Lakewood Lore

Car was fond memory for many

Unearthed, following a recent Lakewood Sun Post story about Lakewood's Templar Motors Corp., was a picture of a Templar model taken after the car had reached the Los Angeles finish line of a transcontinental auto race on Aug. 4, 1920.

The photograph, provided to us by Lakewoodite Glenn Flynn, shows race driver E.G. "Cannonball" Baker behind the wheel and next to him Templar mechanic Arthur Holliday, who was Flynn's uncle.

The car, a racing prototype, set a world record by traveling from New York City to Los Angeles, a distance of 3,424 miles, in six days, 17 hours and 16 minutes.

Shortly before the cross-country sprint over miles of roads that could only be described as atrocious, Holliday took his nephew Flynn, then just a child, for a spin around the block in the special Templar.

"It was a thrill I will never forget. I was the envy of all my boyhood friends in the neighborhood," said Flynn, now a retiree who with his wife, Vera, has lived on McKinley Avenue since 1948.

Mechanic Holliday, a Cleveland West Park resident for many years, was employed in the Templar plant's experimental department. He died in 1945. The picture is from a collection belonging to his daughter, Dolores Holliday of West Park.

Also heard from after the story was a 90-year old Lakewoodite, Ferdinand (Charley) Schaub. He has lived here for the past 79 years and was a test driver for Templar from the time the company started production in 1917 until it shut down in 1924.

Schaub, born in Austria, came to Cleveland with his parents in 1902 when he was 3 years old. Eight years later, the family moved to Lakewood's Winchester Avenue.

Schaub first worked in the office of an auto-frame manufacturing firm at Madison and West 106th that later became Midland Steel Co. After he was advised for health reasons to switch to an outside job, he joined Templar as an over-the-road car tester when he was 18.

"Test-driving was the best job I ever had and the healthiest," said Schaub, who has lived on Elbur Avenue since 1948.

"I random-tested 26 to 27 cars a month on public roads in the county in all kinds of weather. It made me a different person.

"When the company closed down, I became a truck driver and remained outdoors. I never had to take a pill or see a doctor until I was 89."

Schaub remembers a fire that broke out at the Templar plant's third-floor assembly line in 1921.

"Afterwards, company president M.F. Bramley, a good man, let me buy one of the partially burned cars for $1,100," he recalled. "I made repairs, kept the car for two years and then sold it for $1,500."

The model, a touring car, retailed for $2,685 new at the time, according to Schaub.

Templar rebounded from the fire but three years later was forced out of business because of financial difficulties. Its 300,000-square-foot plant still remains at 13000 Athens Ave. where it is now occupied by 16 business and industrial tenants.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post April 13, 1989. Reprinted with permission.

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