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Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

An Early Morning Car Crash

September 24, 1948.

Eddie Offutt had been driving all night at 90 mph. It felt slow to him as the stands flashed by his car. Here, on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he normally drove much faster. Even so, the rough brick surface of the two-and-a-half-mile oval chewed the car's tires. Offutt sailed around the oval with the pedal almost to the floor, watching the miles add up on the odometer of his "waltz blue" Tucker.

Offutt was in charge of a team testing the revolutionary Tucker '48 sedan, then the hottest thing in the automotive world. More than 150,000 people had written letters to the car's manufacturer asking how they could buy one. So many people paid admission to see one displayed in New York City that the venue outgrossed some Broadway plays running nearby.

The car's namesake, Preston Tucker, had unveiled the car to the world on June 19, 1947. Tucker, a brilliant salesman and showman, was promising a newer, safer, and more reliable car than those the auto giants in Detroit churned out. His rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive automobile featured better traction and more passenger space than its competitors, along with disc brakes and an automatic transmission, long before those became standard in the industry. Its padded dash and sturdy frame would better protect passengers in a collision, and the car would drive more smoothly and cost less than other vehicles on the market. The established car companies had stopped assembling new automobiles in 1942, spending the last few years building tanks and airplanes for America's forces in World War II. Now, as peacetime production resumed, these companies were struggling to bring fresh new models to the market. Tucker's bold alternative was raising a stir.

Eddie Offutt lapped the track at 90 mph, worrying little about business problems as he noted how smoothly Tucker #1027 ran. Offutt, Preston Tucker's lead mechanic, had met his employer at Indianapolis years before, when Tucker had worked with famed race car builder Harry Miller. Now Tucker had sent his team to Indy with a fleet of seven Tucker '48s to test the cars' endurance and resolve last-minute bugs. The cars weren't in mass production yet, but Tucker had assembled enough to display them around the country and build consumer interest.

As daylight began to break at Indianapolis, Offutt's drive took a dramatic turn. Just as he entered a curve at high speed, the sedan's engine stalled. In a fraction of a second, the rear of the car swung out from behind him. As he fought to regain control, the right rear tire blew out. The vehicle's tires, with a new tubeless design by Goodrich, had seen nothing but heavy driving in the previous days as the team had clocked a thousand miles at high speed, virtually nonstop around the speedway, often without even slowing for corners.

Offutt lost control. He skidded onto the grass of the infield and the car turned sideways. Then it flipped. The driver held on as it tumbled over and over again, three times in all. The windshield popped out. Finally, the car landed on its wheels.

Offutt climbed out and surveyed the damage. He had bruised an elbow but suffered no other injuries. Other than the missing windshield, some minor body damage, and the tire that had blown out as he lost control, Offutt saw nothing wrong with the car.

Later, Offutt and the others would realize the accident was the result of a simple mistake made in the early morning darkness. At 4:15 AM, Offutt had stopped to refuel the car. A mechanic had reached for the wrong container in the dark and placed aviation fuel in the vehicle, which the Tucker engine was not tuned to run on. For now, Offutt replaced the tire and drove the vehicle off the track.

The Tucker team was conducting the Indianapolis tests in strict secrecy. The Tucker '48 had been subjected to oddball rumors and gossip, like a persistent story that the car could not drive in reverse. No matter how many times they demonstrated the cars backing up, the story dogged Tucker's men. Tucker could not afford leaked test results, especially if something went wrong.

Fortunately, the tests were a spectacular success. The team logged thousands of miles in the Tucker '48s and found only a few minor problems, all easily resolved. And Offutt's crash was not caused by the failure of a Tucker part. If anything, the crash underscored Tucker's assertions about his car's safety: it had rolled three times after crashing at 90 mph, and the driver had walked away with nothing but scrapes and bruises. The team drove the caravan of Tucker '48s back to Chicago, satisfied with their results. Only the damaged Offutt car had to be trailered home — because it was missing its windshield.

But not all was well at the Tucker Corporation in Chicago. Even though the American public clamored to buy the cars, and Tucker had raised $20 million from enthusiastic investors, powerful forces in Washington were gunning for him. The Securities and Exchange Commission had announced that it was investigating Tucker, suspecting him of bilking investors with a massive fraud scheme. The latest headlines about Tucker accused him of perpetrating a hoax, suggesting that his cars weren't real and his factory was a sham.

But everyone who saw the Tucker '48 sedan believed Tucker had built an amazing car. The vehicle was revolutionary, and Tucker had built it despite vocal critics who said it was impossible. Tucker had not resolved one problem though: the cars were taking too long to get to market. Could Tucker save his business?

