CarPort

John Steinbeck was a car guy. We know that from his novels – how else would he have been able to make automobiles such realistic characters? His word pictures of Lincoln-Zephyr, Hudson and Dodge touring car in The Grapes of Wrath, and the Model T Fords in Cannery Row and East of Eden demonstrate that he knew whereof he wrote. Thus it comes as a bit of disappointment that the title character of The Wayward Bus (1947, a film version starring Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield was made in 1957) serves merely as a vehicle for keeping his characters in conflict with one another.

This could almost have been Steinbeck’s wayward bus. It’s an Aerocoach
Mastercraft P372, a type built from 1948 to 1952. The Mastercraft was Aerocoach’s intercity bus;
other Aerocoach models were a transit bus and the Astraview sightseeing model with a glass roof. Aerocoach was made by the
General American Transportation Corporation of East Chicago, Illinois. Not to be confused with AM General LLC, one-time bus builder and now manfucturer of HMMWVs and Hummers, General American took over the bus business of Gar Wood Industries in 1939. The Aerocoaches were an entirely new design with tubular body frame, introduced late in 1940. Much rarer than the familiar GM/Greyhound “Silversides,” or even the long-gone ACF Brills, fewer than 3,100 Aerocoaches were built before General American ceased operations. Most Aerocoaches were powered by International engines, some of them diesels. This one has been repowered with a
GM engine, the ubiquitous
6-71 diesel.

Bruce Fullerton discovered this Aerocoach in Austin, Texas, recently. It’s presently stored at Burnet Road Self Storage, but the owner, who apparently used it as a band bus, is behind on his rent. It’s in decent shape, resplendent in
acres of stainless steel and has those
funky arrow turn signals. Imagine your friends seeing it
drive down the street with you in the
pilot house, your name on the
marquee. Just think how the groupies will
follow you.

By the time you read this, it may not be a wayward bus, but it could well be a homeless bus, or even a dismembered bus. It’s currently under threat of eviction – if you think you might be able to rescue it call Kathy at Burnet Road Storage, 512-453-6302. If it has departed the premises, you will have to contact the Austin Police Department, where Kimberly or Tammy in the Abandoned Vehicle Section, 512-280-0075, may be able to help you. An Aerocoach this rare deserves another flight.

You’ve seen this car before. It was in the way when Wayne Graefen went to retrieve “Ivy,” his 1932 Plymouth convertible sedan. At last report, it was still sitting in the same Southern California rest home for old automobiles. Wayne notes that it’s the convertible coupe style
without side windows for the rear passengers.

That set me to thinking. When did rear side windows appear in convertibles and why? I think I know why (better view for the back seat crowd), but it took a bit of research to figure out when. In the beginning, of course, there were was no reason for the windows, as back seat passengers
rode outdoors. With the advent of the indoor back seat, the convertible’s top was merely extended to cover them. These
’37 Fords illustrate the difference.

The first convertibles to use side windows as we now know them, winding down into the side walls, were the “big” Mopar makes, Dodge,
DeSoto and Chrysler in 1941. Plymouth, however, continued to use the “blind” style top
that year, and right on through
1948. (Dodge devotees will remind us of the Wayfarer, the 1949-
1950 three-passenger roadster, that of course needed no rear windows. Curiouser was this
three-passenger Chrysler Town & Country convertible, apparently advertised but perhaps never built?

Ford Motor Company makes made the switch in 1942, including the Lincoln-Zephyr but excepting the
Continental, whose blind quarters were a styling feature and continued through to 1948.

As it turns out, our feature car was the last of its breed, as Pontiac, with all of the other GM brands, installed rear windows for
1942.

