I'll don't Line After Hours is brought to you by bridge Stone Tires Solutions for your Journey.

Gary John, How are I'm doing well?

We got a lot of automotive history.

We've got an exciting show.

Yeah, I mean, and I've got like this fresh off the press copy of Road and Track, because.

An actual printed version.

Printed version, because you've got Mike Austin, it's on.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's on.

Like the digital version I think is out yesterday and so it's in news on newsstands and in mailboxes any day now.

And Mike did a story on our guest here, Matt Anderson, curator of Transportation at the Henry for Museum.

So when you all go get your copies of Road and Track, go to the last page and here's this piece that.

And I want to know, this was just beautiful, kiss met because I did not know that I was going to be on today when I talked to Matt, and I'm sure you know you book and because of that coincidence.

Yeah, and then the issue came out just in time for this all to it just just.

All comes together here on the Auto Line after ours.

So so Matt, thank.

You for joining us today.

Pleasure to be here, Matt.

You know, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is a couple of months ago, you were one of the speakers at the SA's Propulsion Conference, and you dug out some I thought really interesting insights as to the very early days of the automobile, the horseless carriage, and how things had evolved.

Well, one of the things that you got into was maybe there's lessons today's industry can learn going back in history to those very early days.

And one thing that hit me was if you go back to the very early part of the twentieth century, as the horseless carriage first started to appear, there was a lot of people who just hated them, despised it.

Get a horse, you know, was the common refrain that a motorist might have heard back then.

And it seems to me maybe there's some lessons that today's industry can learn because of there's a lot of people out there who absolutely despise electric cars.

You pick it up from there.

Am I grasping for straws here or are there's some connections and lessons.

No, I think you're onto something there, And you're right, there was some hesitancy and some reluctance around the automobile right of the turn of the twentieth century.

And part of that, Frankie, was a class issue.

Right.

Cars were very expensive at that time, so if you had one, by definition, you were probably pretty well off, So that was part of the issue.

But also they were noisy, they were smelly, they were just playing difficult to drive, shifting gears, advancing spark, having to change a flat tire almost guaranteed anytime you went out.

So all of that played into some of the reluctance to adopt automobiles early on.

But a lot of those problems got knocked out pretty early, and I would say by nineteen oh five nineteen oh six at the latest, folks are really interested in wanting a car.

There's envy, but it's not at the money.

It's envy because I want my automobile now too.

And then there were lower price models that started to come out too.

Henry Ford famously with the Model T.

It wasn't the only one, but that really opened up the automobile to the masses.

Absolutely, and the curve dash Oldsmobile before that was really the first car kind of targeted at a middle class market, we'll say, and you're right, Henry Ford just exploited that obviously very successfully with the Model T.

So it's just an issue of people being able to get into a vehicle that changed their perception of it.

I mean, because you were saying that there were you know, pushbacks, smelly, noisy, flat tires.

I mean none of that went away.

I mean you still had that right, yeah.

To some degree.

Though it got better, certainly by nineteen ten and into the mid teens.

But you know, I think some of it too, was just people were eager to adopt the new technology, and horses had some disadvantages that people came to realize pretty quickly too.

You've got to pay to board a horse, to feed a horse, whether you're using it or not, whereas the car's only costing you money if it's up and run.

And then there's the issue of the shall we say, exhaust that horses leave behind, the emission.

Yes, it was a different emission story.

Absolutely.

You know a lot of people don't realize this, but horses and horse drawn carriages were actually very noisy, at least in city streets if they were on cobblestones or any kind of paved road.

You know, the steel horseshoes, the steel bands on the wheels of carts made a hell of a racket.

Now that's charming John now around Central Park and yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's only because you know, you hear an addition, an occasional horse and an occasional carriage.

But you know, I was, early in my career the editor in chief of a magazine called Automotive Industries.

We could trace our roots back to a magazine that started in eighteen ninety five called The Horseless Age, and my then predecessor, a guy named mister Ingersoll, had written an editorial in the first issue of The Horseless Age in eighteen ninety five and it was like, oh, these soless carriages are going to be so much better.

You know, we're not going to have this emissions problem where it's going to be so much quieter than it is today.

It's going to be far safer than all the accidents that we have right now.

And of course, with one hundred years plus of hindsight it boy, was he wrong.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, We've just traded one set of problems for another set of issues around the automobile, obviously, but people were just thinking about the issues that the horses were causing at that time, and we're eager to kind of break away from that.

And yeah, by as we said, by nineteen oh five nineteen ten, the middle class is certainly entering the automotive market and it won't be long after that for the working class gets in as well.

When Henry kicks off the movie Assembulne about nineteen thirteen, nineteen fourteen.

So this is something that's.

Always kind of fascinated me too, And if I have this wrong, I looked it up a long time ago.

But in terms of per capita, there weren't a lot of horses.

Not a lot of people had.

Horses because of the stuff you guys mentioned.

You need space, you need to board them, they need veterinary care.

So we went from not everyone has a horse to you know, surely for nineteen thirteen ager you're mentioning a lot of people have cars like that was a pretty rapid transport transformation just in the way people got around, right.

Yeah, I think there's a misconception thanks to movies and TV that you know, the sort of hers and carriage or buggy was the equivalent of the family car today.

But you're right, particularly in the cities.

You know, most people didn't own horses, They relied on public transportation or just walked wherever they were going.

But the automobile all of a sudden freed you to travel further distances, and to some extent that had been kind of set up or predicted by the bicycle, which was incredibly popular in the eighteen nineties.

Again because people could now travel where they wanted on their own schedules and go farther than they wanted to.

So in a sense, the automobile is almost a bigger, better version of the bicycle.

Man, go into that, because I think not a lot of people these days appreciate what the chain driven, pneumatic tire bicycle did for transportation, what starting mainly in the eighteen eighties.

Yeah, absolutely, And there's a lot of bicycle technology that went into the automobile.

You mentioned the steel tube frames of seeing early cars, pneumatic tires, chain drives, which were not all that uncommon on cars on the turn of the twentieth century, So that's a part of it.

There were even manufacturers who build bikes who then went into the auto industry.

Pope famously, Rambler, Thomas Jeffrey.

I mean, the rambler name was used on bicycles before it ever appeared on automobiles, and now we think of it with the AMC cars of the nineteen sixties.

