The anchor leg was intended to start out with Motor Trend's Martini-brigade (St. Antoine, Lassa, Markus, and Vance) whooping it up in the downtown St. Louis blues clubs where legendary musicians like Albert King, Ike Turner, and Chuck Berry polished their chops, but one of the little stinker's glow plugs threw a six-hour wrench in that plan, delaying the Leg 3 team's Sunday-night arrival until just after every downtown kitchen had closed. Truck Trend Art guru Thomas Voehringer tells how we passed the time.
St. Louis's big attraction, the Gateway Arch can't be adequately described unless you've seen it in person. It's as awesome -- and alien -- as anything created with CGI technology. At 630 feet tall, it's an elegant example of art and technology. While awaiting Leg-3's arrival we headed to Broadway Oyster Bar for Creole cuisine. Blues was blasting from the stereo as we mixed and matched orders of crayfish, beans and rice, Jambalaya, and Oysters Bienville, a most savory dish. Local breweries provided for our thirst, but slow service wasted valuable time and we barely got a chance to poke our heads into BB's Blues & Soup before heading back to the hotel to console the Leg 3 team, receive some tutoring about the 190D's starting and operating procedures, and sip a celebratory cocktail at Caleco's. -TV
After a brief rest, a hazy morning greeted us as we drove through the city center, dodging morning commuters as we set up for photo opportunities. The majesty of the previous night was gone. Even the Arch seemed less significant in the stark, hazy light of a business morning.
As we pose for various downtown St. Louis photo ops, I do as new Mercedes owners circa 1960 had to, and read the owners manual in order to decipher the many identical and unmarked knobs and switches littering the dashboard. Lucky thing, too, as somehow the fresh-air ventilation regulator was in the "off" position. Was the Leg 3 team testing me? Much has been learned about automaking in the past 50 years, but the art of fresh, flow-through ventilation has been lost. Those little slots to the left and right of the 190D's radiator grille route high pressure air directly into the cockpit where it's diffused under the dash before it has a chance to pick up heat by flowing over a hot engine or hood. I can't think of a single modern car that delivers truly fresh, un-warmed air with the compressor off. I'm cool and comfy, even with the windows up, at temps in the low 80s. Any warmer and it becomes sticky even with all windows down.
Our cross-country route was planned as a journey through America's rich oil history, the best attractions of which were concentrated in Leg 4. Our first is the Illinois Oil Field Museum in Oblong. Here we are wowed by scale engineering models of the nearby Marathon refinery and we learn that Illinois has pumped two percent of America's total oil production from wells in 40 of its 102 counties. Our next stop: Ohio's Thorla-McKee well, touted as America's first.
The route to our next destination in Caldwell, Ohio takes us directly through Indianapolis. What self-respecting car magazine could avoid a quick trip to the Speedway for an ironic shot of our adorable 50-horse tortoise streaking past the entrance? Thank goodness too, because in pursuit of our self-imposed mandate to sample only local eateries, eschewing all chain-store fast food, we got to partake of some of the best BBQ ever, at King's Ribs on 16th Street. Incredible. Local. Flavor. Mmmmmmmmm.- TV
Rolling across I-70, alone with my thoughts--the signal-seeking Becker AM-FM only manages to pull in a few low-on-the-dial Christian stations, and then only briefly--I'm struck by how many trucks we are passing at the posted 65-mph limit. Have skyrocketing diesel prices slowed the Breaker-1-9-for-a-smokey-report crowd?
Silas Thorla and Robert McKee were vexed when, in 1814, a nasty black goo kept polluting their salt-brine well. With no market for oil, they sopped it up in blankets, wrung it out and bottled it as a cure-all (yes, folks drank this "Seneca Oil"). We barely managed to squeeze in a quick dinner before Lori's Family Restaurant closed, then headed 115 miles north to crash for the night in Kent, Ohio.
