The Melton Museum in Norwalk, Connecticut

Although I have talked some in previous posts about the James Melton Autorama in Florida, I haven't said much about its precursor, the Melton Museum in Norwalk Connecticut (1948-53).  So here goes:

Back in the summer of 1941, the State of Connecticut had appropriated funds to build a museum for my father's cars.  But the onset of World War II put the project on hold.  After the war the agreement still did not come to fruition.  As he put it in a letter to fellow Veteran Motor Car Club members in 1947:

 

"As you may have seen by the papers, I have withdrawn my offer of a museum collection to the State of Connecticut.  The first appropriation was made in 1941, the enlarged appropriation in 1945, and the thing is still only on paper...The combination of dilly-dallying techniques, small brother groups crying over locations, appointment of an antique auto curator—repeat curator!—and the shifting sands of politics—of which I want no part—finally made me decide that it would be in the best interests of my collection and the antique automobile movement as a whole, to cut out of all that complicated and unpleasant situation...I shall create a museum of which we can all be proud—and where we won't wake up some morning to find some Politico's Aunt Tillie's 1928 Model A Ford where a Mercer Raceabout ought to be."

 

Rather than donating his collection to the State in return for the building, he continued to own the cars—and to add to their number until he had close to a hundred.   He formed a corporation, The Melton Museum, Inc., and acquired a 10,000 square foot building on an eight-acre site on Route 7 in Norwalk, Connecticut, half a mile from the Merritt Parkway.  To that he added another 10,000 square foot building, incorporating an existing well-known restaurant, called the Stirrup Cup.  On top of the building with the sign saying The Melton Museum, he put brightly painted cutouts of some of the cars represented in the collection; out front he placed a 1902 trolley car.  He sincerely believed that everyone was as interested in the history of the automobile as he was.  He felt that preserving the cars was only half the story, they should be shown to the public as examples of man's ingenuity and as the beautiful antiques they were.

 

On July 24, 1948, the 20,000 square foot Melton Museum of Antique Automobiles opened in Norwalk, Connecticut, with fifty-five cars, antique bicycles, auto accessories, toy trains and music boxes.  Opening day began with a parade of antique autos, driven by his confreres from the Veteran Motor Car Club, and was attended by celebrities such as Clare Booth Luce, Lawrence Tibbett and Connecticut Governor Grover Whelan. Twelve hundred paying customers came the first day, sixteen hundred the second.  Little did many of the visitors know what a huge, last-minute effort had gone into readying the exhibition for opening day.  Firestone, for instance, had agreed to equip all the cars with their new "non-skid" tires—the words formed the tread design. The tires had been flown in by air freight from Akron, Ohio the day before the museum opened, and Firestone men had worked until 2 A.M. to mount them all. For months my mother had been a willing helper in preparing the museum, haunting local antiques stores in search of the right accouterments to accompany the displays, and raiding friends' and relatives' attics for old-fashioned costumes for the mannequins to wear.  She also oversaw many museum-related details on the home front while her husband was on tour with the Metropolitan Opera that spring.

 

Their old friend, former Ziegfeld designer, John Harkrider, designed the exhibits.  The entrance hall was decorated with large photos of my father's various old car exploits with other celebrities:  the 1937 Easter Parade of antique autos down Fifth Avenue with fellow singers Lanny Ross and Jessica Dragonette as passengers; Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy riding in one of the cars my father took to Hollywood in 1944; and a meeting with Henry Ford Sr. in Dearborn, Michigan.  The cashier's office was in a 1912 Renault Hansom Cab, the car's radiator having been converted to a counter for selling tickets. (Admission to the museum was 60 cents.) One exhibit room had a parade of vehicles filled with cap-and-duster clad mannequins intended to look as if they were driving down a country road.  Another room had eight racing cars displayed in an octagonal pattern; one of the cars was a 1911 Mercedes which was accompanied by a huge photographic blowup of Ralph DePalma driving that very car in the 1911 Vanderbilt Cup Race.  In yet another room, the sign in front of the 1910 White Touring Car explained the origins of the collection, "The ambition of a small boy to own a car like this is what started the whole thing."