I think Boujo Poujo pougeou was And you know, though they didn't build automobiles.

The Right brothers went from bicycles to airside.

So why did that happen?

Do you have any idea, I mean, why they didn't do automobiles.

I mean, well, by all accounts, Orville was a bit of a gearhead, so he was interested in automobiles.

But the Rights got into aviation because that was the big problem with the age, and they were just Wilbur I think was really fascinated by it.

But yeah, a lot of bicycle technology went into the first airplanes as well.

They have steel tube frames on the wing spars, there chain drive or any of the propellers.

So the bike, I think gets overlooked sometimes for as much as it contributed to the twentieth century, How.

Did that history was?

The bicycle I got to believe was more of a European thing that then came to the US.

Yeah, the earliest bicycles were developed in Europe, and then the technology kind of migrated to the United States, and all the major advancements I would say really took place in Europe, you know, starting with the addition of pedals on the front with the velocipede, and then the high wheel bikes of the eighteen seventies and then replaced by the chain in Sprocket systems.

Now you have what they called safety bikes with wheels of the same size.

But yeah, we forget what a boom it was here in the eighteen nineties.

It were selling millions of bikes every year and using some early mass production techniques as well, which would then be adopted by the auto industry.

You mean, moving assembly line kind of manufacturing techniques to some extent.

The Pope Company in Connecticut probably had the most advanced factory for bicycles of its time, but they were producing parts using mass production techniques with specialized machines, building them in enormous quantities and rudimentary moving a Sembuland obviously Henry Ford took it to a much farther extent a few years later, but the seeds were planted, so to speak.

So any idea why there was a diversion from like, you have bicycles motorcycles, but then you have automobiles that I mean, why wasn't there some consolidation there.

Yeah, that's a good question, and you're right.

Some manufacturers go in those specific directions and that's it.

And you know there's a natural sort of bridge, I guess from bicycles to motorcycles.

Right, you're just putting an engine on it.

But automobiles kind of developed separately, right, developed in Germany with Carl Benz and his pot and wagen and three wheel initially, and I think a lot of that was just to accommodate the size of the engine, Right, it's got to be a bigger Chassi and the bigger platform.

But motors get smaller.

Bicycles and motorcycles I should say, become more practical.

But you're right, there is a real distinction in the early development of those two technologies.

Don't you have some car at the museum that predates the Benz Wagon?

I mean, you might argue, really is the first automobile.

We have an eighteen sixty five steam carriage built by Sylvester Roper, who in Slee later went on to build steam motorcycles as well.

And you're right.

That does predate the Benz Potten vaguen a little, but the difference, I think is that it's steam powered, for one, whereas Benz was working around the internal combustion engine.

And also Roper never had any imaginings of building this thing on a commercial scale or selling it to the public.

It was literally a carnival attraction.

You pay money to go watch this thing move under its own power, which must have been pretty exciting in eighteen sixty five.

So I mean, how did this thing work?

I mean, what was the heat source?

Well, that's the thing.

You know, we talk about the advantages of steam and electric cars, and you know, one thing said for steam was a proven technology at the turn of the twentieth century, and it worked very well.

Developed low torque, didn't need to shift gears with a steam car.

But a lot of people kind of forget that a steam car still requires some hydrocarbon fuel because you've got to heat up the water to make the steam in the first place.

You know, why not cut out the technological middleman and just go straight to an internal combustion powered car or an ice engine.

But it takes what twenty to thirty minutes to build up the steam in the steam car, so an internal combustion engine, that fire is right up with a you know, a hand crank or even an electric starter, so much more convenient than the steam.

Absolutely, and you're right it did take a while to build up ahead of steam.

Some companies, White in particular, eventually developed flash boilers.

We could heat up your water in about ninety seconds two minutes, so kind of eliminate a lot of that problem.

But the other issue was, you know, finding soft water is easy here in the Midwest or in the East.

It's tough finding soft water or water period out in the desert southwest, so that was an issue that hampered the steam car as well.

How many cars you actually have.

At the Henry Report Museum, We've got about three hundred, and I always say about because we have things like a chassis from a nineteen forty Oldsobil which had the automatic transmission, the first hydramatic.

We have a four gt which is cutting too, is a display piece for the Detroit Auto Show.

So you know, it's up to you whether you want to call that whole car or not.

But about three hundred's a good figure.

So, Mike, you've been to lots and lots of car museums.

I mean, how does their collection impress you?

The thing that I love about it is that it does this might son.

Obviously, it covers the history of the car and especially the mass produced.

Like the thing I always remember is like, oh wow, they have a crust or.

Minivan and they have you know, they have cars you wouldn't normally see in the museum, but are this huge piece of history and like where the industry went.

And also you know, there's definitely something there.

Everyone can go in and be like, oh I and I remember that, or my my parents had that.

And yeah, you've got some really rare pieces too, very expensive pieces.

And how do you go about determining what should be?

And now, obviously the museum has been around an awful long time, and you inherited you yourself, Matt inherited a collection that's already there.

I got to imagine, though there's still pieces that you would like to add.

What are they?

I always have a wish list of things that we should have, and a couple of things on that list I would love an early Saturnes series.

Right this idea of general motors trying to copy the Japanese style and sort of way of producing automobiles and building them literally out of the motor city in Tennessee.

I would also love a Tesla model s right, the car that made electrics cool again, getting back to our original subjects.

So if anybody's out there and has one of those that they're.

Looking to, should be easy to find.

One, one would hope, yes.

And certainly the Saturn sold in big numbers and the Tesla's you know, people seem to like them at the time, you know, early adopters buying those, but got to have one in the collection.

Is there anything rare that you would like to see in the collection?

You know, it's interesting the rarest cars tend to be the ones that were the most common at the time they were sold.

Not too long ago we acquired a Ford Mustang too, which is like nobody's idea of a dream car or a collector.

Amen to that, right, right, But you know, these.

Were cars that sold very very well at the time, kept the Mustang brand alive.

And there's this whole thing called the Malaise era.

Right as manufacturers were dealing with new emissions restrictions and technologies and consumers are interested in fuel economy, all of a sudden, the cars just frankly weren't very good for a few years there, and you know, nobody's collecting or saving that kind of stuff.

We needed to have one in the museum to represent that era as much as we might like to forget it.

