There was a time in America when the future was going to be big. To get an idea of exactly how big, head over to the Washington Auto Show and gape at the GM Futurliner in all its gargantuan glory.
It isn’t the length or width of