In the beginning, Ford and Olds were more assemblers than manufacturers. In an effort to ramp up production as quickly as possible, they chose to subcontract for many of the component parts that went into their vehicles rather than make them in-house. In 1901 and 1902, for example, Olds bought two thousand engines and three thousand transmissions built by John and Horace Dodge, machinist brothers who had cut their teeth making bicycles. Olds bought additional engines and transmissions from the Leland & Faulconer Machine Tool Company, as did Henry Ford until he entered into an exclusive arrangement with the Dodge brothers to provide his factory with all its “running gear,” which comprised practically the entire working automobile except for the wheels, tires, and body.
The decision by Olds and Ford to outsource critical components shaped the course of the industry. As they expanded operations, their companies became seedbeds for other entrepreneurs who dreamed of creating motorcars. Henry Leland, a master of precision manufacturing and founder of Leland & Faulconer, launched the Cadillac Motor Car Company in 1902, named for Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the French explorer who founded the city of Detroit. (Leland would later create the Lincoln Motor Company, named after his hero, Abraham Lincoln.) The same year, David Dunbar Buick, who’d helped develop the overhead valve internal combustion engine, produced his first car. James Packard, Louis Chevrolet, and the Dodge brothers followed, building their own namesake brands and further concentrating the industry in Detroit.
“As a group they were utterly dedicated to the manufacture of motor vehicles to the point where they seemed to have preferred going broke making automobiles than get rich doing something else,” wrote automotive historian John B. Rae. “These men transformed the fledgling auto industry and gave the world a new technology of production.”
By 1905, Detroit had more automobile companies than any other city in the world. Two thousand miles away, J. W. Earl could see clearly that the future of his company—and the country—lay in cars, not carriages. Los Angeles didn’t have the industrial base of Detroit; its economy was driven by agriculture and real estate. There wasn’t a single auto manufacturer in town. Still, motorcars acquired by the rich and adventurous and shipped across the country were starting to appear on L.A.’s broad, flat, unpaved streets. By some estimates there were nearly a thousand of them among the city’s population of 200,000, and each one represented a potential lost customer for Earl Carriage Works.
J.W. was energized by the advent of the automobile and couldn’t wait to get his hands on one, to take it apart, study it, and put it back together, to push it to its limits of speed and endurance. Not just for the thrill, though that was a part, but because he needed to find a way to grab onto this new industry that was barreling straight at him, or it would blow right on by and leave him in the dust.
It would take a few more years, but he would find a way in, aided by his second-born son and the birth of another uniquely American industry.
2
Hollywood and Harley
Hollywood, California, was a pastoral paradise during the first decade of the twentieth century, a sun-drenched valley of fruit and vegetable fields, vineyards, and citrus and avocado orchards interspersed with large, beautifully landscaped homes. To the north, flat cropland gave way to rolling hills topped here and there by the oceanview estates of industrial tycoons escaping the havoc their businesses were wreaking on cities back east. Lines of pepper trees shaded the main route through town, Prospect Avenue, and cross streets were named for the various species of trees—Pine, Palm, Sycamore, Olive, Poinsettia, Orange, Lemon—that a real estate developer named H. J. Whitley had planted along each of them.
Trees weren’t all that Whitley had planted. Along with the town’s cofounder, Harvey Wilcox, he stood staunchly against the consumption of alcohol. In selling Hollywood acreage, he actively recruited conservative white Christian Midwesterners who shared his anti-booze bent, sending out promotional brochures that played up the community’s affluence and exclusivity, urging prospects to “buy land and wear diamonds.” The result was, in the words of one historian, “a God-fearing suburb with a country club feel.”
That feeling permeated the Hollywood Hotel. Opened in 1903, the gracious thirty-three-room country inn boasted its own electric power generator, water supply, and ice-making machinery, along with a broad veranda overlooking Prospect Avenue where guests could sit in rocking chairs and languidly observe the town’s comings and goings. It was, in the words of one writer, “a self-contained oasis of civilized conveniences amid a bucolic wilderness.”