So it was a great acquisition.

I was thinking that you were going to say, some rare hand crafted body, you know, spectacular long limousine or sedan from the nineteen thirties or something like that.

Yeah, well, that's one thing I think that sets our collection apart from others too.

There are certainly other museums that go deeper into certain makes or models or types of cars.

I don't know that anyone can touch our breadth because you know, on the one end, we've got a seventy eight Dodge Omni.

The other hand, we have the thirty one Bugatti Royale.

Speaking of very rare cars, so just about everything in between those two goalposts as well.

So it's an interesting thing.

You know, you're talking, Mike, that they have cars that are common more or less, I mean, not scessarily exclusive, But you guys can textualize everything.

I mean, if somebody goes to the museum and they walk through the displays, they can learn why there was this evolution and why different vehicles look the way they do.

I mean, and you have house trailers and all kinds of transportation.

Yeah, and that's the thing we always hope visitors kind of take away from our auto exhibits.

You know, they're about cars, but they're really about people, right, and it's about how people have changed over the last one hundred and twenty hundred and thirty years to meet the car's needs, and how the cars impacted every facet of our lives, where we work, where we play, how we eat, et cetera.

So those kind of contextualizations are really really important to the way we tell stories at the entry floor.

And the other thing I like too, is it goes well beyond cars.

And so you're you're the curator of transportation.

You know, I probably took my first tour of the Henry Ford Museum when I was about six or seven years old, and it made a lasting impression.

Because you have these gigantic steam powered locomotives inside the museum.

Does that come under your purview?

It does?

Yeah.

I get to work with the railroad equipment as well, And you're right that alleganty locomotive.

That's the one thing I think every everybody sees it and remembers it when they come to visit the museum.

It's always fun to see.

So what else besides trains includes your part as the curator of transportation.

Yeah, well, we've got a modest collection of airplanes that are all civilian aircraft, all pre World War Two.

But within those parameters we've got im boarding examples of just about every significant aircraft of that time.

We do have some railroad locomotives.

We have a diesel locomotive, a few steam locomotives.

We have some.

Cars as well.

Henry for a while owned a railroad that Detroit, Tulito and Kington, so we've got a locomotive and a caboose from that line.

And we've got a couple of small watercraft as well.

Nothing major but steam launch for example, from the turn of the twentieth century.

Things like that.

A little bit of everything.

But another interesting thing is is that while people might think, oh, it's the Henry Ford Museum, therefore it's going to just be full of Fords.

I mean, isn't like you have the first accord that came off the line.

Yes, that's on to us from Honda Generalcy.

But yeah, the very first Accord that was built in Ohio, so the first Japanese badged automobile built in the United States, which is an important piece for what it represents in shifting perceptions of cars import versus domestic.

Yeah, no, I think that's an important point that you made there, Gary.

It's not just for it.

In fact, Fords are probably in the minority of everything that's on display there, at least amongst the cars.

You also have a racing display too, you guys get into the history of motor race sign.

Yeah, we've collected from the beginning racing.

Racing was an important part of the turn of the twentyth century for improving the technology and proving the technology right.

It was some of the best advertising at the time, as it still is to some extent today.

But we've got some pretty significant cars there.

The nineteen oh eight or nineteen oh six Locomobile, which won the nineteen o eight Vanderbilt Cup in nineteen oh eight is kind of seen as a turning point in the American industry because we win the Vanderbilt Cup.

GM as founded, the Model T is launched, so that's important.

More recent things like the Lotus Ford, the first rear engine car to win to Indiana nineteen sixty five, and the one everybody loves, the sixty seven Mark four with Gurney and Floyd at Lamal when Ford was taking it out against Ferrari in those days.

At one point too, you had one of Juan Manuel fond Geo's Grand Prix cars Mercedes from the mid fifties fifty five, fifty six or something like that, that was on loan to you right from Mercedes Benz and then they they said, okay, that's enough, were calling it back to Germany.

It was our car, believe it or not.

And this opens up indiuar discussion about you know, what we have and why we have it, and that was one that we dea session, which is a formal process where we kind of review what we have and it you know, it has to get approved all the way up to the board of Directors.

We opted to remove that car from our collection because it were really our focused on the American market in American innovation, so unquestionably a very important car and it was a big attraction, but it just didn't fit what we were trying to do so sometimes we do that, you know, more often than not we're bringing things in rather than taking them out.

But it does happen.

Do you own or does the museum own all the vehicles or do you have colle or others that you switch things in and out with.

We do have some cars on loan.

We talked about the accord.

We also have a few cars from our friends at GM move loan to some significant racing cars and production cars, and we'll bring things in for special events like our Motor Muster and Old Car Festival.

But most of what you see when you go to the museum is from the collection of the Henry Ford, owned by the organization.

So if these guys at GM can't get you a Saturn, come on, you're watching we go get mad a Saturn?

What about ev One?

Do you have one of those GM's first electric car.

We do have an ev One.

I love that car and it's not an exaggeration state it's the greatest electric car of the twentieth century, but maybe not the greatest electric of all time anymore.

Are these cars all in runnable condition?

Is that an important part for the museum or no.

It's a mix, you know, a lot of what we have we don't run on a regular basis because to run a car you kind of have to keep running it, and we'd be doing nothing but driving cars all day.

Not a bad job, but we have other things to do, so some mic does.

There you go.

But for the most part we drain the fluids, put the cars up on jackstands, etc.

Just for the long term preservation.

We do have some vehicles that will run on a semi regular basis.

Of course, we have a whole fleet of model ts.

We're running out of Greenville Village every day in the summertime.

That's a point for anybody who's never been to Greenfield Village, which is right next to the Henry Ford Museum, not just called the Henry Ford, right, so you can get rides and model ts.

Yeah, people always enjoy that, and I think they're moved not just by the car itself and the technology, but the experience of being in an open air touring car.

And you start to realize that was a big selling point at the turn of the twentieth century, right getting the fresh air, getting out there, feeling the breeze, seeing and being seen.

Frankly, riding in an automobile.

It's we're a big deal.

See.

This is an interesting point though.

So if you go to Greenfield Village, you can also take a carriage ride and you have these dray horses, I mean these giant horses that are pulling people.

