Another Fine Mess Read online

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ called out Ross as I jabbed at the screen with filthy fingers, vainly attempting to locate and deactivate the speaker function.

  ‘It’s a … I’ve got a chap here who, um … Does this sound any better?’ By way of distraction I snaked a hand into the car and punched the starter button, initiating a reedy, electro-mechanical cough.

  ‘Too retarded!’ yelled Ross. ‘Just way, way too retarded.’

  Ker-dug-a-BRRRRRRAGGHHH!

  After two roadside hours the car abruptly burst into fast and furious life. Neither I nor Ross had any idea what we’d just done to persuade it. As would invariably prove the case, the T seemed to cooperate of its own accord, on its own terms and in its own time, a fickle stubbornness that had no place in the world of inanimate machinery. Alongside me, five brown teeth broke into a smile and a big red hand was held aloft. I returned it with a wave of my own, then noticed it was holding a small plastic disk that I recognised as the distributor’s internal dust cover. And so, following a further fiddlesome under-bonnet hiatus, I meandered noisily away over the plump green hills of central Virginia.

  One hundred and sixty miles doesn’t sound like much of a drive. Especially not in America, where in many states that’s a daily commute, or a shopping run, or a ride to the movies and back. But for a novice at the wheel of a Model T, let me assure you that 160 miles in one stint is a life-changing odyssey. At its conclusion I sank fully clothed into the motel nylon, limbs akimbo, ears still ringing with roars and clunks. Then I tilted my empty head towards the net curtains, and tried to refill it. I saw myself puttering through King William County, a colonial realm of steepled, witch-trial churches and sun-washed village greens. I heard all the cheery shouts and toots and waves, which had even poured forth from overtakers I’d led for slothful miles through the winding, low hills. Ahoooga! I felt the heat of Ford’s furnace rise up through the floorboards and the soles of my shoes, smelled the first, breezy tang of salt and seaweed. I recalled those laps of a busy petrol-station forecourt in ever decreasing circles, feet and hands working overtime, trying to master a controlled halt before a pump-edge kerb did a more brutal job for me. Yanking the front seat up, unscrewing the tank cap thus revealed, plumbing its contents with a marked wooden ruler. Hosing in 8 gallons of regular as the questioners assembled. What year is that, sir? How fast does it go? No seat belts? I guess there ain’t much point when you’re sitting on the gas tank. Where you from? How long you had this? You taking it to that antique rally in Richmond? Watching those keen and open expressions evolve into something very different when I answered the last three: I’m from London, England; I’ve owned this car for seven hours and I’m driving it to the Pacific.

  Through the net curtains, the T fixed me with that guileless, wide-eyed stare. You’ve got some front, I thought, sitting there looking all sweet and old and innocent. And now I recalled the demonic growl of low gear; the angry, bucking stalls, and above all the blanching terror that sprang from those free-spirited front wheels. The slightest imperfection in or on the road surface – a dimple, a ridge, a pebble, a twig – dispatched us across the tarmac in a bracingly random manner; on cambered corners, I had to steer in the bend’s opposite direction to stop the T wandering over to greet oncoming traffic. Less lethal but more humiliating were my struggles to engage reverse. This operation, remember, was afforded its own pedal, but pressing it to the floorboards achieved nothing unless I simultaneously rammed the throttle to its skull-shuddering extremity. Even then, rearward progress was feebly reluctant, creating an overall audio-visual performance that attracted the wrong sort of attention.

  The motel manager – a middle-aged Indian, from India – had insisted that I back my precious antique up to the front door of my room. How sad to behold his regret and alarm at the appalling manoeuvre this spawned. At least he didn’t argue when I then flung my bags in through the door and announced that I’d walk to his recommended eatery, a Subway, even though it was a mile and a half away down the dual carriageway outside. Ninety minutes later I shuffled back up the hard shoulder, with breakfast slapping against my knees in a plastic bag: five tepid, leftover inches of a foot-long sub of the day.

  I only remembered why I’d come here when I woke up. This was the nearest motel to the quietest-looking Trump-voting stretch of Atlantic I could find, and it was in Ordinary. As the emblematic starting point for a journey through small-town, everyday, run-of-the-mill America this had seemed irresistible. And I must say, looking back, that as a template of typicality, Ordinary, Virginia, did a stand-up job. It was a seamless zone rather than a town, a settlement with no identifiable centre, just a wide-meshed grid of silent residential streets bisected by four lanes of through traffic. No pedestrians; indeed few visible signs of life beyond the cars that sped past every few seconds.

