[Silly Little Cars] Silly Little Eshelman Bio

[RENZO SEES]

I have posted pics of various Eshelman-s before..heres a bio of the
inventor:

By Brennen Jensen | 11/14/2001

In June 1939, a 22-year-old Pennsylvania man packed some sandwiches, donned
a jaunty white neck scarf, rented a two-seater airplane in Camden, N.J.,
and flew off eastward. Destination: the planet Mars.
Well, that's what Cheston Eshelman told the skipper of the fishing trawler
who, hours later, pulled him out of the Atlantic, minutes before Eshelman's
aircraft sunk forever beneath the waves. The neophyte flyer, on only his
second solo trip, maintained that the red planet was his goal--even after
the truculent plane owners had him tossed in jail for larceny. A Sun
article of the day even quoted the plucky pilot as saying he brought along
a pistol "because the Martians were supposed to be tough guys."

Eshelman missed Mars by tens of millions of miles, but a year or so later
he successfully made it to Baltimore and began a decade-spanning
manufacturing career. The would-be astronaut became a footloose inventor
and captain of an industry of his own creation: the mail-order car.

But we're getting ahead of the game. Eshelman wasn't so quick to nix his
aviation aspirations. Two years after his ill-fated Mars mission, he and
his brother cobbled together a novel plywood airplane--a kind of flying
wing--in a barn adjacent to their Middle River cottage. Eshelman said it
rendered existing aircraft "prehistoric" and "obsolete." Never a man of
modest intentions, he wrote President Franklin Roosevelt, urging him to
invest in his winged brainchild, telling FDR that with a little lucre he
could turn out 100 self-styled fighter-bombers a day.

Federal funds weren't forthcoming, but an undaunted Eshelman kept tinkering
away, birthing a number of largely fuselage-free prototype planes in the
1940s (including one dubbed the Flying Flounder). Some actually flew,
though at least one white-knuckled test pilot kissed the ground after an
Eshelman flight, vowing never to take one up again. (Eshelman's Martian
misadventure had cost him his own pilot's license, so he couldn't
personally test his progeny.) One winged wonder crashed and burned, the
first such accident at the city's then-new Municipal Airport. (No one was
injured.)

Unable to darken the skies with armadas of Flying Flounders, Eshelman
turned his attentions to the nation's roadways. Throughout the 1950s small
ads appeared in the back of Mechanics Illustrated, Popular Science, and
other magazines offering "cars" for just a few hundred dollars. Eshelman
Motors Corp., based at 109 Light St. (site of today's IBM Building
complex), offered a host of low-ball auto options one could buy through the
mail. His simplest vehicle--barely two feet wide and powered by a
two-horsepower engine--was geared to kids and sold for $295. He soon came
out with a somewhat larger "Adult Sport Car" for $100 more. They lacked any
form of suspension, sported brake pads that pressed directly against the
tires, were pull-started through the dashboard, had headlights (but no
generator), and, with their biggest optional engine--a six-horsepower
Briggs & Stratton--could do about 35 mph. Styling for the 64-inch-long
craft consisted of two chrome rockets slapped on the flanks. One had to be
a sporting soul indeed to take to the road in what amounted to a glorified
385-pound riding mower--especially amid the era's multiton tail-finned
Buicks and Mercurys.

Eshelman honestly intended most of his micro-cars to be street-legal. Later
incarnations sported cloth doors, rudimentary aluminum roofs, and plastic
windscreens. He even replaced the dashboard pull-chord with an electric
starter on some models. Stories have it, however, that many people ordered
Eshelmans only to send them back to Baltimore after pulling the humble
little vehicles--10-inch-diameter tires and all--from the packing crate.
Seems the artistic renderings the ads sported led some buyers (perhaps not
the most sophisticated of folks) into believing one could actually acquire
full-sized cars through the mail for less than $500. (Eshelman's teeming
entrepreneurial mind also had a pragmatic side: The bulk of his income came
from selling midget lawn tractors and sundry gardening apparatus; in 1958
he landed a sizable contract to build three-wheeled delivery vehicles for
the U.S. Postal Service.)

In the early '60s, Eshelman finally began selling "real" cars, 2,400-pound
models with six-cylinder engines. He called them Golden Eagles.
Unfortunately, they already had another name: Corvair. Eshelman simply
knocked off all the Chevrolet badges and replaced them with ones bearing
his moniker. (Beats bothering with a factory and all.) General Motors was
not amused and slapped him with a cease-and-desist order. Eshelman Motors
soon gave up the ghost, and its entrepreneur disappeared into obscurity.

Today, half a century after the first Baltimore-born sub-subcompact rattled
down the road, the Lilliputian cars are collectible. (Restored Sport models
sell for thousands.) A quick Internet search turns up scores of Eshelman
collectors and clubs. Wisconsin-based Lou Rugani is restoring a mid '50s
Sport Car he bought on eBay for $400. He tells me about Eshelman's foray
into the world of watercraft--the so-called jet-design rocketboat. "They
looked like rocket ships on outriggers," Rugani says. Seems they were
fashioned out of surplus Air Force under-wing fuel tanks. "He made a car
out of these tanks as well," Rugani adds. "Ugly things, but Eshelman didn't
like to throw anything away."

Perhaps the foremost authority on all things Eshelman is New Jersey's Bill
Hossfield, who owns a dozen Eshelman machines. (One, he says proudly, goes
all of 12 mph.) More importantly, 20 years ago Hossfield tracked down the
elusive Cheston Eshelman and paid him a visit. The former carmaker was
living in what Hossfield describes as "a bare cold-water flat" in Florida.
He didn't even have a phone. After Hossfield vowed never to reveal the
inventor's whereabouts, the two became friends ("He's really the nicest guy
you'd want to meet," Hossfield says) and began regular mail correspondence.
The octogenarian carmaker last wrote him just two months ago.

And so the big man of little cars is living out his days in reclusive
retirement in the Sunshine State. But I like to imagine a more romantic end
for the intrepid inventor. I envision Baltimore's everyman Edison piloting
a Flying Flounder around the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Charmed Life archives
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