And this gets back to the beginning when we were talking about how how people thought that cars are a noisy and smelly and indeed, if you're walking through the village and you those cars are noisy and smelly, but you've got to watch we were walking because the horses deposit things that could fill a.

City absolutely, and you know, we only have about four or six horses working in the village at any one time, and they do leave a bit of a mess.

But the one thing we can't get across is like this is just a small portion of what you would have seen one hundred and twenty years ago in this city.

So it's tough to imagine today.

Man.

You know, we were talking about all these cars and things that you have on display.

You guys have got some incredible records too, photography documents and the like.

Is that available to researchers or others you know, or you tell the story?

Yeah, no, absolutely, We've got a great collection of automotive history.

The two core pieces we have Ford Motor Companies corporate records going up to about nineteen fifty three or so, so right from the beginning nineteen oh three.

We have the articles of incorporation that Henry Companies signed to get the automaker off the ground.

There.

But we also have the collections of Henry Austin Clark, who is a well known automotive collector for many, many decades, and he collected a little bit of everything.

A lot of published sort of consumer material, marketing materials, brochures, tlests.

Those are a phenomenal resource, but a lot beyond automobiles as well, a great collection of trade catalogs, industry catalogs, etc.

And yes, all of that is available for research by the public.

You can make an appointment through our benson Ford Research Center and we can help you.

If you're not in the immediate southeast Michigan area, we can often help you remotely as well.

Get you what you need is a lot of that digitized or not?

I mean, can you search this online?

We are working on it.

We've got more than two hundred thousand items digitized right now, which is great, but we have about twenty six million collections.

Little ways to go.

Yet you got some job security in that or somebody does.

All right, So John, remember the train.

I remember that you have presidential limousines.

Do you still have those?

Yeah, we still have those out on display.

We have five different presidential vehicles, and yet to your point, for them are Lincoln automobiles that were built for various presidents, going back to FDR right up to last.

One was built for Nixon and used through the first George Bush, believe or not, and the best.

You also have the car that Kennedy was assassinated at.

Yes, yes, and that's that's always astonishing when people see that and you assume it would have been destroyed or locked away in a government warehouse somewhere, but no, In fact, after Kennedy was shot, they just practically they needed an automobile, and they figured it was FASTERI to rebuild what they had than to start from scratch.

So that car was completely stripped down, rebuilt, given a permanent roof, bullet resistant windows and armor and all of that in about six or seven months in a very quick fix, and then continue to be used right up through nineteen seventy seven.

And I'm kidding even though that was the car that Kennedy had been shot at.

Absolutely, and I've always read that Johnson in particular kind of avoided that car whenever he could, I think, for obvious reasons.

Yeah, right, Yeah, pretty astonishing.

In fact, maybe I'm confusing.

Museums.

Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Doesn't they Ford also have the chair that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in, replete with bloodstains.

You are correct, we do have that chair, and it's kind of coincidental that that and the Kennedy limousine are both there.

But Henry was a big admirer of Abraham Lincoln so purchased a lot of Lincoln memorabilia in the chair belonged to the Ford family, no relation the Ford theater family in Washington, and they sold it at auction and he had the resources to buy it.

So we've had it ever since.

Go into a little bit and you know, we're getting down to the end of the segment here.

How did the Henry Ford Museum start?

Yeah, we're getting close to our one hundredth anniversary here.

Was founded in nineteen twenty nine and Henry envisioned it as a kind of living, breathing tribute to Thomas Edison, who was his great hero and friend.

And his idea is that we shouldn't just be capturing history about the military, or history about great leaders or politicians.

It should be history of everyday life.

So he collected a lot of common things and things that ironically are not so common anymore because they weren't saved, they weren't thought of his importance.

But that's what I I had always heard is that Henry realized that the world has industrialized, was changing very, very rapidly.

He also recognized that he was one of the culprits for that happening.

And here was a guy who loved you know, Bucolic rural scenes and the like, and wanted to capture that before it disappeared, and he knew it was going to disappear.

Yeah, it's the sort of great irony of Henry Ford in his work.

You're right, he, more than anyone, is probably responsible for that transformation in the United States, but he wanted to preserve some of life as he knew it growing up in the eighteen sixties eighteen seventies.

So there's a lot of focus on that in our collections, but we've always collected things from the modern day as well and continued to collect modern innovations right to the present.

Okay, so let's go full circle on this.

You mentioned that Henry and Thomas Edison were great friends.

So why internal combustion rather than electric motors?

Way back when, Henry was always a believer in internal combustion.

His first car, the Quadricycle of eighteen ninety six, had an internal combustion engine, and he just thought it gas was the best compromise field.

It got you the most power for the weight that it was.

I mean, batteries and electric motors tended to be very heavy and very expensive.

Also got your great range.

I mean, the best electric car of the nineteen teens might get you seventy eighty miles on a charge under ideal conditions.

It's not bad, not too bad.

Yeah.

But also you're that's had about twenty five miles an hour, right.

Yeah, Yeah, and a Model T gets twenty miles to the gallant ten gallan tate two hundred miles of range, so that's a big improvement.

So yeah, that's so.

Thomas and Henry didn't like mix it up over what was the way to go, but they didn't.

I think Edison was a little disappointed that his batteries and electric cars in particular didn't didn't last a little longer.

But Ford did experiment with some electric cars, never went into production, perhaps never had any serious intention of producing the but he and Edison did collaborate on a couple of one offs.

So you mentioned also the early tires failing on flat tires on these early vehicles, and Harvey's fire Stone is a friend of these guys too.

Absolutely, Yeah.

Firestone had a contract to supply tires to Ford even before the Model T and obviously all he did very well for the Model T success as its entry, and the three of them had a great time going on those camping trips in the nineteen teens in the early twenties.

Well, in fact, there's still a family connection there.

So Chairman of Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford's mother is a Firestone.

Absolutely yees, so it's still there.

I realize that.

Yeah, Look, we're gonna have to wrap this segment up.

But Matt Anderson, thanks so much for coming on.

Very interesting.

If any of you and the audience have not been to the Henry Ford, if you ever get a chance, go take it.

It's an amazing museum, and.

I'd say make a chance, don't.

Yeah, make a chance.

And in fact, I mean you could probably spend a week there and still not really fully absorb everything that's in the museum.

There's so much to say.

Terrific, Thank you very much, been a pleasure, real good.

We're going to take a quick break here.

