Stuntin’ In My Two-Four — My 1924 Ford, That Is

Photo: Library of Congress

Wheelies, funny cars, urban highway stuntin’ - they all require some sort of weight transfer for maximum effectiveness, for poking the front wheels skyward and for putting on a show. And nobody seemed to understand that principle better than a series of automotive showboaters on rural parade routes in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Of those showboaters, perhaps none is more famous than Roy Repp, who toured the country with his bucking Buick, which he dubbed “Maud, the Motor Mule.” In the photos above and below, which the George Grantham Bain News Service took in the first half of the 1910s, we see Repp, presumably on a New York City street, giving an impromptu show of his Buick’s abilities.

Photo: Library of Congress

Repp, reportedly an Australian, became famous as part of Ernie Moross’s traveling automotive racing circuit, a WWE-style circus with staged contests and sideshows like Repp’s, which consisted of not only wheelstanding, but also steering the car while up on its haunches and even driving the Buick from the hood. As Popular Science explained his tricks in 1916, the altered wheelbase only partially made Repp’s stunts possible. Repp also devised a hidden movable weight system that shifted back and forth at the flip of a switch; steering was simply a matter of altering the rear brakes to lock one or the other side rather than both at once.

Photo by Leslie Jones, courtesy Boston Public Library

The cross-country barnstorming with Moross - and, likely, the Popular Science expose - led to a whole country full of imitators, many of which used less-expensive Ford Model Ts and Model As and then took their creations to local parades. At least some of those imitators came from local American Legion chapters, such as the Model T-based one above, which Boston-area photographer Leslie Jones photographed in Fall River, Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy Steampunk Vehicles

Or there’s this one, which the Lawrenceburg, Indiana, American Legion operated in a parade with a Pegasus mounted to the hood. Interestingly, we see a description of a similar car - maybe even the same car - built by Clem Grobbel in 1933 or 1934 and sponsored by Gietzen’s Socony-Vacuum Mobilgas Service Station in Center Line, Michigan. “He reworked it by shortening the wheelbase, adding independent rear handbrakes and adding ballast weight and rotating caster wheels at the rear,” Mike Grobbel wrote for the Center Line Historical Information page. “By putting the car into reverse and then hitting the foot brake, the front end would rise up and he could then put the car into forward gear and drive with the wheels up in the air. When he applied one of the rear hand brakes, he could also pivot around the locked rear wheel and drive in a circle while the front end was up in the air.”

According to Mike Grobbel, Clem’s sons, Vincent and Robert, then built this Model A-based wheelstander in 1946 for another service station nearby. Mike wrote that the car still exists and the Detroit Shiners still use it for a parade car.

Another American Legion wheelstander, this one dates to 1936 and comes from Cleveland. The photo’s widely claimed to be the very first wheelie, though as we can see above, Repp had this one licked by more than 20 years. Note, too, the add-ons meant to make the car look vaguely like a train, reminiscent of the American Legion’s 40-et-8 trackless trains commonly used in parades.

Photo courtesy Portal to Texas History

And here we see a T-based “crazy Ford” in the Taylor parade in 1956, this time driven by a man named Charlie Schultz.

Photo courtesy Vanderbilt Cup Races

Charlie Schultz may very well have been a man cut from the same cloth as Henry Austin Clark Jr., seen here in a parade in Southampton in a wheelie car that’s taken some abuse over the years, likely sometime in the early 1960s.

Whether all of these imitator cars used Repp’s movable weight system, we’re not convinced. Likely many of them simply used altered wheelbases and some fancy pedalwork to get the cars to tip up and provide a little show. The side-to-side braking probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to figure out.

As to the fates of these cars, many of them were probably headed to the scrapyard before their conversions into wheelie cars, so they likely only lasted a few parade seasons, then went to the crusher. Though if anybody knows of one that still exists, we’d love to see it.