  The Subway I’d walked to lay amid the stripped-down strip mall that lined the George Washington Memorial Highway, a struggling retail parade with a lot of vacant, weed-invaded space between the thrift stores and Hunter’s Heaven Guns & Archery. An enormous Stars and Stripes, a good 20 feet across, flapped gently atop a roadside pole. A dead racoon swelled in the verge below. A sign outside one of the pre-fab churches read: ‘PRAYER – AMERICA’S ONLY HOPE.’ I’d counted half a dozen TRUMP–PENCE bumper stickers on my weary Subway stumble, plus a home-made placard in the yard of a side-road bungalow that said, ‘FOR SALE – AMERICA’ in very large letters, with ‘CONTACT CLINTON FOUNDATION’ in smaller ones beneath. Handy reminders that Ordinary, and so many thousands of slightly run-down little towns like it, had just played a role in something extraordinary. Without question the most incredible political event in post-war democracy. Trump picked up two-thirds of the votes here; the Democrats returned their worst result in forty-four years.

  I was out on the motel forecourt at 7 a.m., the sun already blazing down from a cloudless sky, the T’s bonnet already propped open. In one hand: a quart bottle of SAE30 engine oil. In the other: my phone, with the Google homepage open, and ‘Where is the oil filler on a Model T Ford?’ entered in the search box. Nobody had ever insulted my intelligence by showing me, and I’d therefore been too ashamed to ask. I now flipped the appointed cap and poured, checking the dipstick at regular intervals. To my alarm it swallowed the whole bottle before reaching the requisite notch, a rate of consumption that couldn’t be entirely explained by the slick little puddles the car had leaked on to the forecourt overnight. At least I knew where the water went: straight under the graceful silver-winged cap, with its incorporated ‘motometer’ temperature gauge, that crowned the radiator. But despite my empurpling efforts, it wouldn’t budge. I pulled and twisted and tugged and swore. Then, trying not to picture his reaction as he read it, I sent an enquiring text message to Ross. ‘It just unscrews,’ he replied. Though not until an hour later, by which time I had brutalised that lovely thing loose with a plumber’s wrench. I had also done something even worse, and much less successful, with a cartridge of thick, red lubricant. A tiny amount of this had made its way into the empty chamber of Ross’s grease gun. The rest had been forcefully expelled into places that the poor motel manager is probably still discovering.

  I’d plotted my official start long in advance on Google Street View, and I had plotted well. Fleming Road, just a quick and panicky pootle from Ordinary, was a peaceful, pine-bordered lane that ran right into the Atlantic, or at least the salty wedge of Chesapeake Bay that I hoped would count. I crunched over the last fir cones and killed the engine with the front wheels on a sliver of pale sand. Two ramshackle jetties prodded into the shallow, still water; across the bay, smoke rose from a distant pair of industrial chimneys. I hopped out. My word it was warm. A large bird of prey circled high in the windless blue sky. The Stars and Stripes hung limply from its pole in the picket-fenced yard of a beach-front bungalow. I drained the little water bottle in my hand, then walked over the sand, bent down and rather laboriously filled it with tepid brine. To endow my journey with a romantic sen
se of purpose, I planned to crown it by tipping a few fluid ounces of Atlantic into the Pacific.

  I gazed around and sighed. Photoshop the chimneys out and this was a scene to linger in. Instead, I savagely despoiled it with a belching, roaring twelve-point turn and a spirited klaxon reveille. Ahooga! Ahooga! Ahooooooooooga!

  CHAPTER 4

  The car that rolled out from the Ford Motor Company’s Piquette plant in Detroit on 27 September 1908 didn’t look like a world-beater. Those gangly, disembodied fenders, fat-spoked cartwheels and stubby, four-square proportions were all throwbacks to the age of the horse carriage. So too was the body construction: sheet metal bent over a hardwood skeleton. The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, released the year before, was inestimably more representative of the era’s automotive market – a sleek rich-man’s plaything that ran like silk on the smooth city roads of Europe.

