The Second Annual Eastern Maine Automobile and Motor Show was to be the most stupendous technological extravaganza yet seen in the Queen City of the East — a “second Madison Square Garden Show,” said the Bangor Daily News. The show was held between April 18 and 23, 1910, in the old Bangor Auditorium, at the corner of Main and Buck streets, where opera, roller skating and marathon races had been the chief bill of fare recently.
The variety of car models on display at this early date is startling: Locomobiles, Knoxes, Whites, Cadillacs, Austins, Fords, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Oaklands, Overlands, Ames 30s, Krits, Hupmobiles, Everitt 30s, Chalmers-Detroits, Hudson 2s, Mitchells, Reos, Parrys, EMFs, Flanders 20s, Maxwells, Regals, Middlebys, Ramblers, Brushes, Speedwells, Johnsons, Appersons and others filled the building. They ranged from simple runabouts to “torpedo-boat touring cars” that belched smoke, shuddered and growled like deranged animals as they chugged down the dirt trails that passed for roads in Maine then.
There were Thor motorcycles, speed power canoes manufactured in Veazie by B.N. Morris and all sorts of autoist accessories, from tires and speedometers to the Ernst Flentje Improved Glycerinel Mixture Hydraulic Jounce and Recoil Preventer (with a regulating valve). It was rumored the Auto Windshield Co. was talking about opening a factory in Bangor to manufacture a new line (made of celluloid panels and brass trim).
The culmination of the show was going to be a giant Auto Parade featuring 200 machines driven by Bangor owners creeping through every major street in the city, proving once and for all that the automobile was here to stay.
For those who weren’t interested in automobiles — assuming such oddballs really existed — an aeroplane was on display, a machine similar to that in which Glenn H. Curtiss, the famous inventor and aviator from Hammondsport, N.Y., had recently won a flight contest in Rheims, France.
“Will it fly in the dark?”
“Where’s the gas bag?”
“What do they do when they are up in it a mile and something bursts?”
These were among the questions asked by the crowds of curious Bangoreans. They had yet to see a plane fly over the Queen City. They wouldn’t see this one fly, either.
All this and more was put together by Frederick M. Prescott, who had organized a dozen such shows in Providence, Worcester, Portland and similar cities. Prescott paid attention to the most trivial details, from the pink magnolia blossoms and thousands of miniature electric lights that studded the miles of bunting festooning the balcony and the ceiling of the cavernous auditorium to the potted palms and natural birch branches that provided barriers between the exposition booths. Each afternoon and evening, Hall’s 10-piece orchestra filled the auditorium with pop hits — waltzes, marches and the like — by Victor Herbert and Johann Strauss.
Selling cars in 1910 was no different from today. You had to get your name in the papers. In an apparent advertising stunt, one Carroll Brown of Portland decided to set a record for the fastest trip by auto from Portland to Bangor. Everything went well until Brown’s bright-yellow Palmer-Singer ran over a dog in Augusta, lead-ing to his arrest in Bangor. Taken back to Augusta on the train under the supervision of a Bangor policeman (in this era before police cars), Brown was fined $50 for exceeding the 15-mph speed limit. Any hope of breaking a record had disappeared when the automobile broke two springs shortly after hitting the dog, necessitating a stopover in Waterville for repairs.
“It is Automobile Week,” the Bangor Daily Commercial proclaimed jubilantly in an editorial on April 18. “The era of the automobile has certainly arrived.” Automobiles were still uncomfortable and unreliable, and roads were terrible, but all the writer noticed was progress. “It was but a few years ago … that Bangor saw its first automobile and that was a very crude machine as compared with the palatial cars that are manufactured today.”
The Bangor Daily News, which had always been a little skeptical of motor mania, offered a gloomier appraisal the next day. The writer complained about “the new-fangled habit” of paying the [state] highway commissioner more than the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court formerly received. He also complained about spending so much money building better country roads for automobiles so tourists “can skip from town to town … and get a good view of the ‘natives.’”
“Automobiles are all right in their place although said ‘place’ is not to monopolize the highways, run down and kill farm poultry, frighten timid horses … [disrupt] funeral processions and lord it generally over the entire countryside,” wrote the curmudgeon.
Like the contrasting views of the two editorial writers, the mood at the auto show vacillated between rapture to despair. The Auto Parade was doomed. It rained all week. The roads were a mess. This was the era before the automatic carwash. “There were so many new cars which were to be used in the parade and the owners re-fused to put them out in the mud that we decided it was all to the best to give it up entirely,” announced manager Prescott.
The good news, of course, was that a lot of automobiles had been sold, and in some cases the existence of muddy roads helped sell them. Prospective owners were taken out on local roads to see how the cars they wanted to buy would perform in the sea of slop. “Cars that would pull themselves and their loads through the mire that graces the Hampden road were certainly capable of doing good work under any ordinary circumstances,” the reporter opined.
An illustrated collection of Wayne E. Reilly’s columns titled “Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire” is available at bookstores. Comments about this column may be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com.