“As with many good stories, I came upon this one totally by chance,” says Eric Moskowitz.
It was 2007 when Moskowitz, then a reporter for the Globe’s northwest suburban edition, heard about a car race that had taken place nearly a century earlier, a contest that helped crown the Ford Model T as the car that would emerge as America’s favorite in the earliest days of the automotive era.
In “The Hardest, Longest Race: Henry Ford and the Cross-Country Contest That Changed America,” Moskowitz chronicles the story of the 1909 Ocean to Ocean Automobile Endurance Contest, which began in New York on June 1 and culminated in Seattle nearly three weeks later, when Ford’s entry crossed the finish line first.
Moskowitz wouldn’t have heard of the race at all if it weren’t for an email that caught his eye announcing a proclamation honoring “the forgotten Shawmut Motor Company, the pride of Stoneham, and the rightful winner of the 1909 Ocean to Ocean Race for the Guggenheim Cup,” he recalls. “I was like, what? I really want to know about this.”
So he started his research. “I wrote 1,500 words, which was a lot,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in history, always looking for ways to write about the past and connect it to the present.”
Moskowitz wrote a piece about the 100th anniversary of the race, but didn’t have the time to focus on a bigger project at the time. When a colleague connected him to a literary agent several years later, he says, he pitched her three other ideas before remembering the race. “I was like, ‘I wrote a story back in 2009 about a cross-country auto race that Ford cheated at to win to promote the Model T,’ and she was like, ‘that is a book!’”
As a local kid, Moskowitz adds, he’d never heard about Shawmut Motor Company, the Stoneham company whose car arrived in Seattle second, after the Ford. Nor had he any idea, until digging into the archives, that the Shawmut car had been declared the rightful winner of the race after Ford’s malfeasance — they had replaced a worn-out engine with an entirely new one, in clear violation of the race rules — was revealed. By that point, he says, “nobody cared.”
So Ford became a household name, and Shawmut — well, Moskowitz says, “they basically fizzle out.”
Still, writing the book allowed Moskowitz to explore a side of New England’s industrial history that has been lost to time. “I had no idea that they were making cars in New England,” he says. “But in fact, New England and New York were really seats of the emerging industry, sort of a natural outgrowth of all the innovation that was coming out of the Connecticut River Valley.”
And also, as he points out, “it was sort of an irresistible story.” The characters alone are enticing, from Henry Ford — “he loathed the media, but was so good at working the media!” — to the race’s sponsor, Robert Guggenheim, whom he describes as “kind of a playboy and a mark.”
A scion of the mining family, Robert was only 24 when he decided to fund the race and its prize. “He’d kind of worn out his welcome with his dad in New York City,” says Moskowitz. “So his father sends him to Seattle in late 1908, ostensibly to look after one of the Guggenheim smelters in Tacoma, but mostly to stay out of the way.”
It was an era of big stunts and publicity gimmicks. Cities like Seattle wanted to announce their arrival as serious players on the national stage. Automobile manufacturers like Ford wanted to show the American consumer that a car could be an affordable, durable tool for traveling across vast distances.
“The automobile in 1909 is like the personal computer in the late ‘70s,” Moskowitz says. “It has grown very quickly in about a decade from one in 10,000 people owning a car to one in 500. So it is clear that it is here to stay. It is no longer just the plaything for the rich. This race demonstrates to the public that this is a car that you can have confidence in without being part of the gilded class.”
One of the most enduring characters Moskowitz says he met during the process of writing the book was the trio of drivers of the Shawmut entry. “They’re the protagonists, both the car and the crew,” he says. The book “came to life,” he says, when he was able to read the letters saved by the descendants of one of the crew members, Earle Chapin.
“He was a newlywed,” Moskowitz says. “He was deeply in love. And so he wants his wife to know that he’s thinking about her. So he writes to her every chance he gets: in longhand with a fountain pen, letters, postcards, even in the thick of the race, and she saved them all.”
After the race, he adds, Chapin stayed in the Stoneham area, becoming an auto mechanic and sometimes selling cars. “He actually briefly sold Model Ts for a couple years in the 1910s. Not necessarily like if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, but simply put, like, by that point, four or five years after the race, half the cars in America are Model Ts, and it’s a good car for a cheap price.”
Eric Moskowitz will read at 7 p.m. Friday, June 5, at Brookline Booksmith.
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section. You can reach her at kate.tuttle@globe.com