Lakewood Lore

Many little old ladies got a charge out of electric cars

Some of our seasoned memory-cherishers, who hold dear their childhood flashbacks, recall seeing "little old ladies" driving electric automobiles on early Lakewood streets, and now wonder if anybody knows who they were.

Because the production of electric in the Cleveland area stopped 78 years ago, it appeared that finding out who drove them would be a problem—that is, until Sandra Koozer, curator of the Lakewood Historical Society, suggested we call Elizabeth Byrne of Rocky River, who will be 85 next month.

Byrne, a Clifton Park resident most of her life, remembers an electric car that her mother, Sarah Hartzell Fish, tooled around Lakewood.

"It was a Baker, built by the company headed by Walter C. Baker, who also lived in Clifton Park and who made electrics in his plant near Edgewater Park," she recalled. "The car had a tiller instead of a steering wheel, a bell instead of a horn, and a vase for flowers. It was quiet, easy to operate, and fine for short trips. I think it would be ideal to have one nowadays, to go for groceries."

However, running out of "juice" was a matter of concern with electrics, and Sarah Fish's model was no exception.

"We had to be sure to get home in time to charge the batteries with recharging equipment we kept in our garage," Byrne said.

Nevertheless, to conk out away from home necessarily wasn't the end of the world, she pointed out. One always could pull over to the side of the road and sit for a while, until the batteries partially replenished themselves.

"My parents did just that once, when they stalled under the old West 14th Street Viaduct," she went on. "They waited an hour and then were able to start up again and make it home."

Byrne herself occasionally drove her mother's electric.

"When I was about 12, I took one of my teachers at Lakewood's Horace Mann Junior High for a ride in it," she said, adding that, back in the 1920s, "We didn't have to get a driver's license."

Byrne's earliest recollection of the car was when she was 5 years old and lived on Brainard Avenue in Cleveland.

"Mother would use the electric to drive me to Kindergarten class at Pilgrim Congregational Church on West 14th and Starkweather," she reminisced. "And, on the way, mother would pick up one of my schoolmates—a boy named Edwin Wright, who lived nearby."

After those early childhood days, Byrne lost contact with Wright. Many years later, as seniors in college (she at Vassar and he at Yale), the two renewed their friendship and, in 1937, were wed.

Wright died in 1976 and, after eight years as a widow, Elizabeth married attorney John Vaughan Byrne, and the couple now lives in Rocky River.

Elizabeth Byrne told us that, while her mother didn't necessarily fit the profile of a "little old lady" during the time she drove the electric, there were two other women in her Clifton Park neighborhood with the same cars who might very well have.

One was Margaret Stecher, wife of Henry Stecher, and the second, Fannie, wife of Walter C. Baker, the car maker. Both families lived on West Clifton Road.

Fannie's husband Walter was an automotive magnate of considerable renown. Actually he pioneered the electric car and produced more of them than any other manufacturer.

His firm was established in 1899. It was merged with Rauch and Lang Carriage Co. in 1915, and the consolidated operation made its last car the following year.

Descendants of two other Lakewood electric owners also have memories of the popular runabout that was noiseless, didn't have to be cranked, and emitted no toxic fumes.

"My grandmother, Margaret Burns, owned an electric that she and my mother, Alicia Burns Stickney, drove in the late teens and early 1920s," reported F. Hamilton Stickney, 78, a native of Lakewood. "The women lived near each other on West Clifton between Detroit and Riverside."

Meanwhile, Blythe Gehring, 74, of Lakewood's Westerly Apartments, remembers an electric that her husband's aunt Elma C. Gehring drove in the first quarter of this century.

Aunt Elma Gehring lived in a Clifton Park home that was built in 1924. When Blythe and her husband, C. Walter Gehring, acquired the property in 1959, the couple found remnants of the battery recharger still in the garage.

At the dawn of the auto age, electrics blossomed, if only for a spell. In 1900, they held a 38 percent share of the car market. Five years later, that figure plummeted to 7 percent. They were priced at about $3,000 and recommended as urban cars for driving at a leisurely pace (about 20 mph) on paved streets.

Besides the aforementioned qualities, they were advertised as being tall enough so that a stylish matron could enter without disturbing her ostrich-plumed hat.

Motoring range on one battery charge rose from 20 miles in 1900 to about 75 miles a decade later. However, charging facilities were few and far between outside of the cities, and costly anywhere.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post November 24, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

More Lakewood Lore