by Steve Lehto
Even so, Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan announced that he would conduct hearings to determine “whether or not influence was used or claimed to be used” in the awarding of the Chicago plant to Tucker.27 Ferguson’s subcommittee began hearings in November 1946 and made Tucker and the men from the WAA defend the deal.28 Soon, everyone became aware of the convoluted fashion in which Tucker had acquired a multimillion-dollar plant, by passing checks that were bad and money orders that were not cashed. Subcommittee counsel grilled Tucker on the $150,000 check for which he had insufficient funds. Tucker insisted he would have covered it by mortgaging the machine shop or his family home. “When the check got back there, it would have been made good.”29
“Didn’t you know it was an offense to issue a worthless check in the state of Michigan?” counsel asked.
Tucker replied, “I didn’t think it was wrong. I was just trying to start a business and create some employment.”
The hearing degenerated into unfocused mudslinging. Tucker said he had been approached by a well-connected attorney, whose name he did not provide at first, who offered to secure the plant for Tucker for “six figures.”30 Later, when he identified the attorney, the man took the stand and denied any such exchange.31 One witness claimed Tucker’s lobbyist, a man named Edward Gaffney, had been promised a 10 percent stake in the Tucker Corporation in exchange for landing the plant. Tucker denied it. When the subcommittee called the lobbyist as a witness, he disappeared.32 Instead, Tucker testified that he had been strong-armed by another lobbyist who had said he could stop the NHA from taking away the plant in exchange for an 8 percent stake in the company. The individual denied this had ever happened.33
One WAA official gave his reason for giving the plant to Tucker: “Because I think he was a man with a plan, and he outlined his plan to us, and he had outlined a workable plan which called for finances, public financing. . . . This was the best proposal that was offered to the government for the disposition of this plant.” On the other hand, the NHA representative testified that Lustron would have made a fine tenant of the plant, particularly because the RFC was willing to lend the company the $52 million it needed.34
Eventually, the dispute ended up on the desk of President Truman himself, who refused to lend his support to the NHA’s demands. This ended the threat to Tucker—and also helped end the political career of Wyatt, who saw this failure as an indication he was losing sway in Washington. He resigned his post during the fight.35 Lustron did not lose out entirely. Before Wyatt left the NHA, he helped the company obtain a facility in Ohio and a new loan from the RFC for $12.5 million to get started.36
Though Tucker ended up keeping the plant, he was incensed by all the interference with his operation. Convinced that powerful people in the auto industry were lobbying against him, Tucker told anyone who would listen that Washington was being manipulated by Detroit.37
Before the Stock Offering
After negotiating the revised intent-to-lease agreement with the WAA, Tucker had contacted Floyd Cerf, and on October 2, 1946, they signed an agreement to allow Cerf to handle the sale of $20 million of Tucker Corporation stock to the public. Cerf worked out of Chicago’s financial district and had never handled a job this big. But Abraham Karatz had introduced him to Tucker, and Tucker had always trusted Karatz’s advice. Though Cerf agreed to handle the sale, he maintained his earlier precondition: before any stock was offered for sale, the Tucker Corporation must show a car to investors.1
Tucker agreed, and Cerf began preparing the registration statement to be filed with the SEC in May 1947. Although the original agreement with the WAA had called for Tucker to be fully funded by March, he was confident he would get an extension because of the time he had lost fighting over the plant with Lustron. Perhaps it seemed overly optimistic to some, but Tucker was right. At the eleventh hour, the March deadline would be pushed back to July 1.
