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Eddie Green drove the Mitchell
for my grandfather, and one day on a straight stretch
of road my grandfather said, "Turn her loose and see what she'll do."
They estimated their speed at forty miles
an hour and came home feeling quite proud of the achievement. My
grandmother never shared my grandfather's yen for speed; fifteen miles
an hour was fast enough for her, and we would proceed along the highway
as slowly as a funeral proces-sion, but nobody cared because in those
days you had the road practically to yourself.
The Mitchell was kept in our "Bubble House", as my grand- father
had no use for it in Boston where he lived. When in Weston he liked to
be driven around the country but he never went very far; the roads
were poor, there were no filling stations, and the possibility of a flat
tire or a breakdown too far from home was
an important consideration.
About 1908 my father bought an air-cooled Corbin. It fre-quently
overheated and caught fire, and we always had a pail of sand along as an
extinguisher. In 1910 he turned this in for a water-cooled Corbin
which was delivered to us late one summer afternoon by two men who had
driven it up from the factory in New Britain, Connecticut. The shadows
were beginning to lengthen as they started for home in our old
air-cooled car, and we were thankful not to be going
with them.
Once they were out of sight my father said, as with every new car,
"Now I've got to show this to Lucky Johnny," for Lucky Johnny, according
to my father, was an outstanding authority
on anything mechanical. Because he was unable to buy an auto-mobile that
met his exacting requirements, he set up a machine shop in his
back yard and built one himself, and even equipped |
