Carburetors

Back in the mid-70s, I was living on a farm in Southern Oregon, trading my labor for room and board.  Jim and Celia Roaf owned the place, he in his mid 70s, she ten years older.  Jim had been trained as a botanist back in the 20s and had worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps testing Northwestern squirrels for bubonic plague.  Celia had been a hospital nurse, but then, frustrated with traditional medicine, she became friends with Adele Davis (Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit) and, at her behest, started the first health food store in southern Oregon.  She and Jim first crossed paths when he, a state health inspector, came in to examine her store and got into an argument with her over the merits of “organic” food. He was an argumentative type, very brain-heavy, but Celia won that round and impressed Jim enough in the process that he eventually proposed to her.  They lived in Grants Pass and he became president of the local chapter of the John Birch Society, until he resigned in protest over their anti-Semitism.  By the time I met him, he had morphed into the unlikely combination of a libertarian environmentalist.

Jim taught me a lot of American history, especially about the development of monopolies, both governmental and corporate.  One of his pet peeves was what the big-three car companies had done to their smaller competitors back in the 30s, especially the Tucker, a brilliantly designed machine that was put out of business by a bogus article in Readers Digest claiming its reverse gear was defective. Jim introduced me to an old guy up in Springfield who still had an original Tucker.  There it was in his garage, all waxed and polished, with a third, center-mounted, headlight that followed the direction of the steering wheel.  The owner had previously operated a service station in Springfield for many years, so I asked him my favorite car question:

“I’ve read stories about these carburetors back in the ‘40s and ‘50s that supposedly got 100 miles-per-gallon and how they were systematically destroyed by the oil industry. You ever hear any of them?”

“I’ve heard ‘em all,” he said.

“Well, are any of them true?” I asked.

“I have no idea.  No way of  knowin’ one way or the other.” 

He glanced over at Jim, then down at the floor. 
”But I’ll tell you what happened to me.”  He looked me hard in the eye. “Back after the war there was a carburetor called the “Fish” carburetor, came out of Canada as I remember. Anyway, I got hold of one and put it on my Lincoln just out of curiosity.  Well it doubled my gas mileage, so I told some of my customers about it. I ended up installing 16 of ‘em right here in Springfield.  Then one day I’m here in my shop and a couple of big guys in suits from Standard Oil come in and they say to me, ‘Hey, we hear you got one of those Fish carburetors.’” 

He looks back down at the floor.  “I say, ‘Yeah, I love it,' and one of them says, ‘Well, we want it.’

‘Sure’, I said, ‘I’ll order one for you.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘we want that one on your car.’"

"Well I pretty much figured out what was goin’ on, so I took the carburetor off and gave it to ‘em.  Afterward, I checked around town, and those guys got to every one of the 16 customers whose cars I’d outfitted.  I didn’t give them their names, but they got to ‘em all.  There was one old guy who told ‘em to forget it, he wasn’t going to give it to them, but they ended up threatening his wife and kids, so he eventually.”

“Who were they?,” I asked.

“Standard Oil.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“Nope, I found out later by checkin’ around.”

“Wow!” I said. 

“Anyway, that’s the only carburetor story I can vouch for.  I don’t know about the rest of ‘em.”

That was good enough for me.

2009