  But Ford had pinned his hopes on America’s booming middle class, in particular the farmers who’d struck it rich feeding the nation’s burgeoning population: from 1900 to 1910, the price index for farm produce shot up by an unparalleled 52 per cent. No other manufacturer seemed to know or care that most Americans lived in small towns or on the nation’s six million farms. As a farm-reared boy, Henry knew the demographic’s priorities: ruggedness, simplicity, practicality. American roads then ranked amongst the worst in the world, so the Model T’s wheels were spaced to slot into the cart-horse ruts that ran down most of them, and its chassis, set high above the ground, was designed to flex and pivot over extravagant imperfections. Short and light, it could pull itself out of the loosest sand and the thickest mud. Pertinently, the T’s 200-mile range was 50 miles longer than the entire national network of paved roads. The Model T would boldly go where no car had ever gone. And it would do it for just $825, a lot less than any competitor, and – more crucially for his intended sector – around $150 cheaper than a team of horses.

  Henry was supremely confident in his Universal Car: on a 1,300-mile test drive around the Great Lakes, he’d suffered nothing worse than a puncture. But because nobody had previously attempted to sell a lot of cars to a lot of people – only 2 per cent of rural families owned one – he had no idea how his utilitarian offering would go down with the public until the first newspaper adverts went out on 2 October, a Friday. ‘No car under $2,000 offers more,’ wheedled the copy, ‘and no car over $2,000 offers more except the trimmings.’ For Henry Ford, now forty-five years old, this was the last roll of the dice.

  He didn’t have long to wait. ‘Saturday’s mail’, recalled the Ford Times many years later, ‘brought nearly one thousand enquiries. Monday’s response swamped our mail clerks and by Tuesday night, the office was well nigh inundated.’ No car had ever managed more than 7,000 sales. The Model T doubled that before it had even gone into full production. One dealer in Pennsylvania gushed: ‘It is without doubt the greatest creation in automobiles ever placed before a people.’

  In May 1909, the overwhelmed company had to stop taking orders for two months. Within a year Ford had outgrown its Piquette factory, and moved to a purpose-built facility up the road at Highland Park. ‘It was the right car at the right time at the right price,’ said Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote the story on which It’s a Wonderful Life was based, and should thus be regarded as an authority on small-town miracles. That price kept getting righter. In 1911, the firm sold 35,000 Model Ts, and Henry dropped the RRP to $680. Two years later, he shifted 170,000 at $525 a pop – a few bucks below the nation’s average annual wage.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, the life of an American farm family was, from most human perspectives, a thanklessly shit one: up at 4 a.m. in an unheated room, with nothing but supper and sleep to look forward to when another hard day was done. So while Ford’s provincial customers may have convinced themselves they were buying a Model T to carry sacks of grain around the farm or pick up a bale of barbed wire from town, in truth they’d been seduced by its breathless, horizon-busting possibilities: nipping out for a country picnic or over the hills to visit the in-laws, top down on the open road for a day at the state fair, the fun of driving for driving’s sake. Heady thrills for farmers who typically never ventured more than 10 miles from their homes, fulfilling desires they barely knew they had. Speed and freedom, owning the future, undoing the fearsome isolation of rural life. Hanging out with people you actually liked, not just happened to live near.

  Norval Hawkins, Ford’s pioneering sales manager, understood all this. ‘You do not sell goods,’ he presciently noted, ‘but ideas about goods.’ His campaigns targeted emotions, depicting proud, lone Model Ts above slogans like ‘Boss of the Road’ and the frankly startling ‘Obey that impulse!’ There were early dabblings with automotive sex appeal: one ad featured a young chap and two girls in the back seat of a Model T, captioned, ‘Look at this picture and decide for yourselves.’ Henry Ford had a more prosaic grasp of marketing, but still felt he knew his customers better than they knew themselves. ‘If I had asked these people what they wanted, they would have said: a faster horse.’

  The planetary transmission, a serious deterrent for those of us with previous gear-shifting experience to unlearn, could be swiftly mastered by rustics who had never driven before. And the Model T had been designed to appeal to their redneck fixing skills: a car that every farmer could repair by the road with baling wire and a hammer. As an indicator of Henry’s success with his rural demographic, by 1910, the vehicle ownership rate in Iowa was six times higher than New York City’s. And almost every car in the state was a Model T. In that year, the US Department of Agriculture composed a paean to the Model T’s liberation of rural America, concluding: ‘Never before have any such proportions of the nationals of any land known the lifting spirit that free exercise of power and independence can bring.’

