Buick Roadmaster

This morning it is very  probable that you had an encounter with David Dunbar Buick’s most important gift to the world, and we don’t mean the Buick Roadmaster or any other Buick automobile. Truth be told, Buick’s  most amazing contribution to our lives came in the bathroom. He patented a procedure for bonding porcelain to iron, creating the bathtub as we know it today. So if you took a shower this morning (and we definitely hope you did), you owe a tiny bit of gratitude to one D.D. Buick.

Of course, if you’re reading this piece, you are more likely an auto enthusiast than a plumbing  enthusiast, so it is therefore you are more likely interested in Buick’s automotive adventures–or maybe,  we should say misadventures. By way of  immediate background, Buick was born in Scotland in 1854, and emigrated to the United States with his mother and father two years later. Part of a family  originally named Buik (apparently as Scots they were so thrifty they declined to buy the “C”), David Buick eventually settled in the bustling lumber town of Detroit where he went into the plumbing business.

David Buick enters the car field

With his partner William Sherwood, Buick owned and operated a successful plumbing supply company, but sparkling white bathrooms paled in comparison to the up-and-coming business of the day, the automobile. A tinkerer and dreamer, Buick became enamored of the internal combustion engine at much the same time as his fellow Detroit area neighbor, Henry Ford, did. In 1899, Buick established the imaginatively named Auto Vim and Power Company with the concept of building gasoline engines for farm and stationary use. A year later,  the lure of the promising automotive industry proved so strong that he decided to sell his plumbing business (for the princely sum of $100,000) and charge ahead in the car business. But the going wasn’t as easy as he had expected.

Though he and  Walter L. Marr, one of his key engineers, had built a “Buick” car in 1900, the development of a car that could be manufactured in any quantity became a very expensive proposition. In an  effort  to raise more funds, Buick incorporated the Buick Manufacturing Company in 1901 as a successor to Auto Vim, and then in 1903 he incorporated the Buick Motor Company.   However, the enterprises never really took hold,  until an investor named Benjamin Briscoe Jr. sold his interest in Buick to a consortium of wagon makers based in Flint, Michigan, about 60 miles from Detroit.

By the end of 1903,  Flint Wagon Works decided to move the Buick Motor Company out of Detroit to Flint with the idea of  producing “horseless carriages.”   Fortunately, the new company had a good piece of technology to work with.   Buick, Marr, and Eugene Richard,  another engineer, had developed an overhead-valve gasoline engine that was powerful,  light,  and reliable–three things that most gas engines of the day were not.

In 1904, production of the Buick Model B began, after a successful test run conducted by Buick’s son, Thomas, and by the end of the year 37 copies had been manufactured. But more financial  worries  threatened the company, and its financial backers were forced to turn to one of the truly colorful business characters of the age, “The Carriage King,” William C. “Billy” Durant.

A colorful  fresh manager

Legend has it that Durant got into the carriage enterprise  by taking a flyer on a horse-drawn cart he had seen in 1886. Though he had no background in the business,  his uncanny sales knack was immediately obvious, and by the turn of the century, he was running the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, the largest manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles in the country. On November 1, 1904 Durant became general manager of Buick Motor Company, and while David Dunbar Buick stayed as president, his days at the helm would soon come to an end.

Once brought into the organization, Durant dove in with his characteristic enthusiasm. Through promotions that included cross-country drives and a heavy dose of racing (often with French driver Louis Chevrolet at the wheel), Buicks gained so much visibility that it began to challenge the still-promising Ford Motor Company for overall sales supremacy. But Buick and Durant  clashed. Durant thought big, wanting to  produce “volume cars” on an assembly line basis, while Buick favored a more meticulous, car-by-car approach. The financiers turn in favor of Durant, and in 1906, at the age of 52, Buick was out of the company that bore his name.

The rise and fall and rise

After that, Buick Motors’s star began to rise as quickly as its founder’s started  to decline. The Buick marque became the cornerstone as Durant built General Motors, only to lose it, and then to take it over again, ultimately  to lose it once again. David Dunbar Buick fell back into near-obscurity. As his days came to an end in the late Twenties, he worked at a Detroit trade school, perhaps wishing  the more than $10 million his holdings in Buick would have been worth had he been able to hold onto them. In 1929, he passed away at the age of 74.

Based on the technical strength of its “valve-in-head” engine, Buick stayed alive and prospered during the ups and downs that dogged General Motors through the Teens and into the Twenties. While Alfred P. Sloan Jr. put General Motors on an even keel, Buick was a mainstay brand, as solidly middle class as the cars emanating from Chrysler, Nash, and Hudson. By 1926, Buick production reached 260,000 vehicles–not anywhere near Ford territory, of course, but still, a very respectable number.

Reliability was the Buick calling card, and the model quickly gained a reputation as “the doctor’s car.” A 1925 Buick made a trip around the world, visiting different  Buick distributors as it went, and that same year, Buicks won top marks in a series of Leningrad-to-Moscow endurance runs–the bourgeois poster child beating all comers in Red Russia.

Depression sales plummet

The beginning of the Great Depression threw Buick for a loop. Sales  dropped  to just 40,000 vehicles in 1933, a far cry from the quarter of a million Buicks that had rolled out of Flint in 1926. But assistance  was on the way. At age 39,  GM named Harlow H. Curtice — the youthful president of GM affliate AC Spark Plug Company–to run Buick Motor Division.

It didn’t take Curtice long to get the wheels rolling  once again. For the 1934 model year,  Buick launched  the Series 40 (later “Special”), which brought speed and performance back to the brand, and sales, spurred by an improvement in the economy, almost doubled. Following that victory, Curtice asked GM design legendary Harley Earl to conceive a “Buick you would like to own.”

Up to then, Earl had spent most of his time on the upper ranges of the GM line with  La Salle and Cadillac, but the 1936 Buick model range, which included the first of the legendary Roadmasters, was a tour de force. These were cars that looked substantial and  impressive  but in no way clumsy or over-large. The front views are particularly inspiring with  a low-set grille and a close-set headlights flanking an impressive nose. The sweep of the fenders is majestic and the rear ends sophisticated  in their simple execution of taillights, trunk lid, and  bumper. These aren’t in-your-face cars with the flamboyance of Cadillac; instead they are inconspicuous  while at the same time impossible to ignore.

Roadmaster’s mechanical advancements

Mechanically,  the Buicks of the time offered some interesting technical trickery. It was one of the first mass-produced vehicles to utilize a modern independent front suspension arrangement, and one of the first to put the shift lever on the steering column. While that might not sound like a good thing in this era of 6-speed manual transmissions, you must bear in mind that cars like the Buick Roadmaster depended upon high-torque engines like the “Fireball Valve-in-Head Dynaflash 8” to be tractable enough to pull from, say, 10 miles per hour all the way to maximum  speed in third (the highest) gear. Instead of using an automatic transmission (then being tested at sister division Oldsmobile), the Buick driver simply got to top gear rapidly and stayed there.

As the country emerged from Depression, Buick Roadmasters  immediately gained a reputation as a solidly dependable  family car with virtually all the luxury of a Cadillac but in a less-pretentious package. The Roadmaster nameplate became one of the longest running in automotive history, continuing from the mid-Thirties through the late-Fifties then returning for a brief cameo in the 1990s.

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