You might ask, “What’s the big deal about those windows? Why didn’t everybody start using them at the same time?” Well, there’s more to them than meets the eye. In order to make them retract it’s necessary to re-engineer the whole body, providing space for the window when it’s down and a lowering mechanism that pivots the glass so as to obviate a center pillar. The independent manufacturers, understandably, took longer to put this into practice. Packard continued their
blind quarters through 1942, then built no convertibles at all in 1946 or ’47. The first “rear-side-window” Packard convertibles came with the
“Pregnant Elephant” models starting in 1948. Studebaker, curiously, offered no convertible coupes in the late 1930s; the last pre-war open cars were the convertible sedans of
1938 and ’39. Post-war, the first convertible was the
1947 model. Nash took even longer. The blind quarter style, like this
’39, re-appeared in 1948 with Nash’s first postwar convertible, then disappeared again. The next Nash convertible was the
1950 Rambler, whose side windows didn’t disappear at all. The first “Nash product” with “conventional” side windows was the 1961 Rambler American convertible.

Hudson’s approach to windows was evolutionary. In 1937, Hudson offered two types of convertibles, the
“Convertible Coupe” with blind quarters, and the
“Convertible Brougham” with rear side windows (Terraplane models shown). The single rear passenger in the Convertible Coupe rode sideways. The Brougham evaded the engineering problems of the windows by making them part of the top, a sort of side curtain that was removable when the top went down. Starting in 1941, you could order Hudson convertibles with or without glass rear side windows. The rear windows did not crank down, however, they lowered with the top. This arrangement prevailed until
1947. Lest we think Hudson incomparably clever, however, I remind you that
Bantam had a similar option in 1940.

If you’d like to rescue that ’41 Pontiac Deluxe Torpedo Six, the CarPort can put you in touch. It comes complete with bees in the side pocket.

Last month we spent a weekend in upstate New York, cheering our daughter Harriet as she competed in the second annual Musselman Triathlon at Geneva. The thought of running 13 miles after swimming for over a mile and
biking for 56 boggles the mind, but she finished in good, if not record, time.

It was not supposed to be an automotive weekend, but interesting cars have a way of turning up. No sooner had we arrived in Syracuse, our overnight stop, than we noticed all sorts of intriguing vehicles around. It seems we had landed in the midst of the Syracuse Nationals. Judging from the nature of the traffic I figured it was a street rod festival, but there’s more to it than that, including bikes, trucks and muscle cars.

I’m not a fancier of modified cars, per se, but I’m always interested in what people do and how they do it – rods and modified cars usually embody exemplary craftsmanship and often innovative engineering. Wayne Graefen tells me that early hemis are “really hot,” and this one took
pride of place under the hood of a
’37 Ford coupe. Early Fords like this
chopped Model A still seem to be the rods of choice; the owners of this one trekked from Massachusetts, so they brought their
luggage trailer. Some cars, like this
’40 Chevy, were tastefully bright; others, like
this one, were quite radical. Front or
rear it gave little clue to its heritage until I looked at the
dashboard, which gave it away as a 1949 or ’50 Dodge. But this Mopar, which, to my mind, should have had a hemi, was propelled by the all-too-common small block Chevy V8.

Sleeper of the day was this
1936 Ford phaeton. But for the color, it had hardly a
hair out of place. The only sign of modification I could find was these
auxiliary gauges, and I still don’t know if they monitor the original flathead or a more modern powerplant.

It was an interesting weekend, but it has not inspired me to come home and build a street rod. It has, however, convinced me that
Freightliner builds
my kind of pickup.

Larz and Isabel Anderson bought their first car, a Winton runabout, in 1899. They never sold it. Over the years they acquired many more cars and kept most of them, too. Each car had not only a name but a motto. This
1905 Electromobile, with British chassis and body by Kellner of Paris, was called “Port Bonheur” (Bringer of Happiness) and carried the motto Ca va sans dire (It goes without saying). In 1927, when their old cars had become noteworthy, the Andersons enjoyed showing them to visitors in the carriage house at their
estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, creating one of the first auto musuems. The core of the Andersons’ fleet remains with today’s
Larz Anderson Auto Museum, which can rightfully boast “America’s oldest car collection.”