We're going to be coming back and talking about more automotive history, making the life full of memories, one road trick at a time.

That's what really matters rich down whether peep.

Tires with the seventy thousand mile women at warranty.

All right, we're back and we're making a guest change here.

We're going to get a mic on our new guest right now.

But we've got Steve Perty here from Shunpiker Productions, right who has written a book and Seohn, I don't know if I'm holding it up right or not.

You got it on the screen here.

So it's called Mass Cops in Motion, yes, a subtitle.

A hefty tome, I'll have you know.

It's about five pounds and it is jam packed with all kinds of pictures of hood ornaments, grills, tailfins.

You tell the story, Steve.

He wrote the book.

It's subtitle is Images and Stories of Automotive Aesthetics, and it's forty years of my photography of hood ornaments and other details of automotive design.

I started doing those, I don't know, forty years ago or so when I inherited kind of a high end thirty five millimeter camera with a two hundred millimeter lens, and I discovered the Concorde de Legance at Meadowbrook about the same time, and.

I went to the show.

And when you're looking at cars through a long lens like that, it just kind of draws you into the details like the hood ornaments and things like ever reflections.

And because you're getting a close up, and because of that the compression factor of that lens, it's the background is blurred.

He's got a narrow depth of field, and so they ended up being kind of artsy.

Well, in the early days, you know, I'd go there with pockets full of film and maybe one in fifty shots were keepers.

But after doing that for a number of years, then you know, I just kind of learned how to really get beautiful images.

So and about the same time, part of the Concorde de Legance was the Automotive Fine Art exhibit.

The Automotive Fine Art Society had their annual show there, So I got to know all of those guys and was influenced by people like Tom Hale and then you know the major automotive artists.

So so that artistic influence and looking through that long lens, you know, I went.

I went to the concur every year and whatever other car shows I could find, and you know I was I was shooting blossoms and faces of animals and other things, but that long lens, but I was always drawn to those hood ornaments.

So how many pictures are in the book.

Three hundred and twenty images, about three hundred and sixteen pages, and I've added about fifty thousand words of text, just enough text to kind of put them all in context.

Sometimes they're about the company, that the company and what it meant about the car itself.

Sometimes it's it's how I captured the image and why I captured it, what drew me to that.

So the the it's not a scholarly work and it's not an encyclopedic work.

It's just those images that caught my eye.

Over All, those years, and so you shot every one of these amages my gas.

So I mean, you've got three hundred plus in here.

You probably have a lot more in your life more.

The hardest part about doing that book was culling those thousands, tens of thousands.

Of So what was your criteria?

First going well, yes, this one goes in that one.

I'd love it, but I'm not going to put it in.

Well, I would go, I'm not very organized with my computer storage systems.

So I would go to a car show that I had shot, and I just kind of skimmed through the images and I'd see some of them jump out at me and some of them wouldn't.

So all those that jumped out at me, I'd kind of separate those, and then I'd go through those again, and then I'd go again and again, and I knew about how many I wanted for the book, So the hardest part was really deciding, because you know, there are so many that caught.

And also, when I started the book, it was going to be about hood ornaments.

But when I started calling these pictures from all the car shows that I'd shot, a lot of other things jumped out at me, like this big Buick grill that became in the book, a two page spread for those kind of things.

Cadillac tail fence Cadillac tale fifty nine Eldorado, right, yes, fifty nine.

There's a couple of images like that.

In fact, one of the images in the book, and one of the very few that I shot indoors without a flash, but indoors, was when the Cadillac when GM had their Cadillac collection stored in a warehouse between when it was downtown and when they moved it out to the to the Heritage Center, and I stuck my way into the warehouse, got some good images.

But it's just the tail fit of the Cadillac.

But behind it kind of blurred was the Christmas tree for they that they had in the little little museum that they had there.

So that became my Christmas card for a couple of years.

You may have got one of them.

So, Steve, you've taken these images in largely of details of vehicles.

I mean, what vehicles have features that you'll not forget?

Well, I'll tell you.

Generally speaking, the nineteen fifties cars are the most striking because they're the most unusual and the most high design.

The thirties cars a lot of times looked alike, but you zoom in on the details and you find a lot of differences.

The hood ornaments particularly are different from one to the other.

But it's probably the fifties cars that are the most dramatic and the most striking, and probably the most photogenic.

You sent us some photos ahead of time.

I don't know if, Sean, if you've been showing them or should we pick out some and talk about them or what?

Okay, well, but I don't know which, why I don't remember which?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so so you can yeah, so that one.

Take a look at that one.

Now, that's another example of what changed when I started the book.

When I was thinking about hold on it, I came across an image.

Like that where and the images is it's got to be a grill of a car, right you can?

Can you tell any more about it?

Maybe you can hold it up?

So hold it up.

But I have from the photo I cannot tell what this is.

Well.

That the bar across the middle is the bar that locates the headlights on a thirties Dusberg, early thirties Dusenberg.

The patterns you see there are a result of the grille slats, some being tilted one way, some being tilted the other way.

And for a photographer, the worst thing to shoot cars at a car show is a bright sunny day.

But in this case, what happens is the sun hits that bar and it makes those wonderful scalops go in both directions.

So that's when I decided that I would include some abstracts, the ones that you'd look at and have to kind of guess what they were, but they were just they but they struck my eye.

Basically, Oh there's a good one.

I don't know if I can turn to this this page quickly or not, but you even have like an Oldsmobile ornim yes, and the photos all rusted out, and here's a forward one.

There you go, that's all rusted out.

So I mean you're not just trying to go for beauty shots.

Oh No, these are car shows and junk yards and backyards wherever it's.

Wherever one of these jumped out at me, I shot him.

In fact, let me tell you about one of my favorite spots in Middle Tennessee.

Right at the base of the Cumberland Plateau.

There's an old guy that his livelihood was collecting nineteen fifties cars and using it as a salvage yard.

Put his kids through school that way.

When I first ran into him, he's about eighty years old.

He hadn't really been selling parts much.

He was just playing with them all.

But he had about thirty of them out in front of his place, and they're surrounded by a fence, and gosh, they're just all rusty and beautiful old fifties cars, nothing but fifties cars.

So I asked him if I could shoot him, and so he let me shoot him.

But then twenty years later I went back again.

