More than you ever wanted to know about Tuckers.
Having an excess of time on my hands awhile back (thanks to being unemployed), I decided to do some digging on Preston Tucker, to see if I could turn up anything I didn't already know. Much to my surprise, I found a number of things, none of which appear in the only biography of Tucker (The Indomitable Tin Goose by Charles T. Pearson) or in any of the literature by the Tucker Club that I've seen published. And while I found no smoking guns in regards to a conspiracy against, Tucker, I certainly found evidence that he was the victim of an opportunistic politician, eager to make a name for himself, who at the very least, was willing to ally himself with some unsavory characters to further his aims.
I'm not going to comment much at all on the film by Francis Ford Coppola, other than to state that is a reasonably accurate portrayal of what happened to Tucker between the years 1945 and 1949. Yes, it does take some dramatic license, and yes it does have some composite characters, and yes it does have some moments in it which are pure speculation (Coppola points out most of these things in his commentary on the DVD), but even the totally fictitious speech Jeff Bridges gives at the close of the trial (the defense made no closing argument, feeling that the prosecution had failed to make it's case) is quite close to things Tucker actually said. So while the film may not be completely accurate in it's portrayal of events, it does however, capture the essence of Tucker, something which Hollywood often fails to do in other biopics.
Before I go any farther, I want to take a stab at clearing up a common misconception about the cars. This is a Tucker Torpedo Until recently it only existed in drawings and photographs of a quarter scale model (the model has survived and is in the hands of a private collector). A few years ago, a member of the Tucker family decided to convert a Buick Riviera into what a Tucker Torpedo might have looked like had the car actually entered into production. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if the car would have been a success.
Many people have labeled Tucker an engineering genius, but I doubt that he would have agreed. Certainly, if there's an “engineering gene,” Tucker most definitely had it. When was a teenager, Tucker took it upon himself to fix the family car, which was having transmission problems. His mother (at the time, a single parent) found him in the garage, with the transmission torn apart and scattered all over the floor. Horrified, she yelled at him, saying that he'd never be able to get it back together, much less get it working again. Tucker's response was to point out that he'd numbered each part and placed them in a chalk outline as he removed them. Tucker later attended night courses, studying engineering, and was one of the members of the Ford owned racing team. It was there, as well as his years spent as a salesman for Packard, Studebaker, and his time working in the offices of Cadillac that he gained his knowledge of automobiles. Tucker's true genius lay in taking a diverse number of automotive ideas and bringing them together in a single automobile, something few other people have been able to do, and none quite as successfully.
What made Tuckers so special ->