Meanwhile, in his efforts to craft the prototype Cerf demanded, Tucker turned to a designer named Alex Tremulis, who would go on to become one of the most important people in Tucker’s organization. A young but well-established car designer, Tremulis was known for drawing beautiful cars. He did not attend design school or college and simply taught himself to draw, and he had a reputation for taking chances and ignoring convention. He also had a big ego; he once told an interviewer, “I operate on the basis that the meek shall inherit nothing.”2
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Alexander Sarantos Tremulis was born in 1914 in Chicago and showed an early aptitude for drawing. As a child, he “loved toy automobiles, planes and rocket ships. Everything else bored me.”3 He often skipped school—he flunked an art class he found boring4—and spent time at local car dealerships, drawing the Stutz and Duesenberg cars in the showroom. Tremulis often modified the appearance of the cars in his drawings, showing different concepts and variations he imagined. In later years, he would call himself an “Imagineer.”5
Dealership employees took note. In the 1930s Duesenbergs and other expensive cars often had custom bodies—coachwork—made to order, creating a demand for imaginative designers. Don Hogan, a Duesenberg sales manager, believed that Tremulis’s concepts had potential and asked him to sketch some designs for customers. Hogan paid him $1.50 for a pencil sketch and $2.50 for one drawn in India ink. Tremulis often provided finished drawings the day after they were requested. In 1933 Hogan hired the nineteen-year-old Tremulis full time to draw car concepts for customers.6
His drawings soon caught the attention of others in the industry. Eventually he was hired by Auburn Cord Duesenberg.7 At Duesenberg he got to feed his appetite for cars, with sometimes spectacular results.
In 1935 he test-drove a Duesenberg town car, hitting speeds in excess of 90 mph on country roads in Indiana. A car in front of him lost control—at least, that’s how Tremulis told the story in 1988—forcing Tremulis to put the Duesenberg in a ditch to avoid a collision. The car tumbled three times and came to rest upside down in a cornfield. Tremulis climbed out, happy to be alive, unaware he had several broken bones in his neck. Tremulis then “called an engineer at Duesenberg’s Chicago offices to tell him the test drive was running behind schedule.”8
In 1936 he was promoted to chief stylist at Auburn Cord Duesenberg, and he stretched his stylistic wings. He worked on one of the most iconic designs the company ever built: the supercharged Cord 812, well known to car enthusiasts for its memorable “gleaming flexible metal exhaust headers,” which ran from its hood to its fenders.9 The car had been developed in secret and unveiled at the 1937 New York Auto Show. Its unusual design caused E. L. Cord, the car’s namesake, to chastise Tremulis when he first saw it. Cord assumed that the exhaust pipes were tacky, nonfunctional ornaments. When Tremulis explained that the pipes were functional, an enthused Cord gave him a twenty-dollar bonus.10
Tremulis worked for several different car companies after that. His designs often looked futuristic. “The past is only history,” he said. “I am more interested in the future.”11 He could clearly draw modern cars, but it took a while to find a place where he could fully explore his imaginative automotive vision.
Tremulis moved to Detroit after Auburn Cord Duesenberg ceased operation in 1937. At Chrysler, he designed the Thunderbolt, one of the earliest “concept cars” built in the city.12 The car was fabricated by LeBaron, a custom shop, which Chrysler credited for the design, but Tremulis was the one who had created it.13 He then did a stint in Beverly Hills, California, designing custom coachwork for Cadillacs being sold on Rodeo Drive to celebrities. The resulting cars were not futuristic, but it allowed him the opportunity to work more closely with the coach builders.14
Tremulis was drafted, and after sending drawings of aircraft to the War Department, he spent World War II at the aircraft lab at Wright Field in Ohio.15 He helped with advanced aircraft design but also created drawings used to gain approval for new aircraft projects engineers were working on. His boss later said that Tremulis “put life into dull three-view drawings,” whi
ch “helped to sell many an airplane design.”16 He wasn’t designing airplanes so much as he was helping his bosses market them.
When the war ended, Tremulis returned to Chicago and took a job with an industrial design firm, Tammen and Denison. He found himself designing nonautomotive items such as bathroom fixtures.17 But he badly wanted to design cars again.
Tremulis read about the car Tucker wanted to manufacture and believed he could rework the Lawson drawings into a practical design that could actually be built. He phoned Tucker and asked for a meeting.18 Tucker told Tremulis he could have only fifteen minutes. Tremulis brought drawings of what he thought a Tucker automobile ought to look like. The drawings were based on the Lawson designs, but Tremulis had made them more realistic. For example, Tremulis eliminated impractical features like the curved glass windows in the doors.
