One Sunday morning two years ago, Don Mayton was sitting at a table in an outdoor restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif., when he did a double-take at the sight of an odd-looking motor home lumbering down the highway. On the side of the rounded vehicle, in cast-aluminum, were the words “General Motors Parade of Progress.”
“It was a Futurliner that had been restored by a gentleman out there,” Mayton recalls. “Up to that point, I had worked for GM almost 40 years and had never seen such a vehicle.”
Back home in Zeeland, Mich., the longtime car buff couldn’t get the image out of his mind. Mayton began tracking down information about the Futurliner and soon discovered that GM had produced 12 of the cherry-red vehicles in 1940 to transport the company’s traveling science exhibit, the Parade of Progress.
In the next few months, Mayton’s interest grew to a near-obsession and, after retiring in May 1998, he devoted much of his time to finding the Futurliners. He pored through old files and photographs in the GM archives and contacted members of antique truck clubs who might know the whereabouts of the mammoth, outdated vehicles.
He was able to unearth nine of the original bus-like behemoths: Two–the California motor home and another in Montreal that had been turned into a cellular phone business–had been modernized. Two more belonged to the Peter Pan Bus Co. in Springfield, Mass., which was restoring one and using the other for parts. Four more surfaced in Arizona, Indiana and New Hampshire. And one was parked behind the National Automotive and Truck Museum in Auburn, Ind. An Illinois collector had donated the badly rusted Futurliner to the museum five years earlier, but the staff had no budget to restore it.
“Any other vehicle in this condition you would have taken and scrapped,” Mayton says. “We basically worked out an agreement where (the museum director) would have it shipped up to Michigan and I would pull a group of men together and, as a retirement project, we’d start working on it.”
Mayton began writing former GM colleagues and the owners of other auto-related businesses, asking for donations. (GM is not a financial backer of the restoration, though two of its vice presidents are advisers.) About 50 volunteers, from a retired priest to a former taxicab maker to a self-employed mason, have stepped forward to help with the project.
About 10 of the restoration enthusiasts meet in Mayton’s unheated pole barn each Tuesday to dismantle, sandblast, prime, weld and rebuild the Futurliner. The project is expected to cost approximately $200,000 and be completed within three to five years.
“Probably the neatest thing about this whole venture is the people involved, and the excitement about restoring a piece of this country’s automotive history–not just the vehicle, but the event,” Mayton says. “The Parade of Progress was like a big circus that came to town.”
The concept of the Futurliner was born at the 1933-34 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. Along the lakefront, between 12th and 39th Streets, the exhibition focused on scientific, technological and manufacturing advances.
Inspired by the overwhelming public response to the fair, which hosted more than 48 million visitors in its two-year run, GM research chief Charles Kettering convinced the company’s chairman, Alfred Sloan Jr., to take the educational exhibits on the road. In February 1936 the “Parade of Progress” made its debut in Lakeland, Fla., with eight custom-built, red-and-white Silver-Topped Streamliners that resembled large moving vans.
The parade was an instant success. The slow-moving Streamliners and support vehicles would arrive in towns across the U.S., a large silver tent would be erected on the fairgrounds or some other open space and free science shows would be presented by recent college graduates, all bachelors.
Throngs of Depression-weary citizens, yearning for entertainment to take their minds off the country’s plight, swarmed the exhibits, lectures and dioramas. There was always plenty to see– from the “futuristic” microwave oven to demonstrations illustrating the real-life effects of sound waves, friction and air pressure.
“We moved each week to a new city, usually one with a GM plant,” wrote Jack Burke, 72, an Elgin resident who worked in the Parade in 1954 and 1955, in a letter to Mayton. “So we donned our work uniforms, packed up, hit the road to the new town, paraded down its main drag and on to the show grounds. We traveled in convoy, the director and assistant director leading in big red Cadillac convertibles, then the Futurliners, all 12 in a row. . . . We always attracted lots of attention.”
