Death of the Tucker ‘48 — Part I
a.k.a. The Tin Goose
Usually when telling a story it’s best to start at the beginning, continue on to the midsection where the plot fully develops and then bring the tale to a close once you arrive at the conclusion — which is almost always marked by the words “The End.” It’s a logical way to go about the business of storytelling and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the venture. But on very rare occasions, the best way to tell a story is in reverse. And in the case of Preston Tucker, it is in fact, the only way to tell the story; because the hero in this tragedy is not the defeated grown man, it’s the wide-eyed boy.
Mr. Tucker died in his bed in Ypsilanti, Michigan on December 26, 1956 at 4:55 PM at the age of 53, most likely of pneumonia. His mother had just applied a concoction of Vaseline and peppermint to his back, the same concoction she had used twice before to cure pneumonia in his childhood. It was a beautiful gesture and as she did it her boy Preston said he felt better, and then he drifted off to sleep. But this time around Mr. Tucker’s body was trying to fight off not just pneumonia, but lung cancer; and it wouldn’t succeed. On his deathbed he weighed less than 100 lbs, half his normal weight and a shadow of the towering figure he once was.
In addition to being severely emaciated, Mr. Tucker died broke; at least that’s my opinion. In September of that same year he flew to Brazil to receive specialized treatments for his lung cancer from Dr. William F. Koch; but he had to borrow money in order to pay for his and his wife’s fare. I assure you that had Preston Tucker owned enough pennies to afford two plane tickets to Rio he would have used every last one of them to purchase the tickets himself, and avoided the embarrassment that he must have felt at being obligated to ask for a hand out. But pride sometimes melts before necessity and in Mr. Tucker’s case, he simply had no other choice. In a cruel twist of fate the man’s health, once robust and unflagging, easily capable of logging 36 hour work days, in the end had come to very closely parallel his fortunes in the business world. Both were marked by a precipitous drop from which he never recovered.
The choice to fly to Brazil was not some random, flailing attempt at a cure. Dr. Koch was a close friend who had operated a cancer clinic in Detroit. But the clinic had been effectively shut down by criminal allegations brought against him by the FDA, for which he was found not guilty. In time he moved his entire laboratory to Rio de Janeiro so that he could continue his practice unencumbered by the accusations and burdensome requirements placed upon him by hovering government officials.
A few years earlier Tucker, when in better health, had fled to Rio for the very same reason as the doctor. But Tucker wasn’t a physician, he was a salesman, a car salesman looking for financial assistance to help mount his comeback. But to say that he was “a” car salesman doesn’t do the man justice. Preston Tucker was not “a” car salesman, because the indefinite article “a” implies that he is to be simply placed alongside all the other car salesman the world has ever known. And you can’t simply stick a few modifiers between the “a” and “salesman” and consider your description at all accurate either; because even by saying that he was “a” very, very, good car salesman, you are still making a dramatic understatement.
Nor can you limit him to the category of “Salesman” alone; he didn’t just sell cars, he envisioned them, then designed them, and then built the greatest automobile on the planet out of absolutely nothing while under pressures that would have squashed a lemonade stand in its infancy let alone an enterprise as complicated as an upstart automobile manufacturer. So to get at the man you have to discard the “a” altogether and state that Preston Tucker was by far the greatest car salesman the world has ever known and he built the only car to have outpaced its rivals in quality and technological advancement by nearly a decade; the only one. In 1948, Preston Tucker reached a good 7 to 10 years into the future, grabbed the available technology and dragged it back to the present. He was simply the best and there’s a long stretch of road that separates him from the man in second place.
By now you must be wondering, “If he was so good, why have I never heard of him and why haven’t I ever seen one of his cars?” Well, as I said in the beginning, this story is a tragedy. But the tragedy doesn’t reach its conclusion on a Ypsilanti death bed, nor earlier in the office of a disinclined Brazilian multi-millionaire. By the time those events played out the theater had long since closed. Though Mr. Tucker would have fiercely objected to the suggestion that he was ever beaten, it’s clear now that the curtain dropped and the lights went out on the stage he built on the morning of March 13, 1949, roughly seven years before he came to his end. On that day the citizens of Detroit awoke to a ground covered in snow and a headline covered in intrigue. The ramifications of that headline would break Preston Tucker, stain three government agencies and turn the concept of our free enterprise system into a humorless joke.
Continue to part II