  By 1912, Ford employed more salesmen than any other US company. The firm had 3,500 dealers across the US, each required to stock every one of the Model T’s 5,000 component parts. An unprecedented promotional mania set in as Ford sellers outdid each other with demonstrations of the car’s remarkable capabilities. Dealers drove Ts up the steps of the YMCA in Columbus, Nebraska, down a staircase at Alamo Square in San Francisco, up two flights and into the hall of a Kentucky courthouse. They drove them through the streets laden to the gunwales: fifty boys in one, three hogsheads of tobacco in another, an entire graduate class, the St Louis Browns baseball team. A dealer in Houston ran his car at 10mph for six days and nights without once stopping the motor. Another who had lost both his arms put on a show in which he crank-started a T with his feet.

  T owners were no less keen to explore the capabilities. Farmers employed their cars as a portable power source for shelling corn, sawing logs and pumping water. They were driven up to the farmhouse porch and used to churn butter and wash clothes. Preachers stuck a shed and a clapboard steeple on the back and had themselves a mobile chapel. After-market accessory manufacturers offered a multitude of gadgets: heaters, ‘anti-rattle’ vibration muters, cigar-shaped speedster bodies.

  The Model T phenomenon went into overdrive in 1913, after Ford and his team introduced the moving assembly line at Highland Park. Henry was not so much an inventor as a superlative innovator, an enhancer and refiner of existing products and methods, and the process was an aggregation of borrowed techniques. His principal inspiration: the slaughterhouses of Chicago, where meat workers hacked methodically at carcasses that passed before them on a moving, overhead ‘disassembly line’. Ford simply reversed this system, confident that the repetition of straightforward manual tasks at a conveyor belt would offer a giant leap in efficiency over standard manufacturing practice, in which teams of skilled workers assembled components at static stations.

  But just as he had with the launch of the Model T, Henry was taking a bold leap into the dark. He expanded Highland Park into the largest factory on earth, where 14,000 assembly-line operatives worked at conveyors and overhead cranes that hauled bits of car in unbroken 300-yard l
ines, at a steady 6 feet per minute. No one had ever seen anything like it. ‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ cried President Taft, after a tour of the new facility. ‘I am amazed by the magnitude of the establishment, and can still hear the hum of its machinery now!’ ‘The Ford plant is a miracle,’ wrote one of the many breathless journalists who visited Highland Park. ‘Hundreds of parts, made in vast quantities at incredible speed, flow toward one point. The final assembly is the most miraculous thing of all.’

  Well, Henry was right again. The time taken to manufacture a Model T plummeted from thirteen hours to ninety-three minutes, and a finished car was soon rolling off the Highland Park lines every eleven seconds. In 1916, Ford sold 500,000 Ts, and cut the price to $345. ‘Like the New Testament story of the loaves and fishes,’ writes Ford’s biographer Steven Watts, ‘Ford seemed to be creating material sustenance for thousands of people by a superhuman process. His fellow citizens responded with a kind of worship.’ Only now did Henry coin the Model T’s most fabled maxim. Before 1915, cars had left the factory green, blue, red and grey, but black was cheaper and more durable, and with a near monopoly in the market he felt emboldened to impose it as a no-choice option. Ford stopped advertising the car in 1917, and didn’t start again for almost seven years. There was simply no point. By this time not even the manufacturer referred to it as the Model T. It was just ‘the Ford car’, the only show on the road.

  The ubiquitous T, a national treasure before its tenth birthday, quickly embedded itself into popular culture. Nicknames were inevitably bestowed, and two stuck. ‘Flivver’, a colloquial term for any cheap and cheerful machine, was in widespread use by 1910. Nobody seems entirely sure how ‘Tin Lizzie’ originated, though the New Dictionary of American Slang offers a derivation that strikes an uncomfortable note today: ‘Sturdy, dependable and black, like the traditional, ideal Southern servant, called Elizabeth.’ There were dozens of Ford joke books and thousands of humorous postcards, poking gentle fun at the little car’s rattling bumpiness or admiring its doughty pluck. Henry’s own favourite, related to the Denver Express when he visited the city in 1915, told of the old man who asked to be buried with his Ford, ‘because the darned thing has pulled me out of every hole I ever got into’.