I hope the coding on this works right.
Having an excess of time on my hands awhile back (thanks to being unemployed), I decided to do some digging on Preston Tucker, to see if I could turn up anything I didn't already know. Much to my surprise, I found a number of things, none of which appear in the only biography of Tucker (The Indomitable Tin Goose by Charles T. Pearson) or in any of the literature by the Tucker Club that I've seen published. And while I found no smoking guns in regards to a conspiracy against, Tucker, I certainly found evidence that he was the victim of an opportunistic politician, eager to make a name for himself, who at the very least, was willing to ally himself with some unsavory characters to further his aims.
I'm not going to comment much at all on the film by Francis Ford Coppola, other than to state that is a reasonably accurate portrayal of what happened to Tucker between the years 1945 and 1949. Yes, it does take some dramatic license, and yes it does have some composite characters, and yes it does have some moments in it which are pure speculation (Coppola points out most of these things in his commentary on the DVD), but even the totally fictitious speech Jeff Bridges gives at the close of the trial (the defense made no closing argument, feeling that the prosecution had failed to make it's case) is quite close to things Tucker actually said. So while the film may not be completely accurate in it's portrayal of events, it does however, capture the essence of Tucker, something which Hollywood often fails to do in other biopics.
Before I go any farther, I want to take a stab at clearing up a common misconception about the cars. This is a Tucker Torpedo. Until recently it only existed in drawings and photographs of a quarter scale model (presumably the model has been lost/destroyed over the years). A few years ago, a member of the Tucker family decided to convert a Buick Rivera into what a Tucker Torpedo might have looked like had the car actually entered into production. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if the car would have been a success.
Many people have labeled Tucker an engineering genius, but I doubt that he would have agreed. Certainly, if there's an “engineering gene,†Tucker most definitely had it. When was a teenager, Tucker took it upon himself to fix the family car, which was having transmission problems. His mother (at the time, a single parent) found him in the garage, with the transmission torn apart and scattered all over the floor. Horrified, she yelled at him, saying that he'd never be able to get it back together, much less getting it working again. Tucker's response was to point out that he'd numbered each part and placed them in a chalk outline as he removed them. Tucker later attended night courses, studying engineering, and was one of the members of the Ford owned racing team. It was there, as well as his years spent as a salesman for Packard, Studebaker, and his time working in the offices of Cadillac that he gained his knowledge of automobiles. Tucker's true genius lay in taking a diverse number of automotive ideas and bringing them together in a single automobile, something few other people have been able to do, and none quite as successfully.
In order to appreciate what made Tuckers so remarkable in their day (and indeed, even today), we need to know a little something about not only the kinds of cars being manufactured at the time, but also the conditions of the time in which they were being built. Cars of the era were different, not only in the way the looked and the materials they were made of, but also in how they were driven and maintained. Today, people think nothing of putting a 100,000 miles on a car, and only performing such minor maintenance as oil changes, belt changes, and possibly a tune up. Cars back then were a whole 'nother breed, and most cars were worn out by the time they reached 50,000 miles, let alone 100,000 or 200,000, as car routinely do today. Depending upon the make, model and year of the car, one could expect to perform all or some of these tasks during the time period in which Tucker's were to be built at roughly the same interval a modern car needs an oil change: Brake adjustment, valve adjustment, clutch adjustment, chassis lube, timing adjustment, and tune up. Mind you, in many cases you had to perform these tasks, if you wanted the car to last any time at all. Failure to adjust the brakes, for example, could result in you being splattered all over the road because you had no brakes.
Additionally, cars had metal dashboards and not seat belts, which meant that if you were a front seat passenger in a wreck, you could expect to find yourself slammed into a steel wall, if you didn't get ripped to shreds by the windshield as you flew through it. Rear seat passengers fared little better. They didn't have a metal dash to contend with (though there was always the possibility they could get thrown from the rear to the front), but there were exposed door handles, window cranks, and in some cars, metal door panels and armrests.
For the driver, however, a worse fate awaited them him or her in the event of an accident. Indeed, smacking into a metal dash, or going through the windshield was a blessing, compared to the fate many drivers experienced. Steering wheels of the era were built out of some combination wood, metal, and or phenolic plastic. These tended to shatter upon impact, while the driver's body would continue forward, impaling itself on the steering column. It gent's better.
Since there were no headrests, even a “minor†fender bender could result whiplash for the occupants (the front seats would some times collapse, adding to the injuries) of the vehicle. Roofs were often little more than thin pieces of sheet metal with no reenforcement, which would collapse in the event of a rollover, allowing some 4,000 lbs of automobile to come crashing down on top of the occupants. Without crumple zones, to absorb the impact of a collision, occupants had to endure the forces transmitted to the car by the impact of a 4,000 lb car.
The six volt electrical system tended to fall victim to the cold quite easily and the illumination produced by the headlights, while adequate for cars which rarely exceeded 50 MPH, was too dim to give the amount of light needed to reveal obstacles far enough away for cars traveling in excess of 60 MPH to avoid them. This problem was worsened by brakes which were often undersized and prone to fading in panic stops.
