Beast and the Beauty

One Christmas in the late 1940s or early ‘50s my aunt Evalyn, our father’s sister, we called her EG, gave me a book by Floyd Clymer that has been around the world with me. It’s still here in the house somewhere, I’ll have to find it, a treasury of early automobiles. It instantly became my favorite book and most prized possession that I poured over for endless hours, lying stretched out on the living room floor reading and rereading without end. There was a dust jacket on it that itself wore away to dust decades ago. EG bought it in the wonderful bookshop at “Woodies,” the Woodward & Lothrop department store downtown in Washington, DC where she lived. Single, she was the dream of a favorite aunt.

It was in Floyd Clymer’s book I first heard of the Reeves Octoauto, a 1911 car in which the first two wheels steered in the desired direction, the second set in the opposite direction.

An interesting challenge to parallel park, it would not have appealed to me if for no other reason than that it reminded me more of a spider than a car.

And it was in Clymer’s book I learned about the Ruxton,

a front-wheel-drive automobile built in 1929 and 1930.

Distinguished by its thin headlamps,

that may have swiveled with the front wheels turning, I don't remember, the Ruxton had a straight-eight Continental engine,

and compared to other cars of its day, because there was no centerline drive shaft, it sat much lower, and must have been more stable. Sitting lower, it did not need a runningboard for stepping up into.

I’ve never seen one, but Ruxton and Floyd Clymer’s book came to mind again last week, the morning I opened Norm’s email with a stack of about 35 old car pictures that included a Ruxton.

With a combination of doubtful business strategy and the misfortune of hitting the very start of the Great Depression, Ruxton never got off the ground, but it was a classic, a magnificent car.