Now he's ninety something.

Couldn't come out to talk to him, but his son let me in there, and a lot of those ended up in the book because they're they're they're strikingly textured with rust and old paint.

The young man paint in some of those cars with house paint when he was a kid.

But but but part of the charm of these details is for one thing, the rusty ones, they really have a character.

And the other is and I was telling you about a sunny day being what a what a what a photographer doesn't like, what a what a photographer does like is a rainy day because those shiny hood ornaments and the shiny cars and the paint and the details sparkle in in that little bit of rain and it adds a depth to that picture that's just strikingly beautiful.

I think so, Mike, at one point you were in this world sort of deeply when you were with Hemming's.

I mean, what is that culture of people who are interested in things like this?

Uh, I don't I don't know exactly.

I'd say it goes deep.

I mean there's a lot of you know, the details, especially when you get into pre work cars.

I mean it's there's an obsessive museum like you know, archaeology almost too they made, you know, or if you get into more bespoke cars that might have changed their hood ornaments, right, it's that they made this one, you know, from this year to this year.

But then you know you read it on the internet and there's different, uh, you know, conflicting stories of like well this one might have been in this state of this year, and it it just goes all the way down.

You know.

If if model trains aren't enough for you, I'd say get into automotive ornaments.

I offer the disclaimer in the front of the book that that you know, I've captured all these photographs of what car they were on, and I cautioned people not to not to take that for gospel, because often there are two different stories about when a what ornament was used and when it wasn't used, and what one was used on which cars, and all that kind of stuff.

So previous books that I've done, you know, I really enjoyed the writing, but I didn't enjoy the research that much.

It was tedious.

But this book, the research was as much fun as the writing.

Why Well, because every time I thought I knew a story it seemed and I went into fact check it, somewhere I found out there was another story and maybe another story, and it led me deeper and deeper, and some of them ended up being really huge stories.

So tell us your favorite one.

Well, I'm glad you ask.

You know our friend Maureen McDonald.

Yes, she and I are working on sort of working on a historical novel about Eleanor of Alasko Thornton, who was the model that posed for the Rolls Royce Wood ornament.

The spirit that's oh no, it's a big story.

That's I talk about a lot of that in the book.

Well, she thought that doing a historical novel about this young lady who was right in the middle of the first fifteen years of automobiling in Britain with King Edward the seventh and mister Rolls and mister Royce and her paramour, Lord Montague, who started the first automotive magazine back in the day, would make a wonderful story for a historical novel.

Well, Eleanor Thornton died in nineteen fifteen when she and her paramour, Lord Montague were crossing the Mediterranean.

He was going to India to be the Crowns representative transportation representative.

She was going to go to Cairo, turn around and come back and run the magazine while he was gone.

Well, as they were passing Crete, their pleasure boat was sunk by a German u boat.

She perished and he survived, and in the end.

Twenty years later, Lord Montague wrote in his memoirs a scene of them clinging tightly to each other as the boat was sinking, and a big wave came along and ripped her out of his arms, and she perished and he survived for three days on an upturned lifeboat.

So David Attenborough and Martin Scorsese bought the rights to a similar story, and they were going to produce a documentary some in or twenty twelve, I think, but it was going to be centered on the founding of Rolls Royce.

Well, this would be the same story, but it would be centered on Eleanor of Alasko Thorpe.

I think your story is more interesting.

I was going to say, what did the lady Montague think when, well, Lord Montague came home with a car that had his paramore's image on them.

Well, she might have been in the passenger seat, because Lord Montague's wife.

You know, back in those days at the turn of the century, for a wealthy, powerful man to have a woman on the side basically to hand handle some needs and the wife is at home taking care of all the other needs.

They got to know each other and she respected They respected each other because Lord Montague's wife knew how valuable she was to him in running the magazine.

She did road test reports with him.

She did she was the manager of the office.

She was the main clerk for the thousand mile rally in nineteen hundred, which kind of established automobile in Britain as a thing.

So it's really a wonderful story.

So hood Ornaments led you to this stright, that's amazing.

So that's the most fun one.

But there's plenty of others, like the packerd of I mean, the Pierce Arrow, the Archer.

You've seen the Archer well like Cupid.

Yes, right, that.

One was designed by a woman named her name is escaping me at the moment.

She was the first full time auto designer in Detroit.

Essentially she worked for the Turnstat Division, who designed a lot of these for the manufacturers, for all different manufacturers.

Well, she used the janitor for her model and sent him to an archery school to make sure he had the right pose so she could sculpt him shirtless.

And oh gosh, I wish I could remember her name rather No, no, that wasn't it.

No company.

Wow, there's story signs of those stories in this book that I found.

The Midge, the MG Midge and old MG's.

You'll see what looks like a mosquito about that high and an aftermarket person in nineteen twenty first produced those for MG's because the Midge was sort of a sounded like midget and that was the name of the car back then, DMG Midget basically, so they used this mosquito like thing, and the company said, we don't want to pesky mosquito on our cars, so we're not going to authorize that.

But then the MG owners loved it so much that the company had to eventually produce it and sell it.

So I want to get back to the spirit of ecstasy, okay.

So I mean to this day that is legendary.

I mean, Rose Royce continues to have, you know, photographers and models and it's a living story of all of these hood ornaments that you've taken pictures of.

I mean, that's got to be the most famous.

Why do you think that's the case.

Well, they went away primarily for both stylistic reasons and for practical ones.

In the nineteen fifties the late nineteen fifties, the hood ornaments just kind of became badges sort of, and part of it was safety issues because people would get them paled on them if you get hit by a car, and others were just plain stylistic.

There's so much filigree on the car.

I think the hood ornament itself became superfluous basically, and probably the last ones that you could call that ended up on the fenders.

There were one on each fender and that was in the early sixties on some full size Pontacs and mostomobiles and things like that.

So they just went away for both stylistic and practical reasons.

I think they Rolls Royce hood ornament, which very classy and still exists now on your Rolls Rice.

When you turn off the car, a little trap door opens and she folds down in under the hood.

The trap door closes on top of her.

Yeah.

Because they became so desirable, people would deal them.

Yeah.

And in the sixties, of course the hippies would steal the Mercedes emblems off the hood of the car because it looked like a peace symbol if you turn it upside down.

So what was.

The last hood ornament?