Having an excess of time on my hands awhile back (thanks to being unemployed), I decided to do some digging on Preston Tucker, to see if I could turn up anything I didn't already know. Much to my surprise, I found a number of things, none of which appear in the only biography of Tucker (The Indomitable Tin Goose by Charles T. Pearson) or in any of the literature by the Tucker Club that I've seen published. And while I found no smoking guns in regards to a conspiracy against, Tucker, I certainly found evidence that he was the victim of an opportunistic politician, eager to make a name for himself, who at the very least, was willing to ally himself with some unsavory characters to further his aims.
I'm not going to comment much at all on the film by Francis Ford Coppola, other than to state that is a reasonably accurate portrayal of what happened to Tucker between the years 1945 and 1949. Yes, it does take some dramatic license, and yes it does have some composite characters, and yes it does have some moments in it which are pure speculation (Coppola points out most of these things in his commentary on the DVD), but even the totally fictitious speech Jeff Bridges gives at the close of the trial (the defense made no closing argument, feeling that the prosecution had failed to make it's case) is quite close to things Tucker actually said. So while the film may not be completely accurate in it's portrayal of events, it does however, capture the essence of Tucker, something which Hollywood often fails to do in other biopics.
Before I go any farther, I want to take a stab at clearing up a common misconception about the cars. This is a Tucker Torpedo. Until recently it only existed in drawings and photographs of a quarter scale model (presumably the model has been lost/destroyed over the years). A few years ago, a member of the Tucker family decided to convert a Buick Rivera into what a Tucker Torpedo might have looked like had the car actually entered into production. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if the car would have been a success.
Many people have labeled Tucker an engineering genius, but I doubt that he would have agreed. Certainly, if there's an “engineering gene,†Tucker most definitely had it. When was a teenager, Tucker took it upon himself to fix the family car, which was having transmission problems. His mother (at the time, a single parent) found him in the garage, with the transmission torn apart and scattered all over the floor. Horrified, she yelled at him, saying that he'd never be able to get it back together, much less getting it working again. Tucker's response was to point out that he'd numbered each part and placed them in a chalk outline as he removed them. Tucker later attended night courses, studying engineering, and was one of the members of the Ford owned racing team. It was there, as well as his years spent as a salesman for Packard, Studebaker, and his time working in the offices of Cadillac that he gained his knowledge of automobiles. Tucker's true genius lay in taking a diverse number of automotive ideas and bringing them together in a single automobile, something few other people have been able to do, and none quite as successfully.
In order to appreciate what made Tuckers so remarkable in their day (and indeed, even today), we need to know a little something about not only the kinds of cars being manufactured at the time, but also the conditions of the time in which they were being built. Cars of the era were different, not only in the way the looked and the materials they were made of, but also in how they were driven and maintained. Today, people think nothing of putting a 100,000 miles on a car, and only performing such minor maintenance as oil changes, belt changes, and possibly a tune up. Cars back then were a whole 'nother breed, and most cars were worn out by the time they reached 50,000 miles, let alone 100,000 or 200,000, as car routinely do today. Depending upon the make, model and year of the car, one could expect to perform all or some of these tasks during the time period in which Tucker's were to be built at roughly the same interval a modern car needs an oil change: Brake adjustment, valve adjustment, clutch adjustment, chassis lube, timing adjustment, and tune up. Mind you, in many cases you had to perform these tasks, if you wanted the car to last any time at all. Failure to adjust the brakes, for example, could result in you being splattered all over the road because you had no brakes.
Additionally, cars had metal dashboards and not seat belts, which meant that if you were a front seat passenger in a wreck, you could expect to find yourself slammed into a steel wall, if you didn't get ripped to shreds by the windshield as you flew through it. Rear seat passengers fared little better. They didn't have a metal dash to contend with (though there was always the possibility they could get thrown from the rear to the front), but there were exposed door handles, window cranks, and in some cars, metal door panels and armrests.
For the driver, however, a worse fate awaited them him or her in the event of an accident. Indeed, smacking into a metal dash, or going through the windshield was a blessing, compared to the fate many drivers experienced. Steering wheels of the era were built out of some combination wood, metal, and or phenolic plastic. These tended to shatter upon impact, while the driver's body would continue forward, impaling itself on the steering column. It gent's better.
Since there were no headrests, even a “minor†fender bender could result whiplash for the occupants (the front seats would some times collapse, adding to the injuries) of the vehicle. Roofs were often little more than thin pieces of sheet metal with no reenforcement, which would collapse in the event of a rollover, allowing some 4,000 lbs of automobile to come crashing down on top of the occupants. Without crumple zones, to absorb the impact of a collision, occupants had to endure the forces transmitted to the car by the impact of a 4,000 lb car.
The six volt electrical system tended to fall victim to the cold quite easily and the illumination produced by the headlights, while adequate for cars which rarely exceeded 50 MPH, was too dim to give the amount of light needed to reveal obstacles far enough away for cars traveling in excess of 60 MPH to avoid them. This problem was worsened by brakes which were often undersized and prone to fading in panic stops.
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