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Chapter 33 The Game is Over Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
33 THE GAME IS OVER
THE YEAR SPENT trying to get the new model started in the Ypsilanti plant was the last time I worked actively with Tucker, though I saw him frequently when I was around Detroit or we both happened to be in Chicago or New York. In September of 1956 we planned to meet at Charlevoix, Michigan, but when I stopped at his mother's home I found nobody there. When I got back to Ypsilanti, Tucker said he had been trying to reach me.
He had a big envelope with X-rays which he said three hospitals had diagnosed as lung cancer, urging immediate operation. (At the time he was still taking it easy after a hernia operation some months earlier.) He knew I had had a similar operation some years before and wanted to ask me abont it. I told him it was rough.
Tucker wasn't so much afraid of the operation as he was doubtful that he could pull through another one so soon, and doctors told him there was no time to lose. He was trying to figure the odds, as a cousin in Grand Rapids had died the same year after both surgery and radium treatment.
Next day he went to his office and telephoned Dr. William F. Koch, a friend of many years, whom Tucker had visited during his earlier trip to Brazil in 1951. Like Tucker, Koch was a controversial figure and the controversy had been continuing since the early 1940s, when he closed his cancer clinic and laboratory at Detroit after a long and bitter fight with the American Medical Association and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. There was a further parallel in that Koch had been indicted, tried and freed in Federal court, but afterwards gave up and moved his laboratory to Rio after continuous investigation by Food and Drug agents. Tucker, remembering his own experience in Chicago, was understandably suspicious of the government's motives in the Koch case.
He wasn't convinced that Koch's treatment was a sure cure, but he thought the odds were at least as good as in surgery, and he had talked with a lot of people who said Koch cured them after other doctors had given them up. Tucker also was impressed with the doctor's background and many years of teaching, which included histology and embryology at the University of Michigan and physiology at Detroit Medical College.
He asked Koch to tell him which major medical centers in Europe were working on cancer, and then he called doctors in Heidelberg and London. He said they all told him they were no longer recommending surgery for his type of cancer, and warned him particularly against radium. He talked with doctors around Detroit, and said the best odds he could find for surgery were ten to one, and he thought they were too long, so he talked with Koch a few more times and made his decision: he would go to Rio and have Koch himself administer the treatment.
After he had made up his mind definitely, Tucker one night phoned his friend Max Garavito in New York, and asked him to get plane reservations. He told Max he had cancer and was going to Brazil for treatment. I couldn't hear Max end of the conversation, but Tucker listened for a long time before he said good-bye to Max, adding that he would see him in New York.
“Emotional, isn't he?” Tucker said with a smile as he set the phone down.
In the week before he left, Tucker lived pretty much as he had before and said physically he felt fine. At Koch's direction he had stopped smoking and was eating only vegetables, and his only complaint was his diet: if Tucker didn't have meat, he wasn't eating. He kept business appointments in his office and went to a classic car meet at Grosse Pointe. One afternoon he went to get his Cadillac, which was being tuned up, and spent an hour helping mechanics tune up another Cadillac that was in for service. He assembled and arranged a lot of material on the new auto design, and said he would work on it after he got organized in Brazil.
If Tucker had buried any money after the Chicago deal he had run out now, because he had to borrow money to buy plane tickets for himself and Mrs. Tucker to Rio. They left in September.
When he saw the doctors he told them to hurry, he was losing time. He had a car to produce and he had to get to work on it. He was still working on designs for the “New Tucker.”
First letters were hopeful and he had started another deal to build the automobile there. The election was over and one of the men he had been negotiating with before was back in Rio from temporary exile. This was multi-millionaire Adhemar de Barros, who entertained the Tuckers in his home while they were trying to get together on a deal.
“Mr. de Barros said they needed that type of automobile in Brazil and that he would get Preston all the money he needed,” Mrs. Tucker said, “but he wouldn't send any money to the United States. He said they had all the facilities they needed at Sao Paulo, and they were still arguing about it when he came to see Preston at the hotel, after Dr. Koch said he had to stay in bed.”
In October Tucker wrote that he was getting along all right, but complained about the climate and food.
“It's terrible here,” he wrote. “Damp, cold, salty and humid.”
He was depressed by the weather and his surroundings and decided to leave, planning at first to stop at Havana, where it would at least be warmer, but finally deciding to return directly to Ypsilanti. He was weak, having lost about fifty pounds, and Koch didn't want him to make the trip by air, warning that severe change in air pressure could stop improvement, or even reverse the effects, of the treatment. But Tucker was determined, and left with his wife early in November. On the flight from Caracas to New York he had to have oxygen.
