Never expected this.
While wandering the rows at Hershey last year, I ducked into one tent just to escape the rain for a few minutes and came across a table full of tether cars of all sorts and shapes. Snapped a pic, went on my way, and I didn’t think to get the vendor’s name or contact information.
Couple weeks ago, Suzy Hollidge saw the picture in our coverage of Hershey in Hemmings Motor News, showed the picture to her husband and shot me an email:
To his surprise, one of those [tether racers] pictured was made by his father, over 50 years ago, (who made only 2) we have the original pictures. Is there anyway to contact the individual who has these cars? His was the last one on the right.
Right about then I started to regret not getting the vendor’s contact information. And I know nothing about tether racers - not even where to start looking for information about them - so I thought I’d stick the pic up here and see if anybody knows anything. But what about those pictures?
White: this is an interesting picture because almost all of the cars here were built by Dooling Brothers, save for one Rexner, which was a $50 car and pretty rare. Doolings ran about $35, a little more affordable then
So Suzy sent me the following photos, all taken at a tether car club event in Boston in the late 1940s. She identified the pipe-smoking gent on the far left as John Hollidge, her husband, Henry’s, father.
The streamliner car was supposed to be left to my husband, but had disappeared during a divorce in the late ’40s.
White: This young man is almost certainly setting the mixture on his carburetor
White: The white car by the boy’s knee is the Rexner, which was a front-wheel-drive car. The two smaller ones in front were rarer and smaller Class B cars
White: Here he’s working on the frog. Note the spare tires in the toolbox deeper in the trunk
White: this picture and the next are very interesting. The broom handle was an alternative method of bump-starting a car…
White: …and if you notice here, the one man is holding a handkerchief stretched out in front of him. You can hardly see it, but a small wand is sticking out of the tops of the cars, and the handkerchief grabs the wand and shuts down the ignition.
White: This young man’s doing it the hard way. He has his battery hooked up, but he’s turning the rear wheel by hand to get the engine to turn over
White: Here, he’s holding a front-wheel-drive car, and there’s a rubber wheel on the engine that he’s holding the car against until the car turns to life
Looks like a Maytag washing machine engine, though I have no idea what he’s doing with it.
If anybody knows about the streamlined tether car, please let us know in the comments below so we can put you in touch with the Hollidges. Otherwise, enjoy the brief glimpse into the tether car scene in Boston in the late 1940s.
UPDATE (10.Jan 2008): Just got off the phone with Kirk White. He said it wasn’t his table at Hershey that I snapped a pic of, but he did enlighten me a little about tether cars and their history. He also provided captions to the above photos, which are worth reading for explanations of what the guys in the club are doing.
As to the streamlined car that started this whole post, White said it was indeed a Dooling Brothers frog, one of about 2,000 to 3,000 that the Dooling Brothers, based in Los Angeles, built in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They were offered as kits, and the buyer would have to install his own engine. Unfortunately, many were lost in the scrap drives of World War II. “They still turn up now and again, but they’re hard to find,” White said. He said a good one will fetch about $3,000, while a well-used one will still sell for $2,000 (rarer models will sell for as much as $30,000 to $35,000).
This thread also turned up some interesting photos, information and links in a thread on the H.A.M.B. And the links in the comments below are priceless for folks like me who didn’t have a clue about tether car racing until now.