“We lived a country life,” Sally Taft Teschke recalled in a 1934 article for the Los Angeles Times, “almost like that of an English countryside.”
Since leading the Taft family out of downtown Los Angeles, Sally’s father, Alfred Z. Taft, had become one of Hollywood’s most prominent citizens. He’d organized local lemon growers into the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Exchange, which was now shipping railroad cars full of lemons to market. In addition to earning $17,000 a year from his own orchards, A.Z. ran a successful real estate company, Taft Realty, from an outbuilding behind his house. A devout Methodist and ardent prohibitionist, he was the prime mover behind a 1903 ordinance that outlawed the sale or transportation of alcohol in Hollywood. As a result, the town’s only bar, the Blondeau Tavern, was shut down, and one well-known local businessman, Philo J. Beveridge, was arrested and put on trial for serving white wine during a private banquet at the Hollywood Hotel. He was acquitted.
“Hollywood was a very moderate and temperate center,” Sally Taft Teschke wrote. “No saloons, no pool halls, gambling or card playing were permitted. Perhaps we were strait-laced. But those who wanted to do those things could step over into nearby communities.”
Sally and her six siblings, along with her four Earl cousins—Carl, Harley, Arthur, and Jessica (born in 1903)—were familiar faces to the conductors on the electric tram line that ran between Hollywood and the city. The tram passed right in front of their houses on Prospect Avenue several times a day and often had to stop for the children to remove toys left on the tracks. The kids, in turn, took it upon themselves to keep the tourists on the tram from picking souvenir oranges and lemons off their families’ trees.
Hollywood apparently wasn’t quite bucolic enough for J.W. Every June, he packed up the entire family and embarked on a camping vacation in the rugged Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield, a two-and-a-half-day journey by horse and wagon. They pitched their tents in the canyons of Bailey’s Ranch, owned by a longtime buyer of farm wagons from Earl Carriage Works, and spent most of the summer among the bears, bobcats, and mountain lions, living off the supplies they brought with them and whatever game they could shoot and cook, an experience not unlike J.W.’s time as a shanty boy in Michigan. It was almost as if he were making sure his children didn’t come to think of themselves as privileged, even as his growing prosperity assured them they were.
As each of the Earl kids entered their teens, they began working part-time at the shop, where more and more of the work involved automobiles. A scant five years after the curved-dash Oldsmobile wowed attendees at the National Auto Show, the car had gone from a novelty to a necessity in the minds of many Americans. A 1906 article in Harper’s Weekly magazine went so far as to say, “The automobile is essential to comfort and happiness.” From a few thousand at the beginning of the decade, the number of cars on the nation’s streets was heading toward half a million by the end of it. With demand far exceeding supply, they were sold as fast as they came out of the factory, on a cash-only basis with no warranty and no network of dealerships offering customer care. As a result, the nation’s blacksmith and carriage shops became the first responders for auto maintenance and repair.
In 1908, the year that Henry Ford introduced the Model T, J.W. changed the name of his business to Earl Automobile Works. He had no intention of turning it into a mechanics’ garage, however, as evidenced by the disclaimer on the front of the company’s catalog of products an
d services: “No Motors or Engines Sold or Repaired.” The forty-five-page booklet included a foreword by the proprietor, addressed to “Our Trade.”
“The most successful companies in the world are the ones that take the greatest interest in their goods even after they’ve gone into service,” J.W. wrote. “This book is submitted to you with the assurance that to all the goods hereinafter shown we take pleasure in extending the Earl Guarantee of satisfaction.”
All the goods shown were aimed at improving on the bare-bones vehicles the mass manufacturers were offering their customers and as such they provide a snapshot of the state of the American automobile in 1910.
Few cars came equipped with windshields. Earl’s brass-framed “Adjustable Glass Fronts” sold so well at fifty-five dollars that major manufacturers began ordering them by the thousands.
Most cars rode on wooden-spoke wheels that were similar in appearance to wagon wheels and nearly as fragile. “No one will dispute the fact that the majority of serious accidents are caused by the breaking of the wheels,” according to the booklet, which touted the benefits of sturdier Earl-made wheels in the language of an ex-lumberman: “second-growth hickory, extra select in quality, double seasoned and double dried.”
