Personalities at California Auto Museum …Richard Floch, Docent Class of 2007 You could say that this month’s CAMprofiles is a fraud—or maybe we just couldn’t catch up with you for interviews over the Holidays. The individual featured this month isn’t one of us…except in spirit perhaps. He never set foot in CAM although he would have been right at home in a blue vest...if he could find one to fit his portly 6’2” frame that is. But for many car guys from the Baby Boom generation who grew up thumbing through the newest issue of Mechanix Illustrated to find his latest road test, he was for us, our own Uncle Tom, the original chrome-dome. Tom McCahill, Automotive Journalist …before there was such a thing His grasp of automotive engineering was probably not at good as many shade tree mechanics of his day— Tom McCahill’s degree from Yale was in fine arts and he had failed at running Murray’s Garage in NYC during the Depression— but Tom didn’t let that stop him from becoming the most widely read Automotive Journalist for nearly 30 years and perhaps the first to be given that title. Coming out of the war and unable to find a job, McCahill walked into the offices of the small format, 15¢ monthly Mechanix Illustrated and suggested that the country was about to go crazy for new cars and they should hire him to do a regular automotive feature. His first ‘road test’, a term he coined that is now firmly a part of the automotive lexicon, was written using his own 1946 Ford. For years afterward he had to borrow his test vehicles, often posing as a photographer and then taking out the car for a punishing junket on and off public roads. The Detroit establishment, who always had a love-hate relationship with McCahill, told him, not so politely, “We do our own testing”. When they finally relented and began providing vehicles, never quite sure whether it was a good idea, he would then go out and beat up the factory jobs before scalding them in print as often as not. In the process McCahill invented the 0-60 acceleration test as a standard measure of a car’s performance, and long before Car & Driver added fifth wheels and electronic timing in their own more rigorous ‘road tests’, there was McCahill with his photographer clocking his borrowed test cars with a stopwatch. McCahill covered just about every vehicle manufactured during the heyday of “bigger is better” in Detroit but his favorites seemed to be Chrysler products (Walter Chrysler was a personal friend), and sports cars. He raced his own Cadillac Series 62 on the NASCAR circuit in 1952 and won a NASCAR Sedan race at Daytona in the same year in another of his personal cars, a Jaguar Mark VII. In 1955 he bought the first T-bird built and then took it out at the Daytona Speed Trials. Thirty years and 600 articles after his first road test in the Ford, McCahill was so much a part of MI and the automotive universe that upon his death in 1975, the publishers hid his passing from the public and continued to publish a ghost- written feature called “McCahill Reports” for some time. Mechanix Illustrated couldn’t survive Tom’s loss for long and was bought out three years later, transforming itself finally into a home improvement magazine called Home Mechanix and later Today’s Homeowner until it finally ceased publication entirely in 2001. Uncle Tom’s colorful language and use of the simile is legendary. With it, he goaded the conservative Detroit automotive establishment for years to improve the suspension and handling of its products and his comment that depressing the accelerator of the 1948 in-line 8-cylinder Oldsmobile Futuramic 98 was “…like stepping on a wet sponge” is credited with GM coming out the next year with the hottest OHV V8 of its day, the Rocket 88. His flamboyant prose put us in the passenger seat next to Uncle Tom in a way that we could almost feel the bumps in the road each month. “A good sports car,” the East Valley Tribune quoted McCahill before his death, “(is) like any other piece of good sporting equipment. It should be something you can work up a real affection for. You may even have a pet name for it, and you may even talk to it when you’re alone. Because you and the sports car, out on the road, are a couple of pals together. And if you’re incapable of working up such affection over a jewel-like piece of machinery, you’d be far better off with a Buick.” Docent Newsletter February-March 2012 11 Here are a few, but certainly not all, of Uncle Tom’s more memorable McCahill-isms. If you can’t get enough, drop by the CAM Library on a Thursday and check out any issue of Mechanix Illustrated from 1946 to 1975…[editor] On early 30's Classic Imperials: On the 1962 Plymouth Valiant: “These long-hooded brutes had more sex-appeal than a "The slightly teutonic looks of the Valiant stand out like a hip boatload of starlets anchored off Alcatraz." flask in a bikini." [my personal favorite–ed.] On the 1952 Buick: On the 1959 Dodge: “(The 52 Buick) corners like a fat lady with bad ankles." But by "The front end is as new as next February's cold." the time he tested the '57 Buick he could report "There's no On the 1957 Ford: more of that old-fashioned Roadmaster plowing and wallowing, "Rugged as an Irish riot in a Russian saloon." like a fat matron trying to get out of the bathtub." On the 1969 Dodge Polara, On the 1959 Imperial: “Our test car was as loaded as a slowly drowning mouse in a vat "This doll was as loaded as an opium peddler during a tong war. of bourbon." Swivel seats make it as easy to get into as a floating crap game with fresh money. On the 31 degree banked turns the big Imp On the 1966 Dodge Coronet Hemi: hung in there like oil going through a hose." "This family sized rig has all the belt of a 2 mile swim in a whiskey vat. When you put your foot through the firewall make On the 1954 Triumph TR-2: sure your teeth are well anchored. It is as furry as a mink farm "The Triumph’s looks, however, are subject to challenge. To me, and as snarly as a bengal tiger in a butcher shop." the front end resembles a cardboard box that someone has shoved his foot through. Aside from this head-on aspect, which On the 1965 Aston Martin DB5: has the esthetic grace of an on-its-side rubbish can, I think the "Built to do 150 mph, (the DB5's) are real beasts and about as looks are fine. The seats are comfortable and truly adjustable. gentle around town as galloping hiccups at a prayer meeting. Whether you are six feet four, or just four, the seat has enough This Aston is as docile as a puppy with a full tummy in traffic but back and forward movement to square you up. The instrument a snarler when you give it a whip." panel is neat, adequate and as easy to read as a Marilyn Monroe On the 1957 Imperial: calendar and almost as informative. The drive shaft tunnel divides the port and starboard sides of the car in two, like a "It will get down the pike like a vaselined arrow, and with no more effort than skipping off a cliff." Quaker pew. There is enough room behind the seat to carry a limp, flexible drunk and this barge has a real trunk big enough On the 1962 Chrysler 300: for two five-rib roasts of beef or 10,391 Philco refrigerator ice "I had the car for over a month, and had as many adventures cubes." with it as a Siberian trapper would have in Miami Beach. The On the Jeep CJ3: new 300 is the old Windsor, sexed up and poured into a sport suit. When you slide behind the wheel you get the feeling that "The standard seats are rumored to be made of foam rubber. For this is a big compact, and not an oversized barge as awkward to my dough, some stew blew the foam from a short beer between handle as wearing moose antlers in a telephone booth. A some plastic -- and that was that. Aside from their lack of functional car that gives top performance with lots of room for comfort, they are cut so that with a well-planned wheel spin you could toss Gramp right over a vegetable cart, and into a saloon beaucoup stuff, which might include wine, weazels or women." on one bounce." On the 1959 Chevy Impala: "Styling is as wild as you’ve seen . just as different as Santa On a 1963 Mercury 427: Claus without a beard . That rear deck is pure Louis Armstrong "It has more hair on its chest than a middle-aged yak" —gone, man, gone! What a spot to land a Piper Cub.” On the 1960 Dodge Dart Phoenix: "When equipped with the optional D-500 engine, displacing 383 On the AC Unit in the 1958 Chrysler Imperial: "…cold enough to blue the lips of an Eskimo blubber collector cubic inches with 2 four barrel carburetors, it should be able to parked inside a blast furnace." chew around a race course with enough stuff to turn the humidity into steam.........