Whittell's Deusenbergs

Whittell's Deusenbergs

No, I have never driven, ridden in, nor wrenched on a Deusenberg, so you might wonder what this story is doing on this blog. To confuse you more, the emphasis of my writing is about sports cars, and it is at first difficult to equate something as big as a modern heavy duty pickup truck with that term.

But in 1930 America a Deusenberg was a sports car by the standards of the day and the country. So rare as to be exotic, with a production run in the hundreds not thousands, beautifully built, and with extreme 100mph+ performance in an era where most cars could barely do 55, it was the American equivalent to what Ferrari became after WWII.

And I have a personal link to two of them.

Anyway, these pages will, no doubt, contain many John Lewis stories, and this is only one of the more outrageous. John grew up on the San Francisco peninsula when it consisted mainly of farms. In fact he had a “farm vehicle” vehicle driving permit at 14 as many kids needed to help the family by driving various pieces of equipment about. Thus, John told me, the first car he showed up at high school in was a 1919 Rolls Royce. But I never saw a picture of the car, and John's stories were usually so over the top that I doubted them from the start...but every one of them which could be confirmed turned out to be true. Really annoying.

John's dad was a big wig tax attorney whose clients included the founder of Bank of America, and Sam Goldwyn of MGM. In fact, John claimed that he and his sister once had Clark Gable and Carol Lombard babysit them while his dad talked business with Goldwyn. I suppose I could have confirmed that whopper with his sister, but since Joyce was a crazy as John I would be suspicious of the veracity of that confirmation anyway, and of course there was no other way to check the story.

With John's interest in cars he had learned that one of his dad's clients had five or six Deusenbergs, and lived in the town of Woodside. George Whittell was, I was told, the single largest shareholder in the Auburn, Cord, Deusenberg company and a personal friend of E.L. Cord. He was quite a character, but you can read about him elsewhere so I won't go into a lot of detail here. But one pertinent item is that he was then confined to a wheelchair...and John's explanation was that Whittell's pet lion knocked him down and Whittell was afraid to go to the hospital as the lion would then likely be impounded, so he “self-medicated” and the broken bones never healed correctly. 

Well...at least it is a fact that Whittell did have a lion, which he use to take for walks through downtown Menlo Park.

This is probably the most unusual of the Whittell Deusenbergs. The photo was copied from this site: http://theoldmotor.com/?p=160291. The photo itself resides at the ACD Museum in Auburn, Indiana (you can see their logo at the bottom of the photo). 

While accurate as far as it goes, there is more information about the car that is interesting. It was displayed at the Chicago Worlds Fair, and had some unique features, including a body that was narrowed so much it required eliminating the door panel upholstery and, according to John, needing customized curved glass windows in order to fit the narrowed windshield, which Whittell researched since Buehrig did not think anyone could make them. They were also, very unusual for the time, tinted. Removing the door panels was necessary to allow enough clearnace to get the driver's hands aournd the steering wheel.

John said Whittell did not drive the car much. Supposedly a friend said it looked like a cow, which put George off. It died on him out in the woods above Redwood City and, in frustration, John said Whittell put a bullet through the block, requiring Beuhrig to have the car sent back to Auburn to be repaired.

John used Christmas cards to Whittell to “soften him up” for a visit to see the cars. Whittell finally called John and asked why he kept sending the cards, and young Mr. Lewis wangled an invitation to the estate. A tour of the barn where the cars were kept, in a rather sad state of deterioration, then occurred, and Whittell mused that he would like to take one more ride down Caňada Road at 100mph...and did John think he could restore the car for that trip?

John, being no dummy and with more enthusiasm than ability, of course said “sure.” Some time later the job was finished, though I never learned who did the actual work. Based on what I saw of John's car maintenance skills I doubt it was him. The butler then put Whittell into the car and off they went.

Upon return to the mansion Whittell supposedly told John “that was fun. The car is yours.”

Aww...c'mon. That has to be the biggest bullshit story ever, right? I certainly thought so, even when John showed me the Road and Track salon article on the car when it appeared at Pebble Beach. What he showed me was a reprint and not the original magazine, and to me the lettering of his name looked a little wonky, so I thought he had gotten one of those “we print anything” places to phony up the piece. Enter Ernie Mendicki.

Ernie was my greatest car mentor. He knew everyone and everything about cars, and when he died his widow and I, in preparing a retrospective for the Palo Alto Concours, figured he had owned 103 rare and exotic cars over his lifetime, including a number of very special Ferraris. There will, no doubt, be much more about Ernie in future posts.

I thought Ernie and John were in collusion about pulling my leg regarding the car. Ernie said they met when John joined the Air Force and got assigned to Castle Air Base outside Merced. One day Ernie was driving on a dirt road in his Oakland Roadster, a brand which morphed into Pontiac, when the Deusenberg and John went by in the opposite direction. Both cars screeched to a halt and backed up to parallel each other.

“I know every car in the county,” said Ernie. “Who the hell are you?”

“I'm John S. Lewis and I'm looking for a garage space to rent for this car,” came the reply.

“Well, I'm Ernie Mendicki and I just happen to have a space for rent,” Ernie exclaimed.

That is how it came about that the wheels for the car were prepped and polished on Ernie's kitchen table prior to the Pebble Beqch show...or so he said.

Ernie said he always liked John because, being five or so years younger, John never treated him like a kid. I doubt that, because John was nothing if not the world's oldest living teenager and thus treated everyone, including himself, like a kid. They used to double date in the car, and while I'm sure Ernie was more svelt when he was a teenager, he was a big boy, and the thought of him and a date in the rumble seat of the Boattailed speedster is something I just can't wrap my head around.

John later sold the car to someone in NY, and after air freighting it there drove through Manhattan to an unmarked building in a sketchy neighborhood to deliver it, via rollup doors and a private elevator which took him to a floor of red carpets, velvet ropes, and a number of fabulous cars. He was paid in cash as the buyer said his wife knew nothing about the collection.

At this point I was looking for hip waders and a shovel as the BS was getting too deep to handle. Until, that is, I was at his sister's cabin outside Sequoia Park one Thanksgiving and, among the family photos on the wall in the hallway, I'll be damned if there wasn't one of the Deusenberg with John behind the wheel and Joyce standing on the running board. The darned story was true! 

Ernie was a master model builder, and here is a model he built of the car which I got after Ernie died, put together from a kit but with hand made boat tail and other details Ernie added, including the meticulously painted license plates with the correct letters and numbers from when John owned it.

This is the highly accurate model of John's car
Ernie Built

There's more about the car...it wound up going to the owner of the LA Times, who then invited John down to go over the car with him, paying John back by renting Riverside Raceway and “playing race cars” for a day with him. I thought that too was a tall tale till my copy of Rider magazine came a few months later. The feature article on Otis Chandler and his Toys showed the man sitting on a black and white checkerboard floor, in front of the Deusenberg.

By this time I was learning to listen more closely to John's rantings, in both wonder and sheer terror.