Car Stories, the First Spark

This is a car that's travelled a lot of miles. Over it's long life the wheels have rolled over hard bricks and gritty concrete from Maryland to Washington state; pushed through red clay and soggy mud from Kansas to Virginia; and even toured the parks and gardens of France and Germany. Now it sits parked at my home in western North Carolina after a century of countless journeys with my family. 

It's not surprising that it has survived so long as the A. C. Williams Company made it of cast iron. In 1844 the company established its first foundry in Chagrin Falls, Ohio producing chain pump reels, spouts, and plow points. By the late 1860s it began using new coke-fueled furnaces and expanded into a line of tool and wagon parts along with hardware items. After two devastating fires in 1889 and 1892 destroyed its factories, the A. C. Williams Co. moved its foundry plant to Ravenna, Ohio. 

By the turn of the century, the company had a good trade in a line of flat irons, also known as "sad irons", that were used in homes and laundries across America for pressing clothes. Since these irons were very heavy for the company's travelling salesmen to carry, the foundry produced miniature sample irons that were lighter weight and which proved very popular with children as well as with its adult customers. The company soon began producing cast iron novelty toys like banks and wheeled vehicles like this car. Though the company's principal products were cast iron machine parts made to order for various tool companies, from 1900 until 1938 its workers produced hundreds of thousands of toy horse-drawn wagons, automobiles, trucks, tractors, and even airplanes. By the 1920s  the A.C. Williams Company was recognized as the largest cast iron toy manufacturer in the world. The company is now known as the Lite Metals Company of Ravenna, Ohio and its early and transitional history is found at its website.

Here is a similar toy car that has more of its original yellow  paintwork. 

A. C. Williams Co. cast iron car
Source: The Internets

These are solidly built cars, though the gas mileage does suffer because of the heavy weight. My car was originally bright red but time has slowly replaced much of its paint with a patina of grass stains and mud. However it does have the original tires and no rust, which I think is pretty good for a car that's a century old.

Though there are no marks in the casting for the A. C. Williams Co., it wasn't difficult to find examples of this particular toy car in numerous listings on antique dealers' websites. It's probably worth between $50 and $100 today depending on the market. 

It is usually identified only as a "Coupe". But I wanted to know if it was a replica of a real automobile and  I especially wanted to learn which vintage. After some deep digging in the internet archives I think I've found the right car.  

It's a 1923 Packard Roadster.

1923 Packard Roadster
Source: The Internets

Car manufacturers of this era are often hard to distinguish one from another unless you can get a good look at the little details like hood ornaments or radiator grills. My cast iron toy car doesn't have that level of detail, but when I saw this photo taken in 1923 by a Packard factory photographer I could see car's outline and features matched my toy. The Packard Motor Car Company built high quality cars in Detroit, Michigan from 1899 to 1958. Its chief competitors were two other luxury brands: Pierce-Arrow of Buffalo, New York, and Peerless of Cleveland, Ohio. 

In its time the Packard roadster was a kind of powerful, fast sports car that a sportsman or a movie star might own. It's an obvious choice for a toy maker to model and you can see it in the long front hood for the 6 cylinder Packard engine, the folding convertible top, and the extended rear trunk large enough for a hidden folding passenger compartment called the "rumble seat." Unfortunately it's not incorporated on the toy car, but this popular feature was imitated by many other car brands. Here's a picture of a restored 1923 Packard Roadster painted in a nifty robin's egg blue. 

1923 Packard Roadster
Source: The Internets

Now more than half a century ago. my dad, Russell Brubaker, gave me this cast iron toy when I was a little kid. He often told me he had played with it when he was a boy and, as he was born in 1929, the 1923 Packard fits into his time line, but I've always suspected it was an older pre-owned model. Though he never said so, I'm sure it was passed down to him from the older boys in his Brubaker family, Lawrence and Clifton Brubaker who probably drove it first on the farm of their father, Harvey Brubaker. 

It's a long tale, too complicated to include on my story about family cars, but suffice it to say that my dad was raised by his grandfather and grandmother, Harvey and Ruby Mae Brubaker. Lawrence and Clifton were his uncles, 15 and 13 years older respectively. Harvey is pictured in this photo standing next to a very similar automobile with a high running board, spoked wheels, and folding canvas top. With a suitcase in hand, he looks like he's going on a trip. For most of his life he worked in "truck farming", basically acting as a distributor who transported farm produce like vegetables, eggs, and milk from rural farms to urban markets.  

Harvey Lincoln Brubaker and Ruby Mae Pratt were married in 1901 and originally lived in Brenkenridge, Missouri. You can read about them in my story from November 2012, Dr. & Mrs. Halstead on Election Day 1920. But by 1920 the Brubakers had already lived on 13 different  farms in Missouri, Virginia, and Maryland. This information comes from a beautiful journal that Ruby wrote in 1946, listing every home.

It was a tough life that didn't make them rich, but it was good enough that Harvey and Ruby raised five children, and in 1929 take on one more, my father. By that year they lived in a rented house in Reisterstown, Maryland, east of Baltimore. Sadly, Harvey died in January 1937 at age 58 when my father was just shy of eight years old, so there are few photos of them together. Harvey's car, possibly a Ford model-T, is so similar to the Packard's shape, that I feel certain my dad linked the toy car to memories of his father/grandfather.

For my dad that toy car was just the start of a long passion for cars, but as a young man it took him a while before he actually got to own one. He was the first in his family to go to college, the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland outside Washington, D. C., but he didn't have a car and used two wheels to get there. It was a stubby Cushman motor scooter that I don't think ever got faster than 35 mph on a downhill run. 

Once he graduated from the university's ROTC program and became an officer in the U. S. Army, his first real cars were more of a leased vehicle. Here he is posing with two military jeeps not too dissimilar from the Packard roadster with running boards and canvas tops.  

The first picture was featured in my story of August 2018, Everything In Focus, about my dad's deployment to the Korea War in February 1952 as a young second lieutenant in the 38th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed "Rock of the Marne".  This was also when he discovered the wonders of cameras and photography, which is why I have these photos.

The second picture isn't marked and I'm less certain where it was taken. I think it was during his second tour in Korea in 1959-60. By this time he had transferred to the U. S. Army Transportation Corps, a relatively safer duty than the infantry, made first lieutenant, and acquired a son, too. This move into the logistical arm of the military had the advantage of opening up many more  opportunities for my dad to play with trucks, cars, jeeps, and sometimes even ships and airplanes too. He always took great pride in keeping engines tuned, tires rotated, and oil checked. And like the boy scouts' motto says, "Be Prepared", he always stored a little kit of wrenches and screwdrivers in every vehicle's trunk just in case of a breakdown. 

That little Packard roadster has been carefully garaged in countless shoe boxes, desk drawers, and parked on bookshelves at dozens of Brubaker homes as it followed first my dad and now me around the world. Every time I take it out for a spin, I think how amazing it is that a little cast iron toy powered by imagination could inspire my dad's lifelong passion and enjoyment of cars and all things mechanical. And I guess its magic spark still motivates me too.

Burrrmm, brrrmm!

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where everyone has their own car story to tell.