This article appeared in the June 5, 2008 edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Drive magazine:
“I tried roadsters, and they’re too uncomfortable,” Morris said. “I like to be in automobiles, not on automobiles. They’re too noisy.”
Noise is not something associated with a Pierce-Arrow. The V-12 engine merely purrs on Morris’ 1937 model — a 1602 seven-passenger sedan with two folding seats in the rear. The reason: hydraulic valve lifters. Pierce-Arrow was the first car to switch from springs to hydraulics.
Another innovation, which came in 1914, was sculpting the headlights into the fenders rather than attaching them to each side of the radiator.
The company, founded in part by George N. Pierce, made everything from iceboxes and gilded birdcages to bicycles — and produced about 80,000 cars from 1901 to 1938, when the Depression wiped it out. But its glory days indeed were glorious.
It didn’t take long for the company to go upscale from its first offering,
the tiny Pierce Motorette — truly a horseless carriage with a single-cylinder engine under the seat — to introducing the Arrow in 1903 with a 15-horsepower engine in front. Then came the Great Arrow in 1904 with its astonishing price of $4,000.
The automaker’s hyphenated name may have originated with a company-sponsored publication, A Tale of Triumph, which chronicled a 1903 endurance run for the car.
“Swift and sure as an arrow shot from a bow,” the book said, according to Ralph McKittrick of Toronto, president of the Pierce-Arrow Society, in an exchange of e-mails. The society, with more than 1,000 members worldwide, including Morris, is based in Atlanta.
The car, which cost more than most homes, was bought by those with deep pockets, including such notables of the day as Orville Wright, Babe Ruth, dancing great Ginger Rogers, cowboy-movie star Tom Mix, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, the royal families of Persia, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Greece and Belgium — even Chicago mobster James “Big Jim” Colosimo, who was gunned down in 1920.
The Pierce-Arrow also became the first official White House car when President William Howard Taft ordered two of them in 1909 for state occasions.
But one reason Pierce-Arrow folded was because it didn’t have enough arrows in its quiver: There was no lower-priced car in the lineup to generate sufficient cash flow.
Morris first encountered the car while growing up in Tacoma, Wash.
“I’ve had a love affair with the Pierce-Arrow since childhood,” he said. “The family doctor had one, and I thought it was the most beautiful car I had ever seen. I was seven,” which would have been in 1933. The car was a 1932 coupe.
Morris, who moved to Santa Fe from San Francisco in 2002 and lives part-time in Chama, bought his first of seven Pierce-Arrows when he still was in high school in 1943 — a 1934 12 Club Sedan, which cost about $3,800 new.
“They were astonishingly expensive because they were extraordinarily well put together,” he said.
But he paid a mere $300 because it was during World War II, gas was rationed to five gallons a week for most folks, and “everybody was taking the bus,” Morris said.
“I was almost never without a Pierce-Arrow since I was 16 years old,” he said.
Morris bought his current 1937 model in 2003 from a man in Prescott, Ariz., who had owned it for 43 years, paying $45,000. It was one of seven built that year and originally was solid gray, repainted to two shades of brown.
“I didn’t even haggle with him, just wrote a check,” said Morris, who was president of a civil-engineering firm in Santa Barbara, Calif., for 18 years.
The car, which sits on white-walled tires, is a behemoth at 6,400 pounds. That includes the 463-cubic-inch engine that, mated to a four-speed manual transmission with overdrive, gets up to 11 miles a gallon on the highway, up to five in the city.
He drives it only two or three times a month. The interior was reupholstered in fabric with the original pattern 12 years ago. Nearly everything works but for a clock embedded in the rear of the front seat. It’s at 10:30. The original radio works and, Morris quipped, “gets 1937 programs.”
Morris doesn’t know how much his car is worth — though he once was offered just under $100,000 — and doesn’t care because “I’m going to keep it as long as I’m breathing.” After that, the car will be donated to the Gilmore Car Museum near Hickory Corners, Mich.
“These cars are such an important part of American industrial history that I’m obliged to help preserve them,” Morris said. “I don’t want them to be left to happenstance.”
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