Offutt would witness just how serious the disconnect was between the reality and the government's suspicions in early 1949, when he was summoned to appear before a grand jury and grilled about the Tucker '48s. The US attorney not only believed the cars were fake but thought Offutt knew it too. Offutt told the attorney about the successful tests at Indianapolis. The attorney then asked him, "How were the cars taken to Indianapolis — trucked down or driven down?"

Offutt said the cars had been driven to Indianapolis from Chicago.

"Are you sure you drove them down?" the attorney pressed, giving Offutt the chance to change his story in case he was lying.

Offutt stuck to his answer, which was the truth. The cars had not been "trucked" down; they had all been driven to Indianapolis under their own power. Offutt offered to let the attorney and the jurors visit the Tucker plant and see the cars. The offer had been made before, many times.

Again they declined the offer.

And so the stage was set for a trial that would ruin an innocent man, Preston Tucker, and doom the corporation building the spectacular Tucker '48 automobile.

Preston Thomas Tucker

People who met Preston Tucker described him as an extraordinary salesman. Six feet tall, he exuded a confidence that could make you believe whatever he was pitching at the moment. He was always well dressed in public, usually in a suit with a fancy necktie. But his most striking characteristic was his ability to speak easily with anyone, to put his listener at ease. His powers of persuasion worked on journalists too: several interviewed Tucker and wrote about him in such glowing terms it was apparent they had fallen under his spell.

He did not come across as slick. He spoke in a folksy style, sometimes misusing words, much to the dismay of his close friends and family members. Speaking of a car with its gas pedal depressed, he might say that the car "exhilarated," or when talking finance to board members, he would reference the recent "physical year." His daughter tried more than once to help him with his vocabulary; he told her not to bother. "They know what I'm talking about."

Those who knew him best said there was much more to the salesman than an unpretentious charm. To Cliff Knoble, an advertising man who worked closely with Tucker, "he possessed a warmth and humanness that made men eager to help him." He was loyal to those he knew and determined to follow through on the ideas he believed in. This, perhaps, was his biggest flaw. People who worked with Tucker in his most important years said that he sometimes discarded advice from experts and deferred instead to friends. Knoble referred to it as a "naiveté" that left him "susceptible to the blandishments of an occasional highly skilled parasite."

Family members saw Preston not as a salesman, of course. To them he was trusting, taking people at face value. His granddaughter says he was not suspicious of anyone. Loving and warm to those around him, he was often even goofy, especially with children. His home was overrun with his own and those of other family members. And he would speak to anyone, always as an equal.

As many have attested, Preston Tucker had a magnetic personality. People were drawn to him.

* * *

Preston Thomas Tucker was born in Capac, Michigan, a small farming community about thirty miles west of Port Huron, roughly sixty miles north of Detroit, on September 21, 1903. His father, Shirley Harvey Tucker, was a railroad engineer, and his mother's maiden name was Lucille Caroline Preston. Shortly after Preston's birth, the young family moved in with Lucille's parents, Milford A. Preston and Harriet L. Preston, in Evart, Michigan. Lucille gave birth to another boy, William, in 1905. Preston's father died of appendicitis on February 3, 1907, when Preston was three. To make ends meet, Lucille taught at the local one-room schoolhouse in a community known as Cat Creek, just west of Evart.

When he was in the fourth grade, Preston befriended a boy a year older, Fay Leach. In later years, Leach would watch Tucker's name appear in the news and remember the time the two had spent in the nearby farm fields. While Leach and the others were doing their chores, Tucker would be talking and asking questions of the older kids. Often, the conversation turned to what fascinated Tucker the most: "these new machines — the automobile."

In 1914 Lucille decided to move to Detroit to look for work. She briefly worked in an office and then returned to teaching. Money was tight; by 1920 the family had six lodgers living with them.

Cars continued to fascinate Preston, and as a teenager he spent much of his time frequenting local service stations and used car lots, talking to the workers and examining the cars. He even landed a job in the auto industry as an "office boy" at Cadillac in 1916. His stint there was short but legendary. He worked for D. McCall White, an executive at the company, who had Tucker running around quite a bit. The teenager decided he could do his job more efficiently if he were on roller skates, so he began skating around the offices at Cadillac. One day Tucker rounded a corner at the office with an armful of papers and slammed into his boss. Tucker's time as an office boy came to an end shortly thereafter, but there must not have been any hard feelings; White would end up working for Tucker a few decades later.