At 8 am we topped off the radiator, packed up, watched the glow-plug indicator coil on the dash heat to its finger-searing cherry red, then charged off toward the birthplace of the global oil industry, Titusville, Pennsylvania. It was here, amidst numerous oil springs, that Edwin L. Drake drilled the first productive well for the purpose of commercial oil production, inventing the concept of driving a pipe down the well hole as it is drilled. Sadly, neither he nor his assistant, salt-well driller Billy Smith, profited substantially from the enterprise (Titusville looks NOTHING like Dubai).
After perusing the museum's fascinating displays illustrating how a central engine could distribute mechanical pumping power across a broad area via cables, levers and turnbuckles, we posed a wax likeness of "Colonel" Drake in the 190 for a photo op, then headed 13 miles south to the oldest producing oil well in the world, in McClintock, PA.
Then with Thomas at the 190D's helm and a light mist falling, a tug on the wiper switch unleashed an electrical gremlin. The wipers remained unmoved and depressing the brake pedal caused the gas gauge to flat-line. A quick stop to Rain-X the windshield and poke around for shorting wires and blown fuses revealed nothing (except a lost voltage-tester attachment suggesting others had investigated the same issue). But upon restarting, the brake lights worked without fouling the gauges and the rest of the day was viewed through a rain-streaked windshield with no further glitching. From the rock-steady ML's cockpit, the 190 appeared to list precipitously on its 13-inch Dayton Thorobreds in the tight Allegheny twisties, but big suspension travel was the order of the day back then, and everything felt quite normal from the broad, cushy driver's seat.
Back on I-80, it was a pretty straight shot to Manhattan's Old Town Bar & Restaurant, a historic hang out for literary types that you might recognize from the intro to Letterman's show. This stop was chosen because it's just a stone's throw from the fabled but defunct Luchowski's German restaurant where our predecessors ended their 1959 odyssey. The official finish line was 30 miles north at M-B USA's headquarters in Montvale, but first--the Big Apple beckoned.
After checking into our hotel (the one with the siamese fighting fish in a drinking glass on the desk), we cab it cross-town to Cafe Boulud with our Mercedes hosts. Dinner and wine (is it possible to have local flavor here?) are awesome. The meals here are not what would be deemed "hardy" in the heartland of America. They are crafted and measured for precise culinary enjoyment, not button-popping gluttony. The repartee is as casual as it is serious with M-B's Geoff Day, never missing a moment for levity or wit. With a variety of fine food, and did I mention the wine, under our belts, we grab a cab back to the hotel. We discuss the past three days and belly up to the bar for a toast to Manhattan, with a Manhattan. It's traditional-- made with Rye. I made the mistake of remembering the numerous Southern Comfort ads that dotted the St. Louis cityscape.
"Done they make a Man...hatt'n with Suthrn K'mfurt too?"
As a matter of fact, they do. It was delicious...I think. We certainly finished them. Then Frank's worldly eye catches sight of a bottle of Absinthe--a favorite hallucinogen of literary and visual artists like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Oscar Wilde. It's an essential ingredient in a Sazerac--the official cocktail of another grand U.S. city, New Orleans. Our bartendress is blissfully unaware of it, but under Frank's instruction, she cobbles together a reasonable facsimile, given she's never heard of Peychaud's Bitters. Perhaps New York is not as worldly as I imagined.
What a cultural chasm between the heart-felt, genteel country folk of Titusville only hours ago. The New York street is still bustling with people moving in every direction, as if time, like the crosswalk signs, was only a suggestion. It's not just a different city, it's a different world.
Good night. - TV
A somewhat fragile and foggy Leg 4 Team arrived after noon in Montvale struggling to smile and speak coherently as we returned our faithful steeds at an all-employee event that was broadcast to all MBUSA facilities. We gripped, we grinned, we reflected on Mercedes-Benz's 50-year history of selling reliable, economical diesel cars and trucks in America. We gushed about the cute 190's exemplary stamina and 29.7-mpg economy, and the ML's exceptional power, comfort, and 27.2-mpg performance. We thanked the many people at MBUSA and the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center. Then we collapsed into cars bound for LaGuardia and JFK.
Our thanks: Geoff Day, Rob Moran, Larkin Hill, Christoph Horn, Koert Groeneveld, and Mike Kunz and his team at the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center
Click HERE to download a PDF of the June 1959 story.