 

He hired a retired Norwalk policeman—Officer Phillip O'Grady—as the security guard.  Dressed like a turn of the century Keystone Kop, O'Grady was straight out of central casting, and played his part to the hilt.  Among the summer help my father hired was Joe Ryan, still only in high school, to polish brass and run errands.  Over fifty years later, among the highlights Ryan recalled was a trip to Canada to pick up a 1924 Rolls Royce that Lady Eaton had donated to the museum. "Between being held up at the border for two days because Customs didn't accept the paperwork I carried, (they had to verify it with both Lady Eaton and your father), and the fact the headlights were so dim I could only drive in daylight, it took me five days to get the car back to Norwalk." His job at the Melton Museum started Ryan's lifelong love of automobiles that evolved into his career as sales manager of a Mercedes Benz agency.

 

The oldest car in the Melton Museum was 1893 custom steam stage coach, which looked rather like a horse-drawn carriage with engines added front and rear. The most modern car in the museum was a 1934 custom-built Detroit Electric.  Other unusual pieces in the collection were aforementioned 1911 Mercedes of Vanderbilt Cup Race fame, a 1900 Rockwell Hansom Cab—the first New York City taxi— and a 12-passenger Stanley Steamer Mountain Wagon circa 1915, formerly used in Yellowstone National Park for sightseeing tours.

 

Dorothy Warenskjold

Dorothy Warenskjold 1921-2010 I learned just recently of the death of Dorothy Warenskjold on December 27th.  What a special person she was!  She was my father's singing companion on radio, television and concert, and a friend to my mother and me for the rest of her life. She ended her illustrious singing career teaching at UCLA (for fifteen years) and holding master classes. In 2005 she moved from her native California to Kansas to be near relatives.  In an article from a Kansas newspaper in 2008, she is quoted as saying "I like my life the way it is. I've done everything I wanted to do."  Lucky lady. She died at the age of eighty-nine, but to me she seemed ageless---and always elegant, so elegant. In researching my book, I discovered just what a mainstay Dorothy was for my father on his 1950s TV show  “Ford Festival.” In a kinescope I have of one of the shows, his co-star,  Dorothy seems relatively at ease in front of the camera, but you can plainly see Daddy’s unease. His eyes dart from side to side constantly, except with he’s focusing on singing a song. Is he looking frantically for cue cards, or checking to make sure that everything is all right for the next scene? Live television must have been extremely nerve wracking for all involved!  The responsibility on my father’s shoulders was tremendous—to produce the show as well as star on it. But he wanted it that way. He barely had time to rehearse, so he employed tenor Joe Gaudio to be his rehearsal stand-in for setting lights and marks. No wonder Daddy looked wooden and ill at ease on the show. Often he was hitting those marks for the first time, rather than having become accustomed to the feel of things during multiple rehearsals. Dorothy told me that more than once she’d link her arm through his, and lead him around on stage during broadcasts because she sensed the uncertainty about his own choreographed stage movement. Thank goodness for Dorothy! I saw a rather amusing, amazing gaffe while viewing one of the old kinescopes in which Daddy and Dorothy were singing a duet from Madama Butterfly. There comes a soprano solo section, and he steps away from her into the background. However, in this instance the camera does not move in for a close-up on her. Rather, he remains in the frame as she sings, while he takes a handkerchief out of the pocket of his Lt. Pinkerton naval uniform, blows his nose, and then returns to her side to complete the duet. Surely that can’t have been the staging he intended!  Live TV was so unforgiving! See my blog entry for August 10, 2010 for more information on Dorothy.

A word of explanation...

A word of explanation as to why I have been so silent and out of the blogosphere for over a month.  

For the past couple of years my husband of thirty-two years has been in and out of chemotherapy for lung cancer. In November he basically ran out of treatment options, and his health declined precipitously.  He died on December 19th.

Needless to say, my focus has been elsewhere for the last couple of months.  But now things are getting back to normal, the "new normal," and so I'm getting back to my blog.

More to come very soon, I promise.