Factory-installed upholstery often was not colorfast. “You know how aggravating it is to have a light-colored suit spoiled by the color rubbing off the leather and adhering to it?” the catalog asked. The answer was Earl’s Blue Ribbon Leather Dye No. 1. At seventy-five cents a pint, it was “sufficient for a five-passenger car.”
The bulk of the booklet focused on what J.W. hoped would become the company’s main business: designing and building automobile bodies. The mechanical engineering of cars was progressing rapidly—left-side steering wheels had replaced tillers, engines had moved from under the seats to under a hood in the front of the vehicle—but car bodies had not developed much beyond their horseless carriage stage. They still were constructed mostly of wood and bolted onto the chassis as a container for driver and passenger seating but not fully integrated into the whole of the vehicle. The big automakers (Ford, Dodge, Packard) jobbed out their body manufacturing, providing drawings and specifications to established carriage makers such as Brewster & Company in New York and the C. R. Wilson Company in Detroit. Smaller would-be body makers like Earl Automobile Works hoped to attract orders from the mass manufacturers through their custom-design work for well-to-do clients looking to upgrade or personalize their vehicles.
“We have the facilities and men to make any style of body the most critical customer may desire,” said the catalog. “It will be just what you want, not what someone else wants you to buy.”
By all accounts, J.W. was a gifted carrossier, with an eye for elegant detail and clean flowing lines. He was a proponent of the “torpedo” style, which he called the “definite trend in body designing.” He advised his customers that the more streamlined bodies “do away with all external projections, resulting in a refinement and general smoothness that greatly adds to their appearance, accessibility and cleanliness.”
J.W. put his money where his mouth was when it came to his own car. His first was a seven-passenger 1910 Chalmers touring car with a 112-inch wheelbase and a price tag of $2,750 (about the same as a nice house). But he found the large car impractical for commuting to and from work, so he bought a sleek 1911 Mercer roadster for about $2,250. The bright orange two-seater was one of the most eye-catching cars on the streets of Los Angeles, and possibly the fastest. With a 300-cubic-inch engine and detachable fenders, running boards, and lights, it could be turned into a professional racing machine in about twenty minutes. The Mercer County, New Jersey, manufacturer claimed the little car was capable of hitting seventy miles per hour, but J.W. soon learned it could go faster than that, thanks to his son Harley.
As Harley recalled more than half a century later, “My father made a very tough steel which was in demand by race drivers for steering knuckles, and that led to my hanging out around the racetrack in Santa Monica, where the crop of young drivers of that time included Ralph de Palma and Barney Oldfield.”
Harley wanted to try his hand at racing and fortunately he knew just where to find a fast car. According to an oft-told family story, the teenager took the Mercer out one weekend and brought it back with the speedometer stuck at eighty, the highest it registered. When J.W. asked him about it, Harley supposedly shrugged and said he must have hit a bump or something. The following Monday a customer at Earl Automobile Works commented, “Harley sure knows how to drive that Mercer.” When J.W. asked what he meant, the man told him that Harley had driven the car in a 100-mile race that weekend, and had won. Another version of the story had it that J.W. learned of the race and Harley’s victory by reading about it in the newspaper. Words were exchanged between father and son, but Harley continued with his high-speed hobby.
Of all J.W.’s children, Harley was the one most badly bitten by the automobile bug. Art gravitated to the upholstery department at the family business and little Jessie, who wanted to be an artist, would sit for hours in the third-floor paint department watching a master pin-striper named George Bernard practice his painstaking craft. But Harley, like his father, was drawn to designing automobile bodies. His talent for it first became apparent in the summer of 1910.
“Harley was sixteen and I was fourteen,” his brother Art told journalist Michael Lamm in a 1980 interview. “We were up at Bailey’s Ranch, camped in this canyon. It started to rain, and we ended up having a big flood. The whole canyon flooded and it filled up this hollow with clay. Harley and I made little saws out of wood and we went over to the clay, and Harley started designing cars out of clay. . . . He’d pick up a big chunk of clay and would work it down to the sort of car he wanted. I guess we had twenty or thirty of these little cars of different sorts, roadsters and touring cars.”