Well, the.

Like we say, the Spirit of Ecstasy is still made, so I still made.

So but the gosh, I want to say, Jaguar didn't.

They have the leaper the well on some of the cars and my boxes are still my box being made.

They still use the hood art but but the last ones that were on the car was probably the Jaguar because they used the leaper even on the ones they made here in Detroit.

The Jaguar S Type was that what they called it X type?

No, the one that was built alongside the Lincoln LS in Wickson S Type Yeah, yes.

What I don't remember that was built him?

Yes, yes, it was built on the same platform, on the same powertrain as the Lincoln LS and Wickham and the Thunderberg.

Yeah, wick I don't remember that at all.

It was a nice looking car, I think.

I don't know if its quality was up to par, but I had an LS and the interior quality on that was pretty dismal, so maybe maybe it.

Wasn't enough quality.

But that was before that was when Ford still owned Jaguar basically, so so that went away.

But yeah, hood ornaments are a wonderful thing, you know, but it just led to so much other stuff.

When I did the book.

What do you think of today's cars?

That?

I mean, well, a lot of people say to me.

You know, I've been reviewing cars for twenty twenty five years, and when i drive down the road on a long highway drive, I'm looking in the rear miror can kind of challenge myself to see how far back I can identify that car.

Or one company the other.

So people say to me, you know, cars all look the same these days.

Well, if you went to the auto show and you strolled around slowly, you'd find some pretty interesting stuff.

And it doesn't all look alike.

But so much of it is.

Evolutionary and not dramatic that you know that it seems that way now.

Hyundai and Kia.

Look at how they're leading design right now.

You know, you look at one of the new new Hyundai and because the palisade or the tail you ride, I mean, that's pretty strike.

They're very dict that doesn't look like other cars in this class.

So I you know, I the golden age of automotive design was probably American automotive design was probably the nineteen fifties, just because it was so varied.

But in the classic area of the thirties was wonderful.

But today there's still quite a lot of variety out there if you look closely, I.

Think, Steve, if we go back to the hood ornament and the other details, it seems to me that at one point they were added to draw people to the vehicle as something particularly special, and a lot of that is gone by the wayside as they look for ways to reduce costs and make them more well maybe not more affordable, but at least less expensive.

Yeah, I don't know if the cost was the biggest issue in the early days when they still called them mascots instead of hood artiments, because they were essentially like an athletic team's mascot, meant to reflect something about the brand essentially, and so Pontiac of course had its Indian head and that lasted in different forms, different styles right up into the nineteen fifties.

Plymouth had the sailing ship, same theme, lasted all the way into the fifties.

Packard, on the other hand, had probably six or seven or eight different, totally different images for their hood ornaments, so those also were meant to say something about the elegance or the speed or the class of the cock or something like that.

But even Chevrolet and you know, lesser brands had some pretty fancy hood ornaments in their name.

Now, these all evolved from radiator cap yes, is that not right?

And then the first radiator caps actually had temperature gauges so that when you're in the driver's seat you could see if your engine was going to.

Overheat or That was called a boice motimeter.

I have a whole chapter on voice motometers.

What happened was Boyce invented that thing, and it got pretty popular because people wanted to see the temperature of their water and so forth.

But it wasn't long before Packard and other companies started embellishing those motimeters with their little crest or their little design.

Packard even put a whole hood ornament behind the motimeter in the latter days.

But then in the twenties, temperature gauges moved inside the car, so they didn't need the motimeter anymore.

But by then it was really I mean, it was accepted that that they had to have some kind of of a hood ornament.

So that's when they became hood ornaments rather than mascot essentially what the collectors would tell you.

So some of them were head ornaments, some of them are just badges.

But I think we've now we're in this era when these sort of things are getting even.

More simplified and flatten.

I think of Volkswagen or Audi, Alphameo Cadillac even as simplified the crest.

What you're feeling on that as as a trend.

Well.

There it's essentially their their logo or their look, the Audi has the four circles and Mercedes has their their star and so so these badges still have their kind of logo look basically, but their badges, they're nothing more than badges essentially, and some of them have some interest to them, some of them don't.

I like the you know as a as a as a guy who likes the aesthetics of it all.

Basically, I like the different different designs that I see.

You know, some Europeans have a little more artistic feel to them, and uh and and then Kea with their new ai A bad I just love that because it was so simple and so classy.

But yeah, the the esthetics of it are much simpler.

They're much less artsy than they used to be.

What do you think about Is there an opportunity here, because you know, to just say it's got a badge, well, you know, there seems to be an opportunity to connote more of what the spirit of the brand is all about and add some artistic flavor to it.

Yeah, I think the simplification is a mistake.

And mean you look at you know, iconic badges not necessarily quota orments, but you know, Ferrari Portia Lamborghini, they're still doing the same one, and you know they'll speak it here and there, but you know they're not taking elements out or rendering it, you know, from an actual shape.

They're not turning the horse into like some pixelated representation.

So I mean, do you think that automakers are doing that from a design perspective in order to make it seem as though they're more advanced?

And consequently, I mean, so you know you're mentioning, you know, in folkswag and what with its flat design for its logos and a lot of that was influenced by the design on the iPhone in terms of what the app designs look like.

And is it do you think they're trying to associate themselves more closely with technology?

Yeah, I think some of it is you, Yeah, you want to be seen as current and modern, and it's changed for change's sake.

So it's you know, it's a very easy thing to say, well we need to do something different.

Well we haven't updated the logo in twenty years, let's do that.

And some of that is some of that is a justified want to feel current.

You know, if you put the old like flowers and ducts.

If you resurrected the nineteen eighties Cadillac badge with the laurels on the side, that's going.

To look dated, kind of old, and not in a good retro way.

But I think I think they have gone a little too far to just say we're going to strip it of all of its decoration, when by definition it is a decoration.

So I should have a little bit of flat.

You know, it's interesting think about think about you know we're talking about Ford earlier.

I mean, think about the Ford badge, I mean his script.

I mean it's not changed.

It's timeless.

Yeah, really, it's evolved over time, but not much, but not much.

You still recognize it.

For the early one.

I like the idea of increasing the stylizing.

The stylized designed Cadillac in their celestique.

Was it one of one of the recent concept cars, not the production version, but the concept car had a wonderful little strip down the side, and inside that strip was a depiction of the Cadillac Goddess that was the hood ornament for thirty or forty years.

