By Dennis Box, The Courier-Herald
Adrian Taylor has always loved old cars. It's a link to the past that came from his grandfather.
Since the age of 15, Taylor has been collecting classic cars. He currently owns three - a 1929 Nash, his first classic car, a 1939 Packard woody station wagon and a 1931 Franklin.
In 1998, Taylor decided to take his family on a classic car tour, a 10-day, 1,200 mile odyssey over Snoqualmie Pass into eastern Washington and north into Canada. There were 100 classic cars on the tour.
The car he chose for the trip was the Franklin. That decision would bring him in contact with a mysterious historical treasure through a young woman, a person he would never meet, and her deceased piano teacher.
A scrapbook
There was something special about the tour from the very beginning.
"When we started off on that trip I don't think there was a day it was under 100 degrees," Taylor said "It was the first long trip I had taken with my family. All the other cars were dropping like flies. But the hotter it got, the better my car ran."
The group stopped in Leavenworth and, unknown to Taylor, his Franklin was spotted by a someone.
"This young woman asked one of the other members on the tour for my name and phone number," Taylor said. "I never actually met her."
The woman had been taking piano lessons all her life from an elderly piano teacher. When the teacher passed away, she left a scrapbook to her pupil.
The scrapbook was a chronicle of a trip taken in 1915 from Walla Walla to San Francisco, Calif - driving a Franklin automobile.
"She contacted me by mail," Taylor said. He guessed she was about 20 years old. "She said she wanted someone to have it that would really want it and appreciate it. She also asked that I not disclose her name."
The young woman did not know why her teacher had the scrapbook, or her relationship to the people in the story it told.
The tale of a trip
Taylor bought the scrapbook from the young woman. He opened it and found on each page original telegraph messages and newspaper articles documenting a trip from Walla Walla to San Francisco.
The messages chronicling the trip begin on Aug. 1, 1915, a Sunday, at 6:10 a.m. The first message notes the car is driven by J.W. McCormmach of the Pendleton Auto Company. There were three passengers, weighing 482 pounds, plus 830 pounds of luggage.
They would have carried extra tires, oil and gas. What they would not have carried was extra water.
The Franklin used an air-cooled, six-cylinder engine. The automobile was manufactured from 1902 to 1934 in Syracuse, N.Y. The Franklin Automobile Company was consider a leader in the automobile industry for its craftsmanship and technology.
A Franklin in 1915 cost $2,000 to $3,000, while a Ford could be purchased for around $300. Before the invention of antifreeze, the air cooled Franklin was often used by doctors in cold weather climates.
The telegraph messages from the trip outline a sales promotion to show the durability of the Franklin to the people of the Pacific Northwest.
One of the messages written by John F. McClain noted, "The high and intermediate gears were removed. The transmission was inspected and sealed with a regulation railroad company seal."
McClain owned a Franklin dealership in San Francisco which was the final destination of the trip.
The hardest test
The idea was to drive from the Walla Walla Franklin Auto Dealer store to J.W. McClain's Auto Dealer store in San Francisco in low gear for the entire trip.
"The whole Northwest is watching the hardest test of an automobile ever made," McCormmach wrote in his telegraph message on Aug. 1.
The telegraph messages tell the story of driving in 1915 and shows the fun this group was having trying to sell their car.
A Lakeview, Ore., message from McCormmach at 9:34 a.m. on Aug. 2 stated, "Rocks, stumps, then desert sand, sagebrush, more rocks, all in the center of the road. 20 minutes ahead of schedule. No damage yet and motor behaving wonderfully. Frisco or bust. We have not stopped yet."
When the travelers reached Oakland on Aug. 3 , they sound like vacationers today.
"Oakland dealer met us at Redding. If he doesn't let us get lost we will make San Francisco tomorrow evening. About the only thing we are afraid of is that the ferry will sink us," said McCormmach's message.
The arrival
They began on Aug. 1 and arrived 6 p.m. on Aug. 4 at McClain's in San Francisco.
According to McCormmach's records the car used 11 gallons of engine oil and 95 gallons of gas. The oil was changed three times on the trip.
The trip took 83 hours and covered 858 miles.
"I will have to congratulate the Franklin organization for building the toughest proposition ever built in the shape of an automobile," said McCormmach's message from San Francisco. "Nothing short of the German Zeppelin can equal this record."
The San Francisco Chronicle showed a picture of the group standing in front of the car noting the Franklin had set a new low-gear record.
H.H. Franklin Museum
Taylor was never able to find out what the relationship was of J.W. McCormmach or the other travelers to the piano teacher.
"I don't know if the family owned the dealership," Taylor said. "Maybe the woman's father was one of them. The young woman I got this from didn't know."
He decided the best course was to donate the scrapbook to the H. H. Franklin Foundation Franklin Museum in Tucson, Ariz. Taylor flew to Arizona on Friday and presented the scrapbook to the Museum on Monday.
The 42 year-old Taylor has owned and operated the Ben Franklin store in Bonney Lake for the last 15 years. He bought his Franklin car in 1992. It had been sitting in a barn back in Pennsylvania. There were 17,000 original miles on the vehicle.
Dennis Box can be reached at dbox@courierherald.com
