What a fun day I had yesterday! Barbara Fox, Tour Director of the 71st Revival Glidden Tour invited me to attend their luncheon at the Mount Washington
Omni Hotel in Bretton Woods, NH. I had a grand time meeting new friends
(several of whom own cars of my father’s) and reconnecting with old friends. I
shared a lunch table with Pat Swigart, whose late husband started the Swigart
Antique Auto Museum in Huntingdon, PA.
As you may recall, in 1946 my father my father instigated
and personally arranged a post-war revival of the Glidden Tour, a prestigious endurance
test for autos in the early part of the century. Members of the Veteran Motor
Car Club of America turned back the pages of history when they gathered on the
morning of August 17, 1946, at 9 a.m. at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, in front
of the Plaza Hotel, to begin the revived tour’s first leg, the 151-mile journey
to Albany. Cars had to be older than 1919 vintage. The original tours, funded
by financier Charles Jasper Glidden, an ardent early advocate of automobiles as
viable transportation, were primarily “reliability tours” to show that cars
could complete arduous journeys with relatively little strife. They were held
annually from 1905 to 1915 and were the most grueling tests for automobiles
until the Indianapolis 500 Race was introduced in 1911. “We brought the Glidden
Tour back again,” said my father, “not to test the performance of our cars, but
more or less as an excuse to polish ’em up and take them out of the garage.”
Nineteen forty-six happened to be the Golden Jubilee of the
automobile industry and the tour was partly to celebrate this milestone. So as
not to be embarrassed by cries of “Get a horse!” tour officials arranged for
two service vehicles to accompany the group on its 1,200-mile run. One of the
major events that made the tour possible was a post-war agreement by Firestone
Tire & Rubber Company to resurrect their old tire molds; that agreement,
instigated by my father, literally put antique autos back on the road. He also
negotiated with Firestone, Texaco, Ford, General Motors, Thompson Motor
Products, and International Harvester for assistance to tour participants in
return for suitable publicity opportunities. He’d done radio shows for several
of those companies—Texaco Star Theater,
The Voice of Firestone, and Harvest of Stars—and some years later
would host Ford Motor Company’s Ford
Festival on TV. His singing career and his car-collecting hobby were never
far apart.
