TRUCKING'S PIONEER - THE WINGFOOT EXPRESS STORY

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Drivers work to free the truck from the mud.

The trucks of the day labored along at eight or 10 miles per hour, the solid rubber tires giving their drivers a bone-jarring ride. The cargoes most often were limited to less-than-fragile items like gravel, grain, coal and lumber. Manufactured goods such as furniture, china, pianos as well as farmers produce and eggs, all suffered a high rate of damage and loss when carried by truck.

Paul Litchfield was plant manager of Goodyear in 1917 and the tire company was thriving. Litchfield was convinced that pneumatic tires would give the heavy trucks the necessary flotation traction and smooth ride to range as far as trains, carrying huge loads great distances.

Litchfield found his message falling on deaf ears. Both truck operators and manufacturers scoffed at the idea that air-filled tires could support five or 10 tons. "Show them" was Goodyear's response. Only a successful, full-time trucking service, operating in fair weather and foul, would prove Litchfield's theory.

The three-vehicle caravan that set out to do just that was barely to the Akron outskirts when it became mired in the mud. So began an agonizing odyssey of muddy ditches, broken bridges, blown out tires and engine failures.

It came as no surprise that a heavy truck would have much more difficulty on the poorly graded dirt roads than the farmers' lightweight buggy. Bridges that safely carried farm wagons collapsed under the Packard truck. Twice the engine failed and had to be rebuilt.

The Goodyear crew doggedly pressed on. They added a winch to their equipment, more rope, and rapidly mastered the art of hauling themselves out of the mud. The support cars were worn out by the time the caravan reached Pittsburgh and were traded for new ones. Blowouts occurred about every 75 miles as the truck plodded ahead at 15 mph.

As the Express traveled, Ferris Miller, the advance man and publicist, took pictures with his folding Kodak and wrote stories for local and national newspaper coverage.

"Every place we stopped we attracted a crowd." Harry Smeltzer later recalled. "People would come around, kick the tires and want to know if they were solid or pumped up."

A Wingfoot Express Packard presses on to Boston through an Ohio snow squal in the winter of 1918.

The Goodyear team pushed on, across the Gettysburg battlefield and the farmlands of New Jersey, through historic Trenton to New York and along the roads that bordered Long Island Sound.

Finally, 21 days overdue, the bone-weary men in their mud-splattered truck entered the bucolic streets of Killingly, Conn. To their astonishment, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of Goodyear fabric mill girls and a rousing brass band.

As Smeltzer described the trip, "It took 28 days and 28 tires." The trip back with fabric from the mill was less eventful and took just five days.

Walter Shively, the tire engineer, promptly applied the lessons learned in the grueling truck tire test and improved tires were almost immediately available. A stronger bead and heavier sidewalls produced a tire more resistant to blowout. The Goodyear cotton cord concept in tire construction already had proven itself in passenger car tires and was indispensable in building the sturdy tires that trucks required.

Future trips employed seven Wingfoot Express trucks, ranging from three- to five-ton models of White, Mack and Packard. The 740-mile run one way was pared down to 80 hours running time within a year. They carried tires to Goodyear dealers in the Boston area, or shoe soles for New England footwear makers, bringing back tire fabrics from the Connecticut mill.

So reliable did the truck tires become, that in 1918 seven Express trucks carrying Boy Scouts completed a 3,000-mile excursion along the East Coast without a single blowout.

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