On July 23rd, the Museum hosted its annual open house for members and guests at its off-site storage facility. At this location are kept the Anderson cars and other Museum collection cars not on display, as well as cars that have been donated to the Museum for sale, in support of ongoing operations. Development manager
Andy Jeffrey provided commentary on many of the cars, including this original
1959 Lancia Aurelia Spyder from the permanent collection. Anderson cars, in addition to the Electromobile, included the
1899 Winton runabout “Pioneer,” Ca Ira (It will go), and a
1908 Bailey Electric that was Isabel Anderson’s favorite, “Le Bonne Fee” (The Good Fairy), Tourjours prete et fidele (Always ready and faithful). A “self drive” car, the Bailey nonetheless included a
perch at the back for the footman. One of the Andersons’ later cars, a
1926 Lincoln, “The Emancipator,” motto Son courage fait sa force (Its courage is its strength), carries a rare body by Brookline coachbuilder George W. McNear.

Other notable cars in the Museum collection included a 1959 Rolls-Royce
shooting brake, one of four converted by
Harold Radford of London, and a large Renault from the 1920s. The
circa-1928 Vivastella is a
six-cylinder long chassis car looking for an appropriate body. The late Arthur Fiedler, long time conductor of the
Boston Pops Orchestra, loved fire engines. The Museum now owns a
1937 Ford pumper that was given to Fiedler by his son.

Cars in the Museum’s collector car sales program were as varied as a
1920 Fiat 501, an early
Datsun 240Z and Jaguar XJ6 saloons from
1971 and
1986. To inquire about these and other cars for sale, email Andy Jeffrey.

The Larz Anderson Auto Museum is
open every day except Monday and major holidays, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. The current exhibit is L’automobile – A Century of Innovation and Style celebrating the French automobile industry. The Museum is located at 15 Newton Street in Brookline.

Wayne Graefen spotted this long-nose beastie while combing the Texas scrapyards (it’s an honourable profession – somebody’s got to do it). Doubly intriguing is what seems to be the
anchor for a sidemount spare. Wayne describes the machine as a hot rod, but what to make of that long hood? He muses “how great it would be if I could only find one of the inline 12-cylinders that my father-in-law insists he saw as a young man.” Inline 12? Was there such a thing?

Inline engines are pervasive. Amost from the beginning there were inlines, in two, three, four, then six cylinders. By 1915, Hudson was touting itself as the “world’s largest manufacturer of six-cylinder cars.” In 1917, Hudson introduced the
Super Six, featuring a counterbalanced crankshaft for unprecedented smoothness. The inline, or straight, eight didn’t arrive until a few years later.

Eights in a vee configuration were common – Rolls-Royce built a few from 1904 to 1906, and by 1917 they were ubiquitous in the New World from such makers as Apperson, Cole, Cadillac, even
Chevrolet. It was 1920, however, before the straight eight took hold, in Italy (Isotta-Fraschini), Belgium
(Miesse) and Britain (Leyland). America’s first production straight eight was the
Duesenberg Model A, introduced for 1922.

Straight eights have some built-in complications. Their long crankshafts are subject to flexing, which can result in fracture. Remedies include stengthening the crank (adding weight) or additional main bearings (adding friction – even a lubricated bearing has more resistance than no bearing at all). Packard made a major advance in 1924 with a symmetrical crankshaft that corrected the imbalance of earlier stright eights, making one of the smoothest engines of that time.

By 1930, virtually all American automakers featured straight eights, starting just above the low-priced range with Dodge, DeSoto and Pontiac. Hudson stretched the small Essex six to eight pots that year, and made it available in the low-priced
Terraplane in 1933. A splash-lubricated engine, its derivatives were offered until 1952. Packard’s
Super Eight engine featured nine mains, and Buick’s Valve-in-Head
“Fireball” attacked the eight’s other Achilles heel, uneven fuel distribution, with Compound Carburetion in 1941. Thirsty and somewhat difficult to tune, Compound Carburetion was not universally revered. The last American straight eights, Packard and
Pontiac, gave up after 1954, though some European manufacturers briefly soldiered on.