1957 Glidden Tour, Plus Queen Elizabeth II

The other day I had an e-mail from Tim Martin (a friend I’ve never met!) who forwarded me recollections of the 1957 Glidden Tour written by Tom Marshall.  Tim gets a weekly e-mail from Friends of Auburn Heights, the foundation now managing Tom’s family’s property in Yorklyn, Delaware, which houses a large collection of Stanley Steamers, Packards and electric cars.  (See http://www.auburnheights.org/)

 I did not go on that 1957 tour myself, but my mother and I joined Daddy in Jamestown for the Queen’s visit celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the first English settlement. I remember having to write a composition about the event for my sixth grade class.  And, of course, I have some photos of Her Majesty.  Were any of you on that 1957 Tour?

 Here is what Tom Marshall wrote:

 The tour began in Roanoke, Virginia, and Bob Way (my third cousin and the owner of a 1919 Model 735) and I drove from home in the Model 76 to Luray, Virginia, over 200 miles the first day and on to Roanoke on the second. On the first official day of the tour, we were headed for Charlottesville, via Natural Bridge and Waynesboro, our luncheon stop. As we approached Waynesboro, I looked in the rearview mirror, and just behind was Locomobile #16, with its owner, Peter Helck, and a friend at the controls. For those who don't know, this is perhaps the most famous antique racing car in the world, in which Barney Oldfield won many races. Helck was a well-known artist who depicted in great detail many of these early auto races. That afternoon, we visited Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, with the Glidden Tour cars climbing the mountain by the old driveway used in Jefferson's time. Arriving at the historic site, I needed water for the Stanley and asked a groundskeeper if there was a spigot nearby. He told me to pull onto the front lawn of Monticello, where numerous connections for attaching a garden hose existed. This worked out well, but seeing the Stanley on the front lawn, everyone on the tour wanted to be photographed there, and the yard was soon full of Glidden Tour cars. Today, it's not possible to drive within ½ mile of Monticello itself.The next day we went to Williamsburg, via Richmond, where I dropped off Bob Way, as he had to return home by train. On the last stretch, it was a very hot afternoon, and as I stopped for water, an exhausted man and his wife pulled in with their 1906 Jenis boiling over. This was an impressive car with a lot of brass, and it happened that its owners were in the room next to me at the Williamsburg Motor Lodge for the next two days. I invited them to ride to an outdoor picnic in the Model 76, and the husband was somewhat impressed. It turned out this was Carl S. Amsley (1921-1998), who, within a couple of years, was in the business of restoring and building Stanleys in a big way. While we were in Williamsburg, Queen Elizabeth II was in town to help celebrate the 350th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown. She spoke in front of the Wren Building at the College of William and Mary, and most on the tour went to see and hear her. I did not. However, I recall riding with Curtis L. Blake (co-founder of Friendly's Ice Cream) in his newly restored 1920 Pierce Arrow.

At Mount Vernon, I took on water at the rear entrance to the grounds, and the next day in the rain on the final leg to Hershey, Pennsylvania, I came up behind a most unusual vehicle traveling about 30 m.p.h. It was a huge machine and had a rear platform like an old-fashioned railroad observation car. Sitting on this platform and bouncing up and down on the overhang was its owner, James Melton, well-known tenor of the Metropolitan Opera, Hollywood, and the radio, probably the most famous collector of old cars in the mid-twentieth century. The "car" was an oversized Winton of about 1918, built especially for Sam Pennypacker when he was running for Governor of Pennsylvania. We ended the tour at Hershey and had to clean up our cars that night for displaying them at the annual Fall Meet of AACA the next day. A fun tour!

Actually, the 1917 Winton Housecar was built for E.J. Fithian when he ran for Governor of Pennsylvania.  I’ve written about this vehicle in an earlier blog post (November 5, 2009).

Note:  My posts may become irregular for a time.  My husband is going through a very serious health issue at the moment.

A Belated Veteran's Day post

During the first year the United States was in World War II, in addition to his normal radio and recital schedule, my father did 50 concerts for servicemen or war-wounded in the U.S. and Canada. Often he would arrange to sing at a hospital or military camp in the afternoon in whatever city he was concertizing, rest for a few hours, and then do his regular performance at night. He also participated in War Bond rallies in both countries. The border was no impediment to his loyalty, “It all goes into the same pot,” he said.

Clearly, the Meltons’ greatest contribution to the war effort was in terms of fund raising, whether it was my mother serving on volunteer relief committees, or my father lending his talents to raise money for War Bonds.

