November 2009

The Wheels of Change road trip heads to southern California this week, making stops in three places rich with automotive history: Pasadena, San Fernando Valley, and San Diego. Here are the details on where I'll be appearing, as well as some tidbits on how each place figures into California car culture and the history of cars:

Pasadena

On Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m at the Pasadena Museum of History (470 W. Walnut Street, 626-577-1660), I will probably chat a little about how—

• Those two desperadoes you see pictured here, L.L. Whitman and Eugene Hammond, became the third set of drivers to drive across the United States in an automobile, going from San Francisco to New York in 72 days, 21 hours and 30 minutes. Hailing from Pasadena, Whitman became the very model of a hard-driving man, setting speed records for his transcontinental trips across America as well as north-south sprints from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

• Pasadena looms large in the history of automotive design. Walter Murphy Coach Works of Pasadena designed the coaches for some of the most beautiful cars in the world in the 1920s, including Abner Doble's luxury steam masterpiece, the Doble Series E. Two of Murphy's former employees, Christian Bohman and Maurice Schwartz, formed a Pasadena coach-building firm that designed the spectacular Duesenberg JN used by Clark Gable to squire Carol Lombard around Hollywood. Pasadena to this day maintains a high-level design profile, as many of the graduates of The Art Center College of Design are carrying on the Walter Murphy-Bohman & Schwartz automotive design tradition.

• The world's first hot rodder may have been Waldeman Grant Hansen of Throop Polytechnic Institute, now Caltech, in Pasadena. The brilliant young Hansen built the first gas engine car ever seen at Caltech, racing it around the streets in what later became the Pasadena-Altadena Hill Climb, one of the wildest road races of the early 1900s. At one point in the race the cars sped over some railroad tracks and all four wheels lifted into the air.

Granada Hills

It will be a pleasure to stop by to see the Mustang Owners of California (Du-par’s Restaurant, 17921 Chatsworth St., Granada Hills, Wed., Nov. 18., 6:30 p.m.) because Granada Hills is in the San Fernando Valley, and in the late 1940s and 1950s (and other times as well, no doubt), the San Fernando Valley was automobile heaven. Here is one of the all-time great hot rod and sports car guys, Dean Batchelor, late of Burbank, remembering this time in the valley:

"It was a grand time for car nuts," Batchelor recalls in his wonderful book, The American Hot Rod, which I quote in Wheels of Change. "The streets of southern California were thick with interesting cars—hot rods, custom cars, and the occasional imported sports car."

Interesting cars, and interesting people. Since I will be talking to California's foremost Mustang club, I am reminded of what Lee Iacocca said about how important it was for Ford to appeal to California teenagers when it was designing the Mustang in the 1960s: "Although the car industry was born in Michigan, it came of age in California. It was the entry point for the youth market—with muscle cars and four on the floor and various other permutations of the basic automobile that began in a factory in Michigan...It's been said many times before, but it's worth saying again: California is really the mirror into the future."

San Diego 

My talk in San Diego (Thurs., Nov. 19, 7 p.m., San Diego Automotive Museum, 2080 Pan American Plaza, 619-231-2886) will be in Balboa Park, which hosted the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. This was a world's fair designed to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and spotlight San Diego's role as a port city for trade. Tens of thousands of people from around the world came to the fair and rode around Balboa Park in one of Clyde Osborn's Electriquettes.

Clyde Osborn will never be listed among the titans of the automobile industry. Rather, he is one of the countless indefatigable American optimists who had a dream to build an automobile and then acted upon it. His dream was the Electriquette, a two-passenger, battery-run electric car that was built for the fair. With a body entirely made of wicker, it looked like a lounge chair on wheels. Rides cost a dollar apiece, and the battery ran eight hours before needing a boost. A San Diego attorney who owned the Fritchie electric car dealership in town, Osborn produced about 200 Electriquettes that did everything that was asked of them. After the fair he abandoned electric car manufacturing and returning to lawyering.

Posted 11/11/09. One of the benefits of going on a book tour is being able to meet the people who are reading my books, and learn from them. Here are a few of the things I learned from the people who came to my talk last night at Clayton Books:

     • How computers are killing the ancient and honorable practice of teenagers building car engines. Used to be they could take apart a Ford or Chevy engine, install new parts here and there, clean and repair the old ones, and then put the whole thing back together better than before. But the computers used in car engines today require specialized training and specialized (and expensive) equipment beyond the reach of many do-it-yourself backyard mechanics who just want to work on their cars to make them run faster. Plus, it's just not as much fun to work on cars with computers than the old ones that pre-date the computer age.

     • What wrecked the American car industry? You could fill ten books with opinions on this subject. In the view of one knowledgeable car and truck collector last night, one reason was the idea of planned obsolescence. He said he once visited a friend at a Ford factory who took him to the floor where the engineers were doing "failure testing." If some piece or part was built too well and lasted too long, the engineers sent it back to the drawing board. They demanded parts that would break down more quickly, forcing customers to buy new models every few years, and over time this approach eroded the quality and reputation of American-built cars, problems that haunt them today.

     • In the 1950s and '60s, on a road on the far western edge of San Francisco known as the Great Highway, they set up a two-mile long drag racing strip for teenagers and others. The timing trap ran from Fleishacker Pool toward the Cliff House, and it was a perfect spot for dragging. On one side was the Pacific Ocean and on the other was Golden Gate Park with very few roads spilling out onto the Great Highway. And what roads there were, could be easily blocked by the police and car clubs that organized this activity so teens could have a safe way to blow off steam in their cars.

     Finally, on a personal note, another benefit of going on a book tour is being able to visit bookstores around the area. Every bookstore has its own ambience and feel, and Clayton Books in Clayton, which sells both new and used, has a unique feature that I've never seen anywhere else. The authors who speak there all sign a door at the back of the store, and I was proud to add my name to this illustrious list.

            Onward to the Hayward Area Historical Society on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 6 p.m. Here is a story that Eric Kurhi did on me for today's editions of the Oakland Tribune and Daily Review. And he added a positively hilarious post on me for the Review blog that also may be enjoyable to some.