STUTZ. The Stutz, like Paul Bunyan or the Twentieth Century Limited, is part of America's folklo

The Stutz, like Paul Bunyan or the Twentieth Century Limited, is part of America's folklore. Mention the name "Stutz Bearcat" and you instantly evoke visions of flappers in cloche hats and 1920's-style mini-skirts, of "cake-eater" suits and raccoon coats and hip flasks.

This anachronism, and it seems to be an anachronism because the time of the open, bucket-seat Bearcat was over by 1920, has bothered me for a long time. Why should a car of World War I days be so resolutely considered a glamorous part of the dizzy twenties? What could be the truth only re-cently dawned upon me. It's simply this.

The youths of the twenties must have bought used Bearcats, Mercers, and Marmons. They couldn't have bought new ones because such cars were not only disappearing but cost too much. I didn't ride in a Bearcat until 1935 or so. I had remembered a very red Bearcat, one of the later ones with proper doors and a spare tire sunk into a well on its afterdeck.

But I had only seen it from a distance, for it was always parked in the driveway of a slightly disheveled old mansion whose blinds were drawn in the daytime and from which sounds of ragtime piano playing came at all hours. I was not permitted to enter its yard for a closer inspection of the Bearcat.

The Bearcat in which I traveled years afterward was owned by Smith Hempstone Oliver, who later became Curator of Land Transportation at the Smithsonian Institu-tion. In those days venerable motorcars (and the Stutz, at age twenty-one, wasn't all that venerable) weren't nurtured and coddled as are early cars today and Oliver used his as ordinary transport in New York. I owned a 1750 cc Alfa at the time and I was used to its lowness and the feeling of

being part of the car which it gave me. J

ust sitting way up high in the Stutz, in a tiny bucket seat on an open platform with a doghouse hood out front and a drum-shaped gas tank behind, made me uncomfortable. When Oliver took off with a crunch of gears and a bound as he let in the clutch, I was nervous. When he started, swooping in and out of New York's antic traffic and admitted to having only rudimentary brakes, I was downright scared.

But that big, bellowing lump of a car would go. Oliver not only kept up with the fast-moving Manhattan traffic, he managed to leave most of the stop-light Grand Prix types behind, too. I must admit that that first ride in that un-gainly Stutz permanently infected me with a desire for such brutish old motorcars. The 1914 Bearcat was the first of Harry C. Stutz's cars to have that ursine label.

But Stutz had built cars before that. He had built a crude gas buggy in 1897, when he was only twenty. By 1905 he was building the American Underslung, that radical, low-center-of-gravity machine whose chassis was hung below its springs and axles. Stutz first made his name famous by build-ing a car to demonstrate the sturdiness of the rear axles produced by his Stutz Motor Parts Company.

He then entered this machine in the first Indianapolis "500" in 1911 and came in eleventh. The car had run faultlessly and Stutz put similar machines into produc-tion with the slogan The Car That Made Good In A Day." Stutz didn't make his own components in those days. He bought parts and like many another maker turned out what was called an "assembled car." He used Wisconsin T-head engines at first, but by 1913 he was building his own four- and six-cylinder power plants. His cars were again success- ful and took a third place at Indianapolis in 1913. The Bearcat of 1914 (Stutz also produced a less sporting Bulldog) had a 61 -litre, four-cylinder, T-head engine which developed 60 hp at 1500 rpm. Its three-speed gearbox and differential were in a single unit in the rear axle.

This was the time of the great Stutz-Mercer rivalry. Stutz owners were supposed to have sung, "There never was a worser car than a Mercer," and Mercer owners, You have to be nuts to drive a Stutz." Per-haps the "Twenty-three Skidoo" sports of 1914 were that corny, but I doubt it. Any-how, the Mercer protagonists were indu-bitably right.

The Bearcat was a coarse, rough, high load of iron compared to the far more refined and better-handling Mercer Raceabout. I must admit, however, that the more highly powered Stutz won more races than Mercer. In 1915 Stutz built a special team of racing cars with overhead-camshaft Wisconsin engines.

Known as the "White Squadron" (they were painted white and the drivers wore white coveralls) , they came in third, fourth, and seventh at Indianapolis and took firsts at Elgin, Minneapolis, and Sheepshead Bay.

There was nothing stodgy about the Stutz Company. It was always willing to take a sporting chance. In 1916, when a disgruntled Bearcat buyer brought his car back to a New York dealer and grumbled that Mercers were passing him even though his car had a bigger engine, they took it back and had it checked by their mechanics.