When he got home Tucker didn't look so bad except for having lost weight, and he was still yelling about the diet. At times he seemed to be better, but after having to have oxygen brought to the house several times he asked to be moved to the hospital, where he said they had good nurses and everything they needed to take care of him. By then he was down from 200 pounds to less than 100, and he refused to see anybody but the family and a few friends.
Before Tucker left Rio, Dr. Koch had prepared a schedule for Mrs. Tucker, telling her what symptoms to look for over the next months, what developments to expect in his condition—when to expect particularly rough times, and when breathing would become easier. The X-rays showed cancer only in the right lung, but Koch told the family later that his own diagnosis showed that the cancer had spread almost through his entire system. He had told Tucker what he was up against, but said Tucker asked him not to reveal his condition to any of the family.
A letter from Koch afterward said he was apprehensive when Tucker left, and that he believed he had suffered a hemorrhage in the infected lung from lowered pressure in the plane. The hemorrhage, Koch said, took too much of his breathing space so he couldn't get enough oxygen to support the recovery process. Like Koch, Mrs. Tucker said she couldn't blame her husband for wanting to come home, but she will always wonder whether the treatment might have worked if they had stayed.
“I honestly don't know whether Preston would have recovered or not, if we had stayed in Rio or Havana,” she said.
“I do know that everything Dr. Koch told me came out exactly as he said it would, right to the day. Maybe if Preston hadn't been so set on coming home, and hadn't ridden all that distance in airplanes, he would have been better.
“Maybe there wasn't any hope from the start. But he was doing what he felt was best, and that was good enough for me.”
About a week before Christmas I went to see Tucker at the hospital before leaving over the holidays. He was in an oxygen tent and he was tired, as another visitor had just left.
“For today, I've had it,” he said.
I told him I would be back in a couple of weeks, when he could talk better.
“If I can't then, I'm not going to,” he said.
A few days before Christmas the doctors said he had pneumonia. His mother said she had pulled him through pneumonia twice when he was a small boy, and she could do it again. She went to a drug store and bought vaseline and oil of peppermint. When she got back the doctor and a nurse were in the room, and the nurse started to protest.
“It's all right,” the doctor said gently. “It can't hurt him.”
His mother mixed a few drops of peppermint oil with vaseline and rubbed it on his back and shoulders, and he said he felt better and went to sleep. In a few hours he woke up and asked her to put more on.
He seemed to improve for a while, but he grew steadily weaker. Finally, at 4:55 o'clock in the afternoon, the day after Christmas, Preston Tucker died.
Controversy centered around Tucker almost up to his last hours. Pneumonia was reported to be the immediate cause of death, instead of cancer. It was rumored that tests which had been made showed that the cancerous condition had been arrested. When members of the family wanted to see reports on the tests, they said the hospital refused to tell them anything. One of his sons, one afternoon, took the chart from the foot of the bed into the men's washroom to read it, where he was reasonably sure the nurse wouldn't follow. He said the report showed a negative reaction to the tests.
Doctors in attendance said the report would be almost meaningless without a biopsy. No autopsy was performed, so the arguments continued. If the Koch treatment had cured, or even arrested the cancer, it hadn't saved his life, so nothing was proved one way or the other.
Just before the funeral I met Tucker's youngest son, who was going into the chapel.
“I'll bet Dad's laughing right now.” Johnny said, “thinking what a man has to do to get you into a white shirt and a necktie.”
He probably was, because it was an argument that had started long before the first deal moved from Ypsilanti to Chicago.
Tucker had made his last headlines, but he is remembered by a small group of men who worked with him in Chicago, trying to build a new automobile, and by a larger group throughout the world which hoped some day to drive it. To many of these people, Tucker had already taken his rightful place among the greats of automobile history, even before his death.
There is no object here of vindicating Tucker, who is beyond caring who was right and who was wrong. The automotive industry wrote his epitaph, as a true and discerning prophet in his narrow field, when it adopted—one after another—ideas he had announced and planned to use. Whether he was a hero or a fool wasn't important; he acted under compulsions which seemed beyond his control, and probably were beyond his understanding.
In a cemetery near Flat Rock, Michigan, there is a plain stone with a small bas-relief in bronze of the Tucker automobile, and somewhere in the record behind that figure is the story of what happened. If Tucker, and his stockholders and dealers, had been playing against a stacked deck, as many of them believed, the question of who stacked the deck was no longer important.
The game was over.
A thesis completed recently at the University of Michigan, by an engineer with almost a lifetime's association with the auto industry, predicts that within the next ten to fifteen years most American cars will have engines in the rear, like the Tucker. Stylists already have anticipated the change with simulated louvres and grilles.
If the prediction is right, the industry will have paid its final tribute to Preston Tucker.