Bohman-Schwarz Coach Works

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.