The mechanics said they couldn't find anything wrong. The sales people then set up a publicity scheme. They advertised that this so-called lemon of a Stutz would be given to "Cannon-ball" Baker for an attack on the coast-to-coast record then held by, of all things, a motorcycle.

The roads across America were almost nonexistent in 1916. West of Omaha the rocky, muddy trail wasn't even sign-posted.

But "Cannonball" beat the record and crossed the country in eleven days, seven and a half hours, faster than anything but a train had ever done it. One day he put in an incredible 592 miles. The car came through almost perfectly, breaking only a shock-absorber clip. In 1919 Harry C. Stutz quit the company and went off to build a car called the H.C.S.

It was not too successful. Steel-mogul Charles M. Schwab and a group of associates then took over and the company began to drift into the doldrums with the last version of the Bearcat, now with a monoblock Wisconsin engine, a Speedway four, and a six with pushrod-overhead valves. In 1925 Stutz came to life again with Frederic E. Moscovics as president.

Moscovics announced that henceforth the Stutz image would eschew sportiness and speed and would concentrate on "safety, beauty and comfort." To this end the 1926 model was known as the Safety Stutz. Oddly, how-ever, in spite of Moscovics' pronouncements, the Stutz became a more sporting machine than ever, and some models were for years the only real sports cars produced in this country.

The Safety Stutz was, for its day, a re-markable machine. It had a straight-eight engine of 4.7 litres and a single, chain-driven, overhead camshaft which, like the Hispano-Suiza and the later, prewar Alfa Romeo, had means for valve adjustment without pulling the whole shebang apart (as I must do on my 1962 Alfa) . It produced 92 hp at 3200 rpm.

The rest of the car was equally advanced. It had a worm-drive rear axle which permitted a really low chassis and excellent road holding. Its brakes, un-usual for its time, were hydraulic by means of water- and alcohol-filled bags which pressed six brake shoes against each brake drum. In sedan form it could better 75 mph. Happily, Stutz didn't build only sedans; it also produced the wonderful, two-seater Black Hawk based on the same chassis.

This name came from racing-genius Frank Lock-hart's 3-litre, Miller-engined, land speed-record car which Stutz built. Lockhart was killed in it at Daytona, but earlier he had set the still-amazing, American Class D rec-ord at 198.29 mph. By 1928 the Black Hawk speedster could develop some 125 hp and it was one of those that got into that peculiar race against the Boulogne Hispano-Suiza (see page 48) which had almost twice its power.

It was a Stutz Black Hawk which so shook the "Bentley Boys" at Le Mans in 1928 by very nearly winning from three 41/2-litre Bentleys. It lost top gear at 2:30 p.m., but it still took second place behind Barnato, the best showing an American car ever made at Le Mans until the Fords' big victory in 1966. W. 0. Bentley later said in his autobiography, "The Stutz was particularly formi-dable with its lower frame and superior cornering to the Bentley..." In 1929 Stutz tried again at Le Mans but did no better than fifth place.

Meanwhile, the Black Hawk was being continually improved. By 1930 almost 100 mph was possible from the now larger 51/4-litre engine. Brakes were better, too, the com-pany having switched to Lockheed hydrau-lics, and a four-speed. gearbox was standard. It was even theoretically possible to buy a supercharged Stutz. Twenty-four of them had been built to meet the Le Mans rules about catalogue models.

They had their blowers out front a la Bentley 41/2, but I've never seen one, nor has anyone else I know. In 1930 it became obvious that the Stutz needed more power to counter the big twelve- and sixteen-cylindered Packards, Lincoln, and Cadillacs. The Stutz Company was not healthy enough to go for an entirely new engine in that depression year. Since the block and crankshaft were cap-able of delivering many more horsepower, a new cylinder head with twin-overhead camshafts was put into production.

This was the famous D.V. 32, with four valves per cylinder. The car was now known as the D.V. 32 Stutz and came in many models. Now, too, the name "Bearcat" was re-born in the Bearcat Torpedo Speedster and the Super Bearcat, a chunky, bob-tailed convertible. The Super Bearcat was Stutz' swan song. By 1935 Stutz was no longer building cars. The company tried to keep afloat for a while by making a thing called a Pak-Age-Car, but even that was ahead of its time. There wasn't to be a real sports car built in America until the Corvette some twenty years later.