The Parade of Progress was such a hit that in 1941 GM researchers introduced an improved fleet of vehicles and the Streamliners–the World’s Largest Highway Leviathans–were retired. The new, 33-foot Futurliners were massive too, with two 45-gallon gasoline tanks, built-in show lights, sides that opened to form a stage and a driver’s seat smack in the center of the cab.
After World War II, the 12 Futurliners were taken back into the GM shop and rebuilt. The license plate in the middle of the grille was eliminated. The four chrome ribs on the sides were expanded to seven. The 4-cylinder diesel engine was replaced with a 6-cylinder gasoline engine with an automatic transmission.
“The biggest visual difference is that in the 1940 version, the driver’s cockpit (which was reached by climbing a stairway to the top of the vehicle) was a glass bubble resembling that in the early WW II military planes,” Mayton notes. “The drivers were basically getting baked to death. It was very, very hot in there. And so in 1952, in addition to changing the top of the cab and eliminating that glass bubble, they added air conditioning in the cab.”
Even after the revamp, the cumbersome vehicles still posed some problems. Communication was always a challenge. Radio receivers were installed in all 12 vehicles, but only the lead and tail buses had transmitters. Maximum speed was still only about 40 miles per hour. And because the brakes were so poor, the Futurliners often rear-ended each other, earning them the dubious nickname “Red Elephants.”
“One of the amazing things about them is that the Futurliners, because of their weight, had two wheels on each side on the front,” says Douglas Dean, a retired optometrist who lectured in the Parade in 1956. “To turn them, you had to have power steering. They were just very difficult to operate, particularly if the power steering went out, which happened a couple of times.”
In late 1956, the popularity of the show waned and the Futurliners were sold or donated. Today, one of the original parade exhibits, “Our American Crossroads,” is on display at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
No Streamliners are known to exist.
The Futurliner in Mayton’s barn is the only one being restored to its original condition, inside and out. Yes, substituting modern parts would be much cheaper, faster and easier, Mayton admits, but that would defeat the purpose. “If we don’t take it back to the original, no one will ever know how they were built,” he says. “We’re just trying to preserve the history around this.”
National Automotive and Truck Museum organizers hope to take the refurbished Futurliner on tour. “Why go to all this trouble to make an operational vehicle and have it sit,’ ” Mayton asks. “We want to put it back on the road like it used to be.”
For information about the Futurliner bus restoration project, visit www.futurliner.com or contact project director Don Mayton at 616-875-3058 or donscar@i2k.com.
ON THE BUS
Twelve bus-like Futurliners were built and used by GM to transport the GM Parade of Progress show across the U.S. from 1941 to 1956.
– Wheelbase: 20.6 feet
– Length: 33 feet
– Width: 8 feet
– Height: 11 feet 7 inches
– Engine: (Pre-1953) 4-cylinder diesel. (1953 and later) 302-c.i., overhead valve in-line 6-cylinder GMC.
– Transmission: (Pre-1953) 4×4 mechanical transmissions. (1953 and later) Four-speed Hydramatic automatic transmission bolted to the backside of a two-speed gearbox for eight forward speeds. Another 3-speed PTO gearbox, which could be shifted manually from the rear quarter, provided a total of 24 gears.
– Top speed: 40 m.p.h.
– Gas tanks: two with 45-gallon capacity.
– Novel features: Dual (side-by-side) front steering wheels. Each wheel has its own set of brakes, brake drums and bearings; 19 access and display doors; 16-foot lighting panel attached to the top of the overhead doors and a large light bar 7 feet above the Futurliner. Twin 6-71 200KW Detroit Diesel generators provided power.
– Experiments demonstrated: a microwave that fried an egg without burning a newspaper; a Ping-Pong game in stereophonic sound; and sound traveling over a beam of light produced by a flashlight.
Source: Futurliner Restoration Project
