here and now as saying that it is the most amazing American car I have ever seen to date; its performance is out of this world. Why do I think so? Wait until you have had an opportunity to drive the car and you'll know what I mean.”
From coast to coast, McCahill wrote, he had talked with automobile men, and whenever the subject got around to Tucker, smiles and guffaws were always in order.
“I was told by men who said they had it right from the horse's mouth, that Tucker was in an engineering jam because he couldn't figure out a way to get a reverse gear into his car. I was told by others that his only car had a Mercury engine under the hood.”
McCahill saw the factory where men were assembling cars, he saw the line of bodies, engines ready for installation, thousands of parts and piles of raw materials, with machines and production equipment ready to go. He was given a ride, and then he drove the car himself.
And McCahill was no novice. He has an earned reputation for panning anything he doesn't like in pungent and picturesque language, and he doesn't care whether a car sells for $1,000 or $10,000—if he doesn't like it, he says so. Of the Tucker's performance he wrote:
“The pre-select shift worked well and the car took off like a comet. After several acceleration runs I stopped and tried reverse gear. The Tucker does back up! Leaving the plant grounds, I went up to Cicero Boulevard on the south side of Chicago, and soon I knew I was in one of the greatest performing passenger automobiles ever built on this side of the Atlantic.
“This car is real dynamite! I accelerated from a dead standstill to 60 miles an hour in 10 seconds. Then I saw an open stretch ahead so I opened the throttle wide. In no time at all, it seemed, we were doing 90 on the clock, 95, 100 and then 105—miles an hour, that is! This was the quickest 105 miles an hour I have ever reached. I have gone 105 before in foreign cars but none of them ever got there that soon.
“The car is roomy and comfortable. It steers and handles better than any other American car I have driven. As to roadability, it's in a class by itself. I'll really go out on a limb and say that if this car will stand up and prove reliable, it will make every other car made in America look like Harrigan's hack with the wheels off. The car I was driving might start coming apart in 50 miles-that I don't know. But you have my word for it, when I was driving it, it was tops.”
If the SEC or anybody in the agency read McCahill's story they ignored it, because a constantly increasing force of SEC people plodded through records at the plant, day after day and week after week. The SEC force, which for a time outnumbered Tucker employees, finally left in September, after photostating thousands of records. Obviously the commission was in no hurry to finish its investigation, which continued more than a year longer.
To the government, every one of the Tuckers was a Tin Goose, and if all fifty had gone into orbit under their own power, SEC and the Justice Department wouldn't have admitted it, or probably even bothered to look out the window.