The Green Duesenberg

In my family albums there is a photo of a smiling older woman standing next to one of the world’s most admired cars of its day, an emerald green Duesenberg convertible (probably a Model J). Some car historians consider the Duesenberg to be the most prestigious car ever made in America. In its day, it was the car of choice among New York millionaires and the Hollywood elite. The woman standing next to the car is my mother’s mother. So the assumption can easily be that my grandparents must have been rich. But were they? Or is the photo telling us a different story?

In the 1920s my grandfather started a travel business in New York City, catering to the elite traveling back and forth across the Atlantic. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche and their desire to participate in the Parisian arts and entertainment scene. They booked the “Luxury Liners” that plied the North Atlantic between New York, London and France. Near the end of the decade the novels of Hemingway drove the travel to a near frenzy, as “everyone” felt the need to spend a summer in Paris. My grandfather always claimed he was in business with Thomas Cook, but a deep look at Cook’s history shows this was just a lie my grandfather told for reasons unknown to me. Perhaps he was a friend in the industry. My grandmother was a nurse for the wealthy families of the upper East side. She bore my mother, June, my aunt Pat and my uncle Locky.

Sometime near the end of the decade, my grandparents bought this Duesenberg, a dark green symbol of their success. My mother remembered fondly riding in the back as a child, up and down the avenues of New York.

In 1929, the market collapsed and along with it the luxury liner trade. This caused mergers in the fleet, sending less profitable ships to scrap.

As the Depression deepened, my grandfather’s business struggled and then closed. He was broke, but apparently had bought the Duesenberg for cash, as the car was not repossessed. With their finances in ruins, my grandmother made the decision to return to Chicago and live with her parents on the North Side. My grandfather stayed in New York, trying to salvage his career. But it was not to be.

My grandmother packed the kids and all she owned into the car. Along with that, she bought a bunch of chickens, enclosed in a wire cage and that too went into the huge back seat with the kids. So in 1932, once the roads were dry and firm, she headed off to Chicago.

There were no fast freeways back then, just the two lane “Lincoln Highway”, the first transcontinental highway. As she drove she would stop along the road at night and bundle the kids up in blankets and sleep for a while. When she stopped for gas, as she told me, “I would pull into a gas station with my huge Duesenberg, pull up to the pumps and ask the young man to “fill it up”. Once full, I would sadly smile and say I was out of funds and ask whether he would take a chicken in payment. I was never turned down.” I wonder whether this was a tall tale or maybe partially true.

Once in Chicago, my grandmother could not care for her children, as she was working as a nurse. She sent my mother and aunt off to a Catholic girl’s boarding school, run by nun’s. I always was unclear whether it was some kind of orphanage. My mother suffered greatly there, including bed wetting, sleep walking and being beaten ruthlessly by the nuns’. Later in her life, as we would drive down the streets in Chicago, she would see a nun in habit walking down the street and would start cursing under her breath the most foul language imaginable about nuns. It was clear she truly hated them.

Her brother Locky was not lucky in his struggle to grow up in the city. He became a street kid and in the 40s was swept up into the Italian gangs running large parts of the city. Locky had two uncles, one a Chicago cop and the other a member of the FBI, part of Elliot Ness’ famed hunters of Al Capone. They tried to keep him in line, but to no avail. Locky, Howard and James were all huge men, muscular and with a look that scared me as a child. Locky ran a Vick Tanny’s health club and then a motel out near the airport, both of which apparently were owned by the mob. He eventually went to prison for 10 years.

The photo of the Duesenberg was grandma’s attempt to sell the car at the height of the Depression. But there were no takers. She kept the car.

My grandparents never recovered their former glory. My grandfather returned from New York. They used what little my grandmother had saved to buy 40 acres 60 miles from Chicago, on the Northwest Railroad line. They build the basement of a house into the side of a hill, a daylight basement with huge picture frame windows and put a roof over it, hoping to eventually make enough money to build the upper floors. But it never happened. They struggled to pay the taxes on the farm, and my dad often paid the taxes so the two of them wouldn’t lose it to the bank. My grandfather took a job in a factory as a night watchman, riding the train home every morning and walking the five miles into town and home again for twenty years. He never gave up on his dreams of glory, telling me later that he was hoping to turn the farm into an amusement park, like Disneyland. He kept those dreams alive until his death at 94.

My mother would drop me off at their farm as a child for a week at a time. I loved their house full of incredible old things. An organ, boxes of books unshelved. Grandpa Hanna would tell me stories of his fabled ancestors, fighting in the revolution and civil war. All this was documented, he said, in ancient family letters and manuscripts in the boxes piled everywhere, the remains of his days in New York. Later my research would find that these stories were, shall we say, embellished. When my aunt finally died in their home, decades later, with the roof caving in, her little dogs’ shit everywhere and her mind gone, my father simply had two strong high school kids toss all the boxes in a dumpster. I was living far away and missed the opportunity to see what family lore might lie in those moldy boxes.

But Grandpa and I would also take long walks around the farm. Him with his pipe in his mouth, his shock of white hair, oddly long and unkempt for that era and I, bundled against the wicked winter winds. His eyes were icy blue slits in his weathered face. He always seemed to be somewhere far away in his thoughts.

He had been a flute player in his teens, playing in symphonies in those gilded 1890s. He had also been a delegate to the convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson, a president that he admired greatly and talked about a great deal. “Oh!” he said in his high pitched voice, his eyes lighting up as I rarely saw them, “you have no idea how we cheered the great man!” He talked in a peculiar way, a way most people I knew did not talk. A cadence from a lost time. Poetic, as if reading from a book.

He met my grandmother in Chicago in the early 20s, when he was in his 40s. She was a young nurse who had graduated from nursing school just in time to be on the hospitals floors during the 1918 Flu epidemic. He swept her away to New York City.

The car was still in the family in the late 1950s, unused and dead, sitting in the weeds next to the dirt road where we would park at the farm. I would often go out and sit in it, playing adult. Its musty smell and beautiful rotting interior and convertible top were a strange world to me.

My father, in his exuberance for all things new and modern, could not understand why my grandmother kept the Duesenberg around.She had bought another newer car and left the Duesenberg rusting in the grass. Apparently, my dad badgered my grandmother into selling the old car for a pittance and someone came, loaded it on a trailer and hauled it away. My grandmother’s revenge came later, as Duesenbergs started selling in the late 1960s and early 70s for incredible prices, bringing over a million dollars for one at auction. My father felt it was the stupidest mistake he ever made, and I would have to agree.

My last memory of the Duesenberg was when I was 8 or 9. My grandfather and I sat alone one winter, as he smoked his pipe, the strong, sweet smell of tobacco in the air. It was before the Duesenberg was sold. He looked out the big picture window into the distance while he told me his stories of New York in the 1920s and ended it with the statement that “The Jews” were responsible for his business failing. Though I was being raised Jewish he had never spoken of Jews before. Confused, I said, “what do you mean?”

“They caused the Depression. They started World War II. It was all their fault. The tourists stopped going to Europe. It was all their fault.”

“I thought Hitler started World War II”.

“No, it was the Jews. We all knew it.”

“But grandfather, I’m Jewish.”

“Yes, I know, I told your mother not to marry him.”

I sat, uncomprehending and watched the wind lash the trees outside. In the distance, the hulk of the Duesenberg sat rusting in the rain.