The Fast Times of Albert Champion

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The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 27

by Peter Joffre Nye


  In the spring of 1905 Champion and Elise returned to Boston. He brought trunks of Nieuport spark plugs, coils, magnetos, and storage batteries. Next he shopped for a location to rent and set up his import business. Most cars made in America relied on imported ignition parts and Champion sought to meet that demand.

  Ample space beckoned in the South End. On Tremont Street loomed the landmark Cyclorama—a fortress-like round brick building festooned with towers and parapets. It had survived a fashionable form of entertainment popular in cities across North America that had rendered extravagant scenes from historic or biblical events. Boston’s Cyclorama in the 1880s featured a huge painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War’s turning point. Paris artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux had depicted a dramatic scene on canvas fifty feet tall and wrapping 400 four hundred feet around the building’s interior.41 Ticket holders entered through a long, narrow hallway, trekked up a circular underground stairway, and discovered they were in the middle of the battlefield—looking at a panorama of rolling hills, valleys, open fields, ditches, stone walls, and soldiers in blue and gray uniforms firing rifles and cannons at each other. Life-size mannequins of troops standing on the floor with pitched tents and cannons augmented the scene to give viewers the frisson of witnessing the bloody battle.

  The Cyclorama had boomed for several years before ticket sales waned. The painting went into storage and the artifacts were dispersed. Next, the building had hosted bare-fisted boxing matches, roller skating, and horseback riding. Then, finally, it was partitioned to attract commercial tenants.

  One day Champion strolled in, looking to rent. The Cyclorama was mostly vacant. A mason occupied 517 Tremont Street.42 A tenant at 525 Tremont Street built horse-drawn wagons. A pair of companies took up 541 Tremont Street—the Tremont Garage Company, incorporated in March 1905 to repair autos, and the Boston Buick dealership, one of the first on the East Coast.43 Both of these enterprises were operated by Frank D. Stranahan.

  Stranahan, seizing the opportunity to get into the auto business, had finally sold his lease on the Savoy Hotel. He had formed a partnership with W. E. Eldridge, importer of household goods.44 The dealership took months to arrange with Buick headquarters in Flint, Michigan. At last, a two-cylinder Buick with four leather seats arrived by train. This model was called a tonneau, referring to its rear seats with a wooden body open to the sky like a rowboat. It came in time for Stranahan to enter it in the fourth annual Eagle Rock Hill Climb in West Orange, New Jersey, near Newark, on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1904.45 When horses and buggies still ruled the roads, hill climbs demonstrated motor-vehicle reliability. The Automobile Club of New Jersey promoted its Eagle Rock Hill Climb as the first in America.46

  Hundreds of spectators turned out to watch drivers race one by one for the fastest time over Eagle Rock Avenue’s cobblestones. The avenue’s steep grade proved too much for many vehicles. Successful ones powered all the way to sweep around the sharp left turn into Eagle Rock Reservation, a forest preserve and home to bald eagles. Frank in his Buick needed a little more than 2 minutes to win in record time in the division for autos costing between $850 and $1,250.47 He had earned publicity and bragging rights.

  It was in the Cyclorama that Champion and Stranahan met. The French national cycling champion and the former hotel manager realized that although they came from different backgrounds, they now shared the same vision for automobiles. Motor cars were so recent that the enterprise drew audacious men who on the whole came up from transportation or finance. Stranahan had run a bicycle shop before joining his father in the hotel trade and likely had followed the Frenchman’s exploits in Boston papers or perhaps even watched him race around velodromes.

  Stranahan valued celebrity star power as a commercial asset. Champion’s world records, especially driving a motorcycle a mile under a minute, had promoted his name. In turn, Albert would have heard about the Savoy Hotel. Its classy reputation attested to Stranahan’s bona fides in financial savvy and business management. The two men discussed how they could combine resources for their mutual benefit.