Tucker asked to see more of his portfolio. Tremulis pulled out drawings of streamlined cars and airplanes, and the fifteen-minute meeting stretched into three and a half hours.19 Despite the two men both having huge egos, they got along immediately. Tremulis understood Tucker’s dreams, and Tucker believed Tremulis could create blueprints from them.
Tremulis was still employed by Tammen and Denison, but Tucker didn’t want to hire the firm, just Tremulis.20 He offered him what he called a “styling-study” contract, to develop the ideas they had discussed. Tremulis accepted.21 Tucker then told Tremulis that his first order of business was to create final drawings for the Tucker sedan—that is, turn the Lawson drawing into a practical design car builders could start working from immediately—within six days. It was around Christmas 1946, and Tucker wanted to have them before the first of the year. The deadline seemed impossible, but Tremulis accepted.22 Tucker agreed to pay Tremulis $700 per month with an eye toward a large raise once the car went into full production.23
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Like others who interacted with Tucker, Tremulis found himself drawn to help him. Decades later, he recalled that Tucker was “a good boss” who had two pictures on a shelf in his office. One was of Jesus, the other of a Porsche automobile.
Tremulis’s design background helped him dissuade Tucker from some of the more outlandish ideas for his car. Having designed practical objects both for cars and for household use, he had an understanding of what could be manufactured and what could not. But Tremulis also understood how to deal with Tucker: He didn’t argue with him. Instead, he told Tucker how a design might be made better and still fit with his larger vision.
For instance, others had tried talking Tucker out of including features like steerable front fenders that turned with the wheels, because they increased costs and added little value. Tremulis—knowing of Tucker’s desire for a safe car—simply told Tucker the design was unsafe. He reminded Tucker of Frank Lockhart, a famous racer who’d built a race car with fairings over the wheels, similar to Tucker’s steerable fenders. The Stutz Blackhawk, as it was called, was designed for land speed records but had spectacularly crashed at Daytona and killed Lockhart. Tremulis told Tucker that they had later done wind tunnel testing on the car’s configuration and determined that the fairings acted as rudders in the wind. As such, they would make the car dangerous to drive. Tucker agreed, and the feature was dropped.24
Tremulis liked the idea of a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive car, because it wouldn’t require running a driveshaft from the front of the car to the rear axle. Eliminating the shaft meant no tunnel—or “hump”—running the length of the car between the driver and passenger. Tremulis could design the car lower to the ground, playing to his preference for streamlined designs.25 The Tucker automobile he designed sat five or six inches closer to the ground than its competitors. And Tremulis worked in other new ideas. In his drawings, the front seats and the rear seats were interchangeable and could easily be swapped. That way, if the front seats looked worn, the owner could rotate them like tires, putting the ones from the rear into the front, and vice versa.26 Interchangeable parts would also lower manufacturing costs and make the car easier to assemble.
