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| (Des Moines Register. June 16, 1901) |
W. J. Riddell picked a hell of a time to get
into the automobile business.
In 1900, he was selling bicycles at Eighth and
Locust in Des Moines. His shop carried Cleveland and Crescent bicycles. A good
one cost around $30. Riddell advertised his place as the “Oldest and Largest
Exclusive Bicycle Store in the City.”
It was a solid business. People knew what bicycles
were. They knew how they worked and where they could ride them.
Then along came the automobile.
The early cars were loud, expensive, and
unreliable. Iowa had few decent roads. Gasoline could be difficult to find.
Mechanics who knew what they were doing were even harder to find. A horse could
usually get you home. An automobile might leave you sitting in the mud.
Riddell wanted in.
In 1903, the Des Moines city directory listed him
under both bicycles and automobiles. Soon the bicycle dealer at Eighth and
Locust was running the Riddell Automobile Co.
And he wasn’t thinking small.
One advertisement bragged that Riddell was the “oldest automobile house in Iowa.” He claimed he had been “first in the field” and had already picked through the machines on the market to find the good ones.
Then he rattled off the names. Peerless. Winton. Locomobile. Franklin. Cadillac. Prices ran from $200 to $10,000. Two carloads were coming Monday.
“Let us take you for a ride,” the ad said.
That was probably a pretty good sales pitch in 1905. Plenty of people had never been inside an automobile. Forget heated seats and cup holders. Just getting one of these things rolling down Locust Street without a horse attached to it was entertainment.
Riddell had cheaper machinery, too. A Cadillac Model A Runabout sold for $600. Spend $650 and you got one with a tonneau, an extra passenger section in back. The body was royal blue, the running gear primrose.
Tools were included. That mattered because across Iowa could turn into a mechanical survival test. Roads were dirt. Rain made mud. Tires blew. Chains broke. Engines stopped for reasons that weren’t always obvious. There wasn’t a gas station every few miles, and there sure as hell wasn’t roadside help.
If the Cadillac quit, those tools weren’t for decoration.
Riddell didn’t dwell on any of that. He called the cars “the greatest auto bargains ever offered in Iowa.” He also had a new $750 Oldsmobile Runabout he was willing to knock 15 percent off of, plus freight.
In 1907, Riddell Automobile Co. occupied 720–722 Locust. W. J. Riddell was president and R. S. Chase was secretary. The bicycle man had become an automobile man, and the gamble was looking pretty good.
Then something happened.
In 1910, Riddell Automobile Co. still had Riddell’s name on it, but Riddell wasn’t running it. Ashton Clemens was president. R. J. Clemens was secretary and manager. M. R. Lash was the treasurer.
The directories don’t say what happened. They tell us where Riddell went. He was managing the Buick Motor Co. at 1013–1015 Walnut Street.
His old company kept rolling without him. Riddell Automobile Co. became the Central Iowa distributor for Overland automobiles. It sold parts and accessories and developed into the dealership that would become familiar across America.
In 1912, the company moved to 321–325 Grand Avenue. An Overland Model 69T, with five seats and 30 horsepower, sold for $985. The company stocked Fisk tires along with parts and accessories.
The days of selling bicycles out of a little shop were over.
So were the days when simply owning an automobile made somebody a neighborhood attraction. Cars were becoming normal. Dealers were getting bigger. Manufacturers were building more of them. Roads were slowly improving. An entire industry was taking shape.
Riddell had caught it near the beginning.
In 1914, the Des Moines directory had a brief message for anyone looking for Riddell Automobile Co.: “See Clemens Automobile Co., Successors.”
Des Moines Register. September 15, 1905)
That was it.
In roughly a decade, Riddell went from selling $28
Crescent bicycles to selling Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, Wintons, Franklins, Peerless,
and Locomobiles. He got into automobiles when buying one still required a
little money, some mechanical ability, and maybe a questionable sense of
judgment.
The cars in his advertisements look almost
ridiculous now. Big spoked wheels. Open bodies. No windshield. No real
protection from rain, dust, mud, or anything else Iowa threw at you.
But look closer.
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| (Des Moines Register. April 8, 1906) |
Riddell wasn’t selling some goofy machine that went out of fashion.
He picked the winner.
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