  Stranahan doubled as president and treasurer of the Tremont Garage Company.48 Younger sister Anna served as clerk.49 Champion’s inventory would complement the Tremont Garage Company’s auto repairs. For discussions about joining the Frenchman’s enterprise, Frank consulted younger brother Spencer. Spencer, with his thinner face and stronger jaw line, was a talented athlete,50 and he had graduated from Prince High School at fifteen,51 in the same class as Anna, who was three years older.52 Their younger brother, Robert Allen Jr., was away at Harvard, the first in the family to attend college. Albert and Frank and Spencer agreed to run their businesses from the same address and share an economy of scale with billing and payments. They would all draw modest salaries while they built up the enterprise.

  Frank D. Stranahan about the time he was treasurer of the Albert Champion Company. Photo courtesy of Ann and Stephen Stranahan.

  The time was auspicious. Auto production and sales had rocketed ten-fold nationwide in five years, to 25,000 cars in 1905.53 The Massachusetts Highway Commission announced that summer that it would start requiring licenses for drivers and autos; by the end of the year, the commission would claim it had registered 3,206 autos.54

  Thus, on June 10, 1905, the two Stranahans and Champion combined their energy and vision for the future when they incorporated the Albert Champion Company at 541 Tremont Street in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with capital of $5,000 as a wholesale business to import French auto parts.55 One hundred shares of $50 stock were issued.56 Frank held majority ownership, fifty-one shares to Albert’s forty-nine. Content with a big-name partner, Frank settled for the title of treasurer. Spencer was the clerk.

  Albert Champion was president.

  Precocious Spencer Stranahan was clerk in the Albert Champion Company. Photo courtesy of Ann and Stephen Stranahan.

  The Albert Champion Company in Boston’s South End was incorporated in Massachusetts in June 1905 with $5,000 capital. Photo courtesy of Ann and Stephen Stranahan.

  Right away, Champion followed the example of his Paris boss, Clément-Bayard, a devoted advocate of advertising, by launching the first in a stream of ads in Automobile promoting the Albert Champion Company as the sole US agent importing Nieuport’s ignition products. Ads boasted: “Everything for electrical ignition.”57

  The Albert Champion Company came to life with heavy wooden crates hitting the Cyclorama’s cement floor with a thud. The crates held spark plugs, spark coils, magnetos, and batteries. Teamsters hauled them on handcarts from a horse-drawn truck parked outside. Champion and the Stranahan brothers unpacked inventory and sorted accessories into boxes on wooden shelves in rows at the rear of 541 Tremont Street. Overstock went to off-site storage.

  Consumed by his new career, Champion left his previous accomplishments—documented in his scrapbook—locked in a trunk to be discovered decades later.

  Building the enterprise from scratch involved traveling by train to cities and towns around New England and down to New York. Champion had a network of contacts to exploit. He lugged a leather case packed with sample accessories to jobbers—wholesale merchants supplying retail auto and motorcycle companies. The former star athlete transformed himself into a sales rep. He joined the men’s club of drummers in suits and shined shoes riding the rails to sell their wares. When he returned to the Cyclorama, he sat at his desk to fill out the paperwork that serves as the lifeblood of commerce. If he missed riding behind the heat of a fast motorcycle,58 feeling the adrenaline rush of the chase, risking his life to make another conquest, he found what he desired on Long Island when he met the lovely French actress Olta de Kerman.

  Olta de Kerman had accompanied her husband Jean Hallier to Mineola, NY, on a seasonably mild and cloudy Saturday, October 14, to watch the second-annual running of the Vanderbilt Cup Race. Sometime after the 6 a.m. start Champion met them among the five thousand chichi mingling on the grandstand,59 which still smel
led of the fresh-cut boards that had been used to erect the facility on the Jericho Turnpike.

  The Vanderbilt Cup was America’s premier international auto road race. The inaugural 283-mile event had been won by a low-slung, rakish Panhard.60 The French car had averaged more than 50 mph. The Panhard’s victory had attested that gas-powered autos had a technology advantage over steam and electric vehicles for driving long distances at high speed.

