Akron: Rubber City’s Classic Show

There is no other city in America so closely tied to the auto industry as Akron, Ohio, for decades the world home of the tire industry. Akron became Rubber City in parallel with Detroit as Motor City.

So it is not surprising that Akron also stages one of the nation’s oldest car shows. Last weekend was the 46th Annual Father’s Day Antique, Classic and Collector Car Show, held at Stan Hywet, the long-time residence of Frank Seiberling, founder of both Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Seiberling Tire.

There’s also a parallel to Michigan’s Meadow Brook Hall, and the Concours d’Elegance event, which is merely celebrating its 25th anniversary this summer. Both Stan Hywet Hall and Meadow Brook are Tudor Revival mansions, built with proceeds of the auto industry’s booming first two decades of the 20th century. Construction of Stan Hywet Hall 1912-15, however, preceded Meadow Brook by about a dozen years. Matilda Dodge Wilson, widow of a Dodge brother, built Meadow Brook.

Journey to Ohio

You’d have thought a hard-core old Ford hand like me would have been chained to the grounds surrounding Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, site of Ford’s centennial the same weekend. Instead I was invited to Akron as the “celebrity author” speaker on Ford history as part of the Ohio show’s recognition of the Ford celebration.

The Akron show had a special exhibit of yummy vintage Fords from local collectors as well as the Crawford Museum in Cleveland. Owners of Ford products displayed at the show had their vehicle sites marked with a special sign reading: “Ohio Region Classic Car Club of America Celebrates 100 Years of Ford — 2003 Father’s Day Car Show at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens.”

As I told the car-nutty audience, perhaps gathered more for the fund-raising art auction than to hear me, collection of old cars is based on memories. And one of the cars under the tent — a Golden Anniversary/ Indy 500 pace car limited-edition 1953 Ford convertible — had special memories for me. It was identical to the one in which my bride and I rode between the church in Venice, Fla., and our wedding reception in Sarasota many decades ago. The immaculate ’53 on display in Akron, white with gold interior, belongs to the Crawford Museum.

Detroit cousin

Before relating more about the show, let me tell a little about the relation between Akron and Detroit, which is not as obvious now as it once was.

Rubber tires and tubes, of course, were in limited (by modern standards) production for bicycles before motorcars came over the horizon. With the incredible growth of the automobile industry after 1905, and the need for at least five bigger and beefier tires per vehicle rather than two little ones for a bicycle, Akron boomed. As antique car historians know, tire failures were frequent in pioneering days of motoring, so many early cars indeed carried two or more spares plus tube repair kits. Demountable rims to facilitate changes were a popular extra-cost option into the Twenties.

There were many tire companies concentrated in Akron then, each plugging its own virtues of tread design, wear, safety, ride and durability. The marketplace boiled down to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) who sold directly to car and truck manufacturers, and the Aftermarket. OEMs had a big advantage over aftermarket-only tire makers because of the natural propensity of motorists to replace original tires with replacements of the same make. So the OEMs could afford to sell their wares to Detroit for bargain prices in order to have a guaranteed replacement business at high profit.

Certain tire companies became matched to certain automakers: Firestone to Ford, Goodyear to Chrysler and U. S. Rubber (later Uniroyal) to General Motors. Foreign tire companies simply were not part of the U.S. market.

By 1939, the number of different OEM passenger car tires had settled down on just seven sizes, all 16 inches in diameter, for example, 5.50 for Studebaker Champion; 6.00 for the “low-priced-three” plus Dodge and Pontiac; 6.25 for Chrysler and Nash sixes; 6.50 for some eight-cylinder medium priced cars like Buick 40; 7.00 for Packard 120 and Cadillac sedans; 7.50 for Cadillac limos, and 8.25 for the Packard Twelve. Note that the vast bulk of production was for the basic “six by sixteen.”

To put that in perspective, by 1987 there were 77 different sizes of car and light-truck tire sizes in production for Detroit’s remaining Big Three and just four years later the number had leapt to 146, according to a retired tire company executive I talked to at the Akron show.

By the way, I’m skipping over some key tire developments of the post-war period, notably low-pressure, tubeless, steel-belted and radials.

Within the last quarter-century, two other key changes came to the tire industry. First, in the late Seventies, Detroit began to feel competitive cost pressures from Japanese car companies, so they squeezed Akron to reduce prices. One result was a “Southern strategy” of moving tire production from the eastern Ohio city to the Deep South, not to escape unions, which they could not, but to get younger, more productive work forces.

The structural change was an almost complete takeover by foreign companies of the long-standing Akron tire makers — and it all happened in less than five years in the middle Eighties. The only two American companies left are Goodyear, which is “in trouble,” and Cooper, an aftermarket supplier. Dunlop was bought by Sumitomo, Firestone by Bridgestone, Armstrong by Pirelli, General by Continental, and Mohawk by Yokohama. Uniroyal and Goodrich merged, and then were taken over by Michelin.

Today, Akron is no longer a tire producer. Where once there were perhaps 70,000 United Rubber Worker union members making tires in the Rubber City, now there are none. Yet white-collar Akron continues relatively prosperous as a center of tire technology and tooling, as well as polymer-related development growing out of synthetic rubber compounding.

Akronite collections

Back now to the Akron car show. Because tire companies generated huge fortunes, some fine classic cars were bought by Akronites and, fortunately, remain preserved today.

I think the most notable car I saw at the show was a 1940 Packard Super Eight with custom Darrin sedan body. Darrin convertibles with cut-down doors are well known in classic circles but I for one had never seen the low-slung closed-quarter sedan before, resembling the 1938-41 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Specials and 1940-48 Lincoln Continentals.

Another rare classic seen there was a magnificent 1937 Lincoln K LeBaron dual-cowl convertible sedan. My Krause “Standard Catalogue” says only 49 LeBaron convertible Lincoln sedans were built, out of a total of 997 Lincoln Ks of that model year. It doesn’t indicate, or I can’t decipher, how many were dual-cowl.

Although the show was handled by the Ohio CCCA, it was not invitational, so a number of unrestored cars turned up, especially interesting when they are true classics which have just been lying around waiting to be adopted by a millionaire collector. Of these were several Packards and couple of Auburns. Alas, to my surprise, a couple of Auburn replicars snuck into the show, but they didn’t look too bad despite their too-small wheels and clunky dashboards.

Among the mundane but rare was a believed-to-be one-of-a-kind-left 1935 GMC pickup truck. And of course there was a “copse of woodies” in a new category this year, including two virtually identical dark green 1948 Ford station wagons and a rare ’46 Mercury Sportsman with its odd-looking but actual ’41 Ford taillamps. Among the 25 judged classes were those specifically for Chevrolet, Corvette, Ford Model A, and both Ford Thunderbird and Ford Mustang through 1978.

I saw license plates from at least four states, so clearly the Akron show has a big draw. With a total pre-registration of 387 vehicles it is no small potatoes, and well worth a trip to Akron for future Father’s Days. For the ladies, the Stan Hywet house and gardens provide relief if the cars get too boring.