Although all of his efforts to entertain the troops were in North America, my father's radio broadcasts were heard overseas through Armed Forces Radio. Fifty years later, one soldier, Colin Dyer, wrote me:

“In April 1945 I was in the 15th General Hospital in Liege, Belgium, recuperating from a wound. Often the Armed Forces Radio would broadcast a half hour of James Melton recordings. All of the orderlies, janitors, and others comprising the staff of menial workers were German POWs. We noticed that one of them found it appropriate to mop the floor at the door to our ward during these half-hour James Melton programs. In due course, we learned through his halting English that he had been a music student at the University of Leipzig before the war, and that he was much taken by Melton’s voice. At least for the 30 days I spent in that hospital, the doorway to our ward was the cleanest spot in Belgium.”

Political Memorabilia

A propos of the recent election, I decided to check the "politics" folder in my JM archives. Look what I found.

I'm sure it pained my staunchly Republican father mightily to sing for FDR, in spite of the prestige involved in singing for an inauguration celebration. (No doubt he was much happier 12 years later singing for Eisenhower's inaugural!)

I've only scanned two pages from the multi-page program, which included toasts to the president and vice president, an address by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, "God Bless America" played by the U.S. Navy Band under guest conductor Irving Berlin. I have not been able to track down what selections my father sang at the event.

The menu, in case you are interested, included Diamond Back Terrapin Soup with Sherry, Pompano Saute, Filet Mignon on Smithfield Ham, Coupe Tortoni with Brandied Figs and Gateau Mille Feuille.

Does anyone have a clue who signed the program's cover in the lower right-hand corner?

Look what I found on e-bay!

It never ceases to amaze me what one finds on e-bay! I check periodically for Melton memorabilia, though I think I’ve gotten most of the “good stuff” by now. However, a few weeks ago, much to my surprise, look what I found (and bought, of course). A photo of my parents from 1928, taken at a costume ball given by the Seiberlings of Akron, Ohio—at which my parents announced their engagement. (It was at the Seiberling’s that my parents had met the year before.) Nearly 300 guests were invited to this bal masque, and every conceivable kind of costume was in evidence, Colonial dames, princesses, gypsies and sheiks. Mr. and Mrs. Seiberling welcomed their guests dressed in 16th century Venetian attire. The announcement of my parent’s engagement at this event gave, as one newspaper put it, “the final bit of interest to a party that for color and social importance has not been equaled this year.”

Here is how my mother remembered that evening in her unpublished memoir:

Mrs. Seiberling had asked Jimmie to sing the tenor aria from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet, “Ah, léve-toi soleil.” She sent him off to rehearse, and led me up a small staircase to a balcony over the music room, and arranged “Juliet”, in her blue lamé gown, pearl cap and long scarf, facing south. “Cheek in hand, dear, and as Jim sings, toss your veil gracefully over the balcony so he can kiss it when he's through singing.”

I crouched like a caged mouse, glued to the little stool on the balcony. The lights came on, the orchestra played, and Jimmie walked out on the stage, lifted his face, and began to sing, facing north, to my back. I tried to turn, but was wedged in by the smilax and holly decorating the tiny balcony. Craning my neck in the right direction and I gazed feebly down at him, tossing my scarf ardently toward his outstretched hand. It caught on the greenery. I tugged. Smilax fell, scarf didn’t.

Jimmie was in a bad mood when we met later. “I couldn't sing a note with my neck stretched out like a turkey gobbler on the block. And you making smoke signals with that scarf didn’t help my concentration any!” I was crushed, but Mrs. Seiberling’s glow reassured me somewhat, until friends, polite but honest, told me I looked like a frightened rabbit peeking through the bushes.

The orchestra started playing and I smiled hopefully at Jimmie. He said he couldn't —or wouldn't?— dance in his costume, and stood their clutching his cape around his doublet and hose all evening. My father, a jaunty Capulet, was delighted to show off his knees, and whirled me around the dance floor happily. I will never forget how doggedly Jimmie clasped that cape around himself for the rest of the night. This was my first lesson in an artist’s temperament: super-sensitiveness and with a need for perfection.