  Behind the glorious cup race was railroad heir and pioneer racecar driver William K. Vanderbilt Jr. He had donated an ornate silver loving cup made by Tiffany and Company. The 10.5-gallon cup swelled to the breadth of a stout man’s chest and weighed thirty pounds.61 Called Willy K. by his friends,62 Vanderbilt was a handsome, athletic aristocrat who had been cosseted in private schools in preparation for Harvard. He had married the daughter of a US senator who had amassed wealth from the Nevada Comstock silverlode. Vanderbilt and his wife, Virginia, had traveled in Europe, where he’d been awed by ultra-long car races on public roads and how much more advanced continental automakers were than their US counterparts. With the clout to challenge America’s auto industry, complacent about holding short car races on horse tracks, and to propose the country’s first long-distance road race, he had arranged for the American Automobile Association to sanction the event, and he’d invited foreign automakers to send cars and drivers. The competitive field was limited to five cars per country. Other than the challenge cup, his race offered no purse. Companies paid drivers substantial bonuses just for press coverage.

  In the grandstand where Champion circulated, Vanderbilt held court with his wife, his sister Consuelo, the Duchess of Marlborough, and New York’s fashionables. Another one hundred thousand folks watched along the 28.3-mile route on Nassau County dirt roads—one of the largest audiences ever to see a sporting event in America.63

  Substantial crowds collected at all six turns. Men and women watched from the edge of the road, unprotected by a fence or any kind of barrier. When the nineteen muscular vehicles downshifted and braked to crawl around sharp corners, spectators were close enough to reach out and touch the cars, and when the autos charged through the turns, their unmuffled engines growling under the strain of making up lost time, tires would spray dirt at the feet of the gathered masses. The heavy chariots bounced over undulating roads past farm fields for ten laps, a grueling gauntlet of 283 miles. Posters nailed to trees and telegraph poles and pasted onto barns months before the event warned local residents, “Chain your dogs and lock up your fowls!”64

  Five American cars and drivers lined up against fourteen renowned drivers and vehicles from France, Germany, and Italy. The stars and stripes snapped in the wind over the grandstands. Champion saw for the first time his future business partner, French-speaking Swiss native Louis Chevrolet, at the wheel of a Fiat in his first season racing in American. Like many drivers, Chevrolet peered through goggles and chomped on a cigar that served as a mouthpiece to keep him from breaking teeth while bumping over the roads. He held the bottom of the steering wheel with an underhand grip.

  All but one car carried a large number on the front, big enough for anyone to spot from a distance. The exception was the car driven by American Albert Campbell. Issued “unlucky” number thirteen,65 the superstitious Campbell had instead placed a large X across the nose of his Mercedes.

  Louis Chevrolet, the Swiss-French racer, made the passenger car bearing his name and two Indy 500 winners. He and Champion were friends until Champion betrayed him. Photo courtesy of General Motors Media Archive.

  After the first lap, accidents and equipment failures turned the contest into a race of attrition. Despite Albert Campbell’s exorcising his Mercedes from the jinxing number thirteen, on the second lap his gas tank fell off.66 During lap seven, Louis Chevrolet smashed at high speed into a telegraph pole on an S-curve.67 The collision tore off a front wheel, bent the axle beyond repair, and crushed the front end into a tangled junk heap. Chevrolet barely escaped being killed. A photo of him sitting behind the steering wheel of the demolished Fiat contributed to his legend.

  A two-sided scoreboard similar to those in ballparks stood above the stand reserved for press and officials, across the road from the grandstand, to provide updates on the standings and how many laps remained.68

  The grandstand was filled with the privileged. They socialized while unpacking picnic baskets loaded with food and cases of drink to devour. Champion relaxed with Olta de Kerman and Jean Hallier and chatted in torrents of rapid French. Hallier preferred a tall, silk top hat to Champion’s wool cap. Hallier’s wife, one of the few women attending, looked stylish under a flowery hat secured with a wide ribbon tied under her delicate chin. White gloves protected her small hands. She was petite, like Elise, with elegant facial features. Olta’s beauty bewitched Champion. For some five hours, as the fastest racecars on two continents thundered under the start-finish banner spanning the Jericho Turnpike and rumbled past the grandstand, setting off a tremendous ovation, Albert and Olta flirted with stolen glances and subtle winks.