But what about the inline twelve? Yes, Wayne, there was a straight twelve. For that we can thank
Gabriel Voisin, the idiosyncratic French aviation engineer who also built automobiles. Voisin’s cars were as eccentric as he was, the
Aérodyne C25 being a case in point. In contrast to the car’s slippery shape, Voisin added some
external braces to strengthen the front fenders, and topped it off with his characteristic laminated aluminum
bird mascot. Most Voisins were sixes, but a few V-12s were built from 1929 to 1931. In 1934, Voisin began experimenting with a straight twelve, made by coupling two 3-liter sixes nose-to-tail. His intent was to improve weight distribution, and to this end the engine extended far back into the passenger space. Two such cars were built, Voisin’s own, an
Aérosport Coupe, and one sedan. Production never materialized. Does anyone have a photo of the straight twelve engine?

The CarPort is grateful to Bud Gardner and his Encyclopedia of Eights for much of the knowledge in this installment. The Encyclopedia is a handy reference covering the basics of all the world’s eight-cylinder automobile engines and will be published in electronic format later this summer. Contact Bud for pricing and ordering info.

World War II began to affect 1942 U.S. passenger cars even before the order came to suspend production by February. In October 1941, the War Production Board forbade the use of bright trim on other than bumpers and bumper guards. Plated parts could be used if painted over; Oldsmobile had perhaps the only ad showing a so-called “blackout car.”

In contrast to Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation, whose pre- and postwar cars we contemplated last week, the independent manufacturers didn’t change their products much for 1946. Hudson, whose
1942 models adopted the industry trend for light, horizontal grilles, also followed fashion with a bolder, more complex style for
1946, but little else on the cars changed. Nash’s
postwar grille was bolder than the prewar item, but gave a better balanced effect, as the upper grille on the ’42 looked a bit
snooty. Packard changed hardly at all, making the delicate grille bars on the
’42 marginally “stronger” for
’46. And Studebaker offered only a continuation of the
Champion model for four months until the all-new ’47 cars were ready. Though austere, the carryover Champion was all but indistinguishable from the
1942 cars, whose upper-class models were attractively trimmed. The fact that the independents were working hard on all-new postwar cars probably accounts for their lack of effort to facelift the stopgap cars offered for 1946. Willys, on the other hand, dropped production of regular passenger cars until 1952.

The General Motors cars, however, were a mixed bag, many makes being exceptions to the similar-but-bolder-and-more-complex school. Chevrolet’s
1946 grille was actually a bit simpler than
42’s. Cadillac gave its
1946 grille bigger rectangles and reshaped lights from
1942’s. Buick made minimal changes from
1942, adding just a
horizontal vent at the top of the grille and emboldening the bars. Pontiac, whose
1942 face was a real mix of sizes and shapes, simplified the front of its
1946 cars, and Oldsmobile, whose ’42 grille was
truly bizarre (the middle bar was actually part of the bumper), also cleaned up its grille for ’46, although the car had a
permanent frown.

Perhaps we shall never know what the 1943 cars would have looked like, had there been such models. The 1946 facelifts were likely quick jobs, undertaken in a hurry when most of the styling effort was going into all-new 1947s, ’48s and ’49s. For posterity’s sake, though, I wish there had been more ’42s.

Rich Miller recently sent me some photos of his new 1942 Mercury. A low mileage car from Colorado, it benefits from a recent restoration, enhanced by having led a sheltered life. The
ornate dashboard plastic, for example, looks virtually new.

I’ve always had a fascination with 1942 cars. Because the model year was cut short by World War II, few of them saw traffic when new, and fewer still survived to be restored. The Mercury, in particular, had simple, yet elegant, ornamentation.
Its grille showed the horizontal themes becoming popular, but light, almost dainty in execution. After the war,
Mercury’s face became bolder but “busier,” even confused. I started to think about how other cars were transformed during the wartime absence of new models.