Tremulis struck upon another idea for making the car’s parts more interchangeable. The pillar between the front and rear door on each side of the car cannot normally be switched to the other side, because door hinges for the rear doors are normally attached to them. If the doors on the car did not hinge on the pillar, however, a symmetrical pillar could be used on both sides of the car. The resulting car would have rear doors hinged toward the back of the car—other cars had been made this way—making the rear seat easier for passengers to enter and exit. Tucker liked it, and it became a design feature.27
Tremulis also knew he could work around some of Tucker’s ideas without confrontation. Tucker had plans for a mammoth engine setup that the designer did not believe would be practical, so Tremulis designed the engine compartment to accommodate a more typical automobile engine in case the original build didn’t come to fruition. Later in the process, when Tucker’s preferred engine was indeed scrapped in favor of a more conventional engine, Tremulis’s foresight would pay off.28
For now, however, Tremulis worried less about the engine and took his aerodynamic vision to extremes. Most cars of the time had small rain gutters running along the tops of doors, outside the car, to keep water from leaking into the passenger compartment. Tremulis designed internal gutters that let the rain enter the gap between the door and the roof and then channeled it out from inside the door frame. This design, as Tremulis proudly noted later, would result in a 1 percent improvement in aerodynamic efficiency of the shape of the car.29
* * *
On December 31, 1946, Tucker stopped by Tremulis’s office to see what he had come up with. Tremulis considered his drawings unfinished but showed them to Tucker, who enthusiastically embraced them. Tucker chastised Tremulis for saying the drawings needed more work: “The trouble with you stylists is you never know when to stop.”30
Tucker declared the drawings finished and gathered a group of intimates for the unveiling. Tremulis showed them one at a time. The audience was enthusiastic—after seeing Tucker’s positive reaction—and the new drawings were approved.31 With the car’s shape now fixed, Tucker told Tremulis to build a prototype of his drawings within sixty days. Tremulis said it was an “utter impossibility.”32 Tucker told him to try anyway. He needed to have something to show investors to satisfy Cerf.
The Tin Goose
In January 1947 Tremulis set up shop at Tucker’s Chicago plant and began building a live example of what he had drawn on paper. Most auto manufacturers would have begun with a full-size clay model first, but there was a shortage of modeling clay as the rest of the auto industry resumed production after the war ended. In addition, Tremulis did not have enough time to make a clay model. He decided to simply build the first model out of sheet metal, going straight from the drawings to an actual car. Tremulis still believed Tucker’s sixty-day deadline was impossible but felt he could get the model built faster than most people thought possible. With a small group of elite craftsmen and metalworkers, they would build the first car in one hundred days. “With a great degree of affection,” he dubbed it “the Tin Goose.”1
Skipping the clay model was possible in part because Tucker had hired a friend named Herman Ringling, renowned for his ability to do bodywork with raw sheet metal. He was so adept that he worked the metal bare-handed, telling people it gave him a better feel for the work. Ringling told the designers he could handcraft the sheet metal for the car as long as he had good drawings to work from.
For a basic framework, Ringling found a junked Oldsmobile roughly the same size as the proposed Tucker automobile.2 He then fashioned fenders, a hood, door skins, and the other various body panels and put them on the Oldsmobile frame after removing the junked body panels. When he was done, the only original sheet metal on the car—that is, sheet metal that had been on the junkyard Olds—was the roof, and even that Ringling had reshaped. He just decided to recycle it rather than replace it. The finished prototype also retaine
d some insignificant hardware from the donor Oldsmobile, like door handles and locks.3
The men at the Tucker Corporation knew that only a prototype could be handmade like this. They needed to tool up and mass-produce cars if the company was to succeed. In the auto industry, car manufacturers used clay models to measure the dimensions for production tools and dies. Since Tucker had skipped this step when the Tin Goose was created, his men needed to go back and create one.
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On March 10, another young designer joined the team in Chicago. Philip Sidney Egan was born December 13, 1920, in Oak Park, Illinois. His résumé made it clear he was destined to design cars. His mother painted watercolors and his father was an art director at an advertising agency. The family car was usually a Pierce-Arrow. Philip studied aeronautical engineering before the war; after a brief stint with the army air corps, he spent some time designing airplanes and then moved to Lippincott & Margulies, a design firm Tucker hired to help with some of the detail work on the car.
On his first day, Egan met Alex Tremulis, who looked like a “debonair professor.”4 The two were kindred spirits. Tremulis had come a long way from sitting on the dealership floor, sketching cars while playing hooky. Now he led a team bringing his vision to life. Tremulis showed the young designer the workshop where Ringling was busy building an automobile in metal, the one that would become the Tin Goose. Tremulis then told Egan that Tucker still needed a clay model, something that Egan would be helping with. Egan knew they were doing things out of order, but for a good reason.5 He soon realized that convention was irrelevant to Tucker and Tremulis.