Another downpour quickly dissolved Harley’s creations, but the idea of modeling automobile bodies from clay stuck in his head, and what he had discovered in that mud puddle in the Tehachapi Mountains would one day have a profound effect on the development of the American automobile.
A year later, a chance encounter on a Hollywood street radically altered the Earl family’s quiet country life. Developer H. J. Whitley was walking along the newly named Hollywood Boulevard (formerly Prospect Avenue) one afternoon when he noticed a stranger looking somewhat lost and confused. Whitley asked whether he could help. The man introduced himself as David Horsley and said he was a principal in the Nestor Film Company of Bayonne, New Jersey, and he was looking for a rental property to house a motion picture production studio.
Whitley had some experience with motion picture people. A crew from the Biograph Film Company recently had spent two days in Hollywood shooting a seventeen-minute film called Love Among the Roses, directed by D. W. Griffith and featuring a teenage Mary Pickford. Biograph was one of a number of motion picture companies from back east that had moved to the Los Angeles area in the last two years. Seeking to take advantage of the perpetual sunshine for filming, they’d established production studios in Glendale, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and downtown. Believing that a film studio might attract new home-buyers and businesses to Hollywood, Whitley escorted Horsley to the long-vacant Blondeau Tavern, where the filmmaker noted that the large rear courtyard could accommodate a production stage. Horsley agreed to lease the property for thirty dollars a month.
The next day, a Nestor film crew and a troupe of actors shot a comedy in an orange grove at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and El Centro Avenue, and Hollywood was never the same. Within a few months, at least a dozen more motion picture companies traveled up the bumpy road through the Cahuenga Pass to establish operations in Hollywood. “They popped up like gypsy encampments full of soldiers of fortune and vaudeville performers down on their luck,” according to local historian Gregory Paul Williams.
They shot their short, silent films outdoors on wooden platforms under tented sheets of muslin to filter the sunlight.
Because actors had to provide their own wardrobes, the streets soon swarmed with vagabond performers dressed as cowboys and Indians, Roman soldiers and slave girls, biblical kings and belly dancers. It was as if the circus came to town and stayed. The newcomers took over the Hollywood Hotel, which had expanded to more than one hundred rooms, and ignored the house rules against alcohol consumption and sex among the unmarried. Concerned locals coined a derogatory term for them, calling them “movies” (because they worked in so-called moving pictures) and posting for-rent signs and ads that warned, “No Dogs. No Movies.”
But the “movies” just kept coming. In December 1912, fledgling director Cecil B. DeMille arrived with a large crew from New York’s Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, including well-known Broadway leading man Dustin Farnum. They acquired studio space at the corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street for seventy-five dollars a month and proceeded to shoot The Squaw Man, based on a hit Broadway play that had starred Farnum. The feature-length film was a huge success, enabling the Lasky Company to buy the surrounding block. DeMille built a home down the street from the Earls, becoming the first “movie” to take up permanent residence in town. Along with D. W. Griffith, he began churning out westerns in the surrounding hills, which soon reverberated with the sound of galloping hooves and faux gunfire. Crowds of townies and tourists spread picnic blankets on the hillsides to watch masked outlaws rob stagecoaches and painted Indian warriors attack wagon trains.
For the Taft and Earl kids, it was an exciting change from the bee-buzzing quietude of their early childhoods. “We delighted in watching movies in the making,” Sally Taft Teschke said. “And soon the excitement began to spread to the parents.” It helped that the studios started paying the townsfolk for the use of their houses and property. “It was quite thrilling to see your own home on the screen, and to comment on how poorly the neighbor’s home looked in certain scenes,” Sally said, adding somewhat ruefully that the rental money “was a subtle poison that soon broke down all barriers against the studios.” She apparently drank the poison eagerly, however, when the studios needed extras for crowd scenes: “I appeared in three pictures before my teachers and parents caught on. And when my shame was discovered, you may be sure that the penalties were in accord.”
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