Just she's done in plastic, she's done in an outline, but it's a reference to the no.

I love that idea.

And you know, with today's technology, there's a lot that you could do with badging to make it much more artistic, you know, standing out.

I'm thinking, I just saw a company just this week.

I'm trying to I see so many different things that has developed the technology to mold led lights right into plastic badging so that you can have not just a badge sitting there that's some sort of coded plastic but is illuminated, right.

And you don't want to go too far, you know, you don't want the Tokyo by Night School of Design or it's you know, doing all these different things.

But there's got to be a way to really take badging to another level here.

You know.

They had a press conference some years ago with George Jarro, the young young mister George Arrow, and I asked him at the end, I said, what designs do you like and not like?

Or what do you like about design?

What you don't like about modern design?

And he said, well, I really like the way that the different markets, the European market, the Japanese market, the American market have their own language, thrown design language.

And he gave a couple examples of that, and I think that's true.

Think of the think of the Japanese, the little Japanese fun cars, the K cars, well yeah yeah, the cave style car.

A lot of them looked like an anime puppy for goodness sakes, are so cute.

But and that's a purely Asian design.

You you see those here if they import a few of them.

Yeah, no, I'm not the K cars, they're very boxing and angular and all that.

I think you're thinking of.

Maybe if the figure, yeah.

Figure or the S cargo.

Yeah, those were fun design.

Yeah, of course that was back when Nissan was making money hand over.

For and they made it a whole series.

Those are the Zamba cars.

I think there were there might have been four, but there are three different desk cargo and the POW and the figure out.

We're all like, we're gonna make fun things.

Yes, but I thought those were wonderful.

I mean they stopped get Yeah, I haven't looked, I haven't I'm I haven't refreshed my memory on that, but yeah, they stopped coming up with the ideas or there was probably a financial crisis or yeah.

No, they were largely Japanese market only.

They so they never were sold in the United States.

The Cigarel they brought a bunch over I think, didn't they Those were they probably gray market.

Cars maybe I just saw one Wauntion not too long.

Yeah.

No, They're really good looking cars and uh and they got great publicity for Nissan the world over, but I think they were very niche.

They never really sold in big numbers.

I don't think they exported them much around the world as as Nissan.

Like I said, I'm sure there was a lot of gray market stuff that was going on.

I think we actually had a Pow in the studio that Chris Poker drove here.

Yeah, Chris, Chris definitely a big, big fan of the Powe.

Yeah yeah, so uh so Yeah, modern design, I think it needs a little more personality, a little more panache.

So so in your book, is it all American or are their European.

Car I start out talking about motimeters.

Then we go to a special chapter on l Leak you know the leak glass, Yes, very fast Leak.

I'll read La Lak made a renee Laleak.

I think his name was made thirty some different crystal months for cars back in the thirties, and to find an original of those today is just something because of course they were made out of crystal and you hit a big bump and they crack and break.

They're still reproduced today, but all these thirty some versions, I've got a book on that that I used for the research, but I've only seen a few, so I've got a chapter on them.

But then I go into the Brits and then to the Continental Europeans, then to General Motors, then to Ford Chrysler, and then a big chapter on American independence.

And then I finish up the book with a little short chapter on trucks because I had my designer said, I had a few pages yet to spend, so I got to have the bac who Well, the bulldog's in there.

And also, you know, my favorite one is on the DIVCO.

Have you ever noticed that?

You know?

Divco is the little humpy milk truck, the Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company.

They made that little humpy milk truck to stand up delivery truck and it had the nicest little art deco hood orn on it.

So that's kind of the way.

Well, the last image in the book, I wanted to end it with a little whimsy, so I included an image I got in Jackson, Michigan.

At the car show, somebody had a rag of the old pickup and he had welded a little crowbar under the front of his hood.

So it was also the hood pull and the hood ornament.

So that's the way I ended the book.

Okay, we're getting down to the NTR.

If people are watching the show and they go, dang, I'd like to get that, or maybe it'd make a great Christmas present.

Where can you get the bull?

Well, I found it about seventy percent of the people buy that book or buying it for gifts.

It's only available on my website, not on Amazon or any.

Of those sites.

Okay, so as your website Shunpiker Productions dot com s h U N p I k e R Shunpiker.

So it's is well, a shunpiker is one who shuns the turnpike, takes the back road instead of the highway.

In the spirits of Charles Carrault, Jack Kurowak, and William at least heat moving.

Turnpike is more of an East Coast kind of time, we would just call them highway.

Sorry, highway.

Yeah, but so's the back road kind of guy.

Yeah, I talk about that in the introduction to the book that that not all of my discoveries are on the back roads.

But I think that's kind of a basic way to live your your vehicular life, your travel life.

When you see a sign that says road ends or dead end, you go down there and see what's down there, because there's bound to be something pretty interesting down there.

So Shunpiker dot com.

Shunpiker Productions Productions dot dot com.

Yeah, only available there.

It's one hundred dollars and I'll ship it anywhere in the country and it'll always get a and that's part of a hundred dollar price.

Yes, one hundred dollars.

Price includes a personal inscription and shipped anywhere.

In the cotton US.

Cool beautiful book.

Yeah, beautiful shots in there too.

A lot of work.

It was a lot of work.

It took me forty years to take the pictures and it took me just a year to actually gather it up and get it to the designer.

And I hired a company in Grand Rapids that does just art books that's essentially an art book.

That's what I wanted to be.

Company in Grand Rapids did the production, so it was printed in China and did.

He handled all that logistical stuff, and I'm glad I hired that because they did a beautiful job.

It's a gorgeous book.

Thanks congratulations with that, we're going to wrap it up.

Okay, Steve Purdy, thanks so much for coming on.

We're having me.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, my Gosten, great to have you here.

Appreciate it.

Where's that road and Track issue?

Let's get that up here again.

We've actually got a physical copy, which I love because I don't know.

The digital stuff is convenient, but the printed version is so much better.

And I agree.

I don't get mini magazines these days, but I appreciate having one to hold on to.

And Darry, we won't be here next time.

We'll be eating.

Next week is Thanksgiving.

We're going to take that week off, but we hope all of you like this show.

Two weeks from now, we'll be right back here again.

O'll online.

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