Older brother Lincoln also had a thin horizontal grille in
1942, but was given a heavier, grid-like grille for
1946. Ford, which had kept a
vertical grille pattern in 1942, likewise became
bolder in ’46, but went horizontal in a much simpler fashion, with light red accents.

Chrysler also had a
simple, elegant horizontal grille at the onset of war. Like competitor Lincoln, Chrysler “went busy” after the war, adopting a
fine-mesh checkerboard grille that, while not unattractive, lost the gracefulness of the plain chrome bars. DeSoto’s
1946 grille was no busier than the prewar item, but also bolder, and the car sadly lost the unique Airfoil disappearing headlights that had been
’42’s hallmark. Dodge, while not simple in 1942, did have a light,
mostly horizontal grille pattern, but went for
heavy rectangles in 1946, hardly an item of beauty. Plymouth, at least, effected simpler trim after the war, a grille of
alternating width horizontal bars “cleaning up” the prewar kaleidoscope of
shapes and angles.

Almost always the first year of a given design is “purest,” and best stands the test of time. The “freshening” of subsequent seasons soon loses its novelty, and looks like the contrivance it is. One wonders what the 1943 cars would have looked like, had there been a new car season. Would they have looked like the “busy” ’46s, or did the wartime hiatus affect the stylists’ work in more ways than one?

Next week we’ll look how the war affected the rest of the American passenger car industry.

It took my friend Dan Ditullio a little over twenty years to restore his Cord 812. The result is well worth the time and expense, but he learned a few things in the process, some stories worth retelling. This, friends, could happen to you.

He purchased the 1937 Beverly, the more upmarket of Cord’s two sedan models, from a co-worker in the spring of 1981. The car looked better than it really was – it had been on the road in 1968, but the paint covered up a surfeit of poor body work done for some previous owner. The Cord doesn’t have a frame, per se, so “body-off” doesn’t apply. You have to hoist the whole car up and go in from underneath.

The car had experienced some fender damage, and in the process of fixing it one headlight had been installed higher than the other. It took Dan and his friend Charlie Reynolds quite some time to get the alignment just right. When finished, the Cord could say “peek-a-boo” without squinting.

Cord instrument panels are marvelous, an impressive array of instruments and airplane-type controls mounted on an engine-turned background. Dan’s had suffered over the decades, so restoration was essential.

Dan had attended to his engine and re-installed it in the car. It sat for a while as the new interior and trim were installed. All restorers know that a dormant engine should be rotated periodically to keep its parts moving and lubricated. One day Dan began to do just that, cranking the engine with the starter with the spark plugs removed. A large dust cloud arose from one side, accompanied by a loud “crunch.” Disassembly revealed the problem: mice had crawled up the exhaust pipe and stored seeds inside the engine. Cranking it over had punched the seeds clear through one of the aluminum cylinder heads.

All’s well that ends well. A set of modern reproduction heads put the engine right, and patient finishing had the car ready for showing the next summer. It received a well-deserved “First Place Primary” at the 2002 Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival in Auburn, Indiana. At this writing, the car has received a number of other awards, including a senior trophy at the 2004 ACD Festival, driven the 1,600 miles there and back while achieving about 20 mpg at 65 mph.

Dan’s advice to fellow restorers: If you’re going to let your engine sit for months, make sure you seal your exhaust pipe and carburetor intake tightly with duct tape!

Doesn’t everyone? Of course, a parade must have
marching bands, baton twirlers,
fire engines and celebrities riding in parade phaetons. What kind of parade phaetons? Well, didn’t Chrysler build the best parade phaetons?

One of the best known is
“Famous Fanny,” a Crown Imperial built by Derham Body Company of Rosemont, Pennsylvania for New York City in 1940. In this photo,
General Eisenhower receives a hero’s welcome from New Yorkers in 1945, as Mayor LaGuardia soaks up some of the limelight. The 1941 LeBaron-built
Newport dual cowl phaetons are parade-worthy, too, though with smaller passenger cockpits.