When Preston was sixteen, he convinced his mother to let him use his savings to buy a car. He found an Overland touring car for sale and negotiated the seller down to $300. He drove it for a year and a half and then sold it for the same amount he'd paid, using the money to buy a Ford Model T. There was something mechanically wrong with the Ford, so his mother told him to sell it rather than endure the headaches of maintenance and repair costs. Tucker found a buyer at $350. The profit inspired him. He sought another car deal and located someone selling a Chandler for $750. Tucker offered the $350 he had made from the Model T sale and struck a deal.

The Chandler had a defective transmission, and Tucker was reluctant to pay someone else to fix it. He tore the transmission apart himself and laid the parts out on the floor of the family's garage. To remember where the parts went, he numbered them as he took them out, writing the numbers on the floor by each part with chalk. Despite his system, Tucker could not get the transmission to run properly. He relented and paid a mechanic to rebuild it. Sixty-four dollars later, he sold the Chandler for $610, a tidy profit. After all, Tucker was still in high school, attending classes at Detroit's Cass Technical and working odd jobs in the evenings and on weekends.

After Tucker left high school, his family moved to the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park. Preston found a job riding motorcycles for a living with the Lincoln Park Police Department. Only nineteen, he lied about his age and became a police officer, patrolling a stretch of town near the Detroit River, trying to enforce Prohibition. Canada, where bootleggers acquired alcohol to smuggle into the United States, was just across the river. It was 1922, and the outlaws had discovered the lucrative nature of the import business, which meant Tucker would not be able to spend as much of his working time as he hoped simply cruising around on a motorcycle. His mother did not like the danger of his work, and she told his supervisor that he was underage. As a result, the police force ousted him for the time being.

Tucker had met Vera Fuqua when he was eighteen, and the two had begun dating. They married in 1923. By this time, while Vera worked for the phone company in Detroit, Tucker had returned to the auto industry and was now working on Ford's assembly line. He didn't enjoy standing at a machine all day and asked for a different job, but he didn't like his new job either. He left Ford and ran a gas station for a short time. When he turned twenty-one in 1924, he rejoined the police department; now that he was old enough, his mother couldn't stop him.

Tucker enjoyed police work and collared a bank robber and an auto thief along with some alcohol smugglers. But his creativity and knowledge of cars soon got him in trouble with the department. His squad car had no heater, and Tucker thought he could remedy that easily enough. He drove to the public works department and borrowed an acetylene torch, which he used to cut a hole through the car's firewall, which separates passengers from the engine compartment. This would allow engine compartment heat to keep him warm while on patrol. It was a crude alteration, and word soon got around that Tucker had butchered a city-owned police car without permission. He was moved to foot patrol and saw the handwriting on the wall.

In 1924 Preston and Vera welcomed their first child, Shirley — named after Tucker's father — followed by Preston Jr. in 1925. The couple would go on to have three more children over the next five years — Marilyn, Noble, and John.

Around 1925 Tucker became good friends with Mitchell Dulian, the owner of a Studebaker dealership in Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb with a booming immigrant population. Dulian hired Tucker as a salesman, and Tucker took to selling cars in ways that Dulian, a veteran, had never seen. Tucker would take a "parade" of cars through town and set up near a street corner, where he would pitch the cars to people on the streets as if he were an "old time medicine man." He paid commissions to local shopkeepers and businessmen for sending him prospects. Dulian's was soon the top-selling Studebaker outlet in the Detroit area.

Tucker quickly became disillusioned with working in Hamtramck, though, because the commute from Lincoln Park took away too much of his family time. In 1926 he returned to the police force one last time.

Dulian, meanwhile, moved to Memphis, where he owned two dealerships. He asked Tucker to come down and manage one of them. This Tucker could not resist. As soon as he got the telegram offering the job, he sent back a telegram accepting it. According to one biographer, he left in such a hurry that he didn't have time to resign from the Lincoln Park PD. Instead, they termed it a leave of absence. Arguably, Tucker was a member of the Lincoln Park PD until the day he died, but he actually left on March 18, 1927.

After a few years in Memphis selling Studebakers and Chryslers, Tucker and his family moved back to Lincoln Park. Tucker repeated this pattern several times — spending time outside Michigan for a year or two and then returning to the Detroit area.

In 1931 Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Company offered Tucker a job as a zone manager. He and his family moved to Buffalo, New York. Shortly thereafter, Preston got a job at a Packard dealership in Indianapolis, and the family moved to the home of the Indy 500. He attended races there, as well as the several weeks of practice and qualifying that preceded them. In the garages at the track, Tucker talked to car owners and builders, including Harry Miller, whom he had first met on a visit to the city in 1925. The two remained in contact even after Tucker moved back to the Detroit area.

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Excerpted from Preston Tucker and His Battle to Build the Car of Tomorrow by Steve Lehto. Copyright © 2016 Steve Lehto. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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