  The aptly named French driver, Victor Hemery, averaged a little over 60 mph to win in a Darracq that ran on Nieuport’s electrical components.69 Hemery claimed not only the Vanderbilt Cup to hold for a year but also $12,000 from the New York distributors of Darracqs and Michelin tires. Minutes later, a Panhard dashed over the finish line for second place. Once again, the Vanderbilt Cup turned into a French affair.

  People swarmed from the grandstand onto the Jericho Turnpike to go home.70 Vanderbilt, alarmed, fled the grandstand and yelled at officials to stop the race to prevent the injury of spectators and drivers. Officials waving checkered flags ran up the road to warn oncoming drivers that the race was over.

  By the time Champion trundled down the grandstand, he and Olta de Kerman had arranged a liaison.

  Champion had sold most of his inventory. A month after the Vanderbilt Cup event he shipped out to Paris on a mission to bring back more French ignition accessories. He left Elise behind. His month-long visit stretched through Christmas and New Year’s Eve, ushering in 1906.

  Gossip from friends in the City of Light reached Elise—Albert was escorting Olta de Kerman around. Elise, on her own, discovered that the actress and her husband lived at 260 West 25th Street in New York.71 Elise communicated with Jean Hallier, at home. He confirmed his wife was overseas. By then he may have learned about his wife and Champion. Elise and Jean Hallier devised a plan.

  On Tuesday, January 2, Albert and Olta returned to New York on the French steamship La Loraine. Huddled on the harbor pier in the freezing offshore wind were hundreds of friends and relatives of passengers as well as newspaper reporters. Elise, appearing greatly agitated, clutched tightly the arm of Jean Hallier, standing by her side.72 Before the ship docked, Elise appealed to Officer Farley, a New York City policeman.73 She explained that her husband was traveling with another woman and requested protection in case she was assaulted by her husband’s companion.

  Among the first to walk down the gangplank and come ashore were Albert and Olta.74 Elise broke from Hallier and rushed to the gangway, followed closely by Hallier.

  Elise wore a fur coat and dress that covered her feet. She moved as through on wheels as she rushed toward her husband. “You villain! How dare you deceive me in such a manner? Your little game is all known to me now. I shall immediately begin divorce proceedings.”75

  Before Albert had time to reply, she turned and walked away to the far end of the pier. Hallier joined her.76 Albert hastened into the Customs Office.

  “Mrs. Champion and Mrs. Hallier looked daggers at each other for a full half hour while Mrs. Hallier’s baggage was being examined by the customs officers,” reported the New York World. “The actress was approached by Hallier, who talked with her in French for several minutes.”77

  Their loud voices drew the attention of everybody on the pier. Hallier finally returned to Elise’s side. They left together to intercept their spouses exiting the Customs Office.
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br />   Elise, with tears streaming from her eyes, told a reporter the story of her troubles with her husband. “A month ago Mr. Champion sailed for France. I learned that woman,” she added, pointing at Mrs. Hallier and glaring at her like a tigress, “was to accompany him. He met her during the automobile races on Long Island. Ever since that time he has been infatuated with her.”78

  After clearing customs and claiming his luggage, Champion defended himself to journalists. “It is simply a case of a jealous woman,” he said. “I have been guilty of no wrong-doing, and my wife has no cause to be jealous.”79

  Newspapers capitalized on the confrontation. The World broadcast, “Albert Champion, Bicycle Rider, and His Spouse Have Trouble.”

  Dispatches thrummed over national wire services. The Boston Herald repeated the New York accounts and published oval portraits of Elise and Olta adjacent to one another, like boxers promoting a bout. Line art represented the women quarreling as their men stamped away in opposite directions, Hallier in a top hat, coattail flying in the wake of his long strides, Champion in cloth cap. Shy Elise, a homemaker, had always avoided publicity. Now her picture, in fur coat and a fashionable hat, was printed for all of Boston to see and next to the very stranger who threatened her marriage, which must have intensified her humiliation. To her, the public spectacle could not be more louche. Or repulsive.

  In due course Albert and Elise reconciled, though she had wised up to his cruelty.

  For Champion, the affair was just one of those things. He shrugged off the Fourth Estate tattlers. Boston’s papers were forever chasing sensational stories, concentrating on the bizarre and morbid.80

 

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