Perhaps the most celebrated parade cars are the three Imperial phaetons built in 1952, and later updated to 1956 appearance. One each was supplied to New York, Los Angeles and Detroit (more history available at the Imperial Web Pages). New York and LA still own their cars; the
Detroit phaeton passed through several private collections and is currently owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum.

The 1962 Imperial at the top of this page is somebody’s attempt to make a parade car: coachwork by Sawzall. It sat for some months at roadside in Groton, Connecticut, where its crudely-made tonneau cover doubled as a
fishpond. When last seen it was headed out of town on a trailer.

Parade phaetons have become a figment of the past. The assassination of President Kennedy in a Lincoln in 1963 spelled the end of open-topped presidential limos. The current White House Cadillacs are as unattractive as they are secure. The general rarity of large convertibles has affected parades all across the nation. In my town, the grand marshal always rides in the same 1967
six-cylinder Plymouth Belvedere.

John Katz passes this Reo tow truck each time he returns home from Baltimore. It sits beside the northbound lane of I-83 between York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Athough it will take centuries for it to rust to dust – Reo, after all, was the “World’s Toughest Truck,” according to its manufacturer – John would like to see it better loved. That doesn’t mean, however, that he’s likely to take it home.

Reo was, of course, Ransom E. Olds’s second automotive venture. Leaving his Oldsmobile, and his name, behind, he applied his initials to a new firm, the Reo Motor Car Company, in 1904. His Reo cars sold well – third place in 1907 and almost always in the top ten – and were joined by a line of commercial cars in 1906. A subsidiary, Reo Motor Truck Company, was formed in 1910. Despite coining the name “Speed Wagon” in 1915, Reo trucks were pretty conventional, upright and stodgy right through to
1929.

Reo ceased car manufacture in 1936 to concentrate on trucks. The truck designs became more stylish, following the fashions of the day, and Reo supplied a line of rebadged light trucks to Mack, to be sold as
Mack Jr. Further restyling for
1938 portended that Reo would become a trendsetter.

Emerging from bankruptcy in 1940, Reo didn’t exactly start a trend, but the trucks made their mark. Called “Moreload,” for their cab-forward design, they were like nothing else on the market. The bold front end leapt forward, its front axle pushed back. Reos were built in sizes from 1-1/2 ton capacity up to 68,000 pounds GVW, and offered a choice of gasoline or diesel engines. A few
pickups were built, big he-man pickups, not the half-ton type they had supplied to Mack. My home town road department used Reo
dump trucks and my high school had a
Reo bus.

In 1950, the Reo prow was
squared off a bit, and in 1954 a V8 engine was offered, built in-house, as all its gasoline engines had been. Front end design was
blunted still further in 1955.

In 1954, Reo Motors, as the company had become in 1940, was acquired by Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation. If Reo in the 1930s and ’40s had been poor, it now became a stepchild. By 1957, White Motor Company owned Reo, and the following year bought Diamond T. What followed was a line of Diamond Reo trucks aimed at the top of the truck market. They had trouble staying there. Diamond Reo Trucks, Inc. was sold in 1971, and went bankrupt four years later. Loyal Osterlund, a D-R dealer, bought the rights and tooling, and he and successive owners struggled on through the late 1990s. Diamond Reo finally petered out in 2001. Ironically, it is the Diamond Reos that are best remembered by today’s youth, along with REO Speedwagon, the band.

That leaves us with the task of identifying the
Reo spotted by John Katz. It doesn’t appear in the
spotter’s guides, but Reo authorities Bob Ebert and Jim Neal figured it out. What John saw is a
World War II Reo 6×6 wrecker, of a style built for the U.S. Army. Bob and Jim have, with Tim Fijalkovich, written a book, The World’s Toughest Truck: The Reo/Diamond Reo Story, to be published by Driveline Publications, a subsidiary of Antique Power, Inc. It should be out later this year. Until then, Reo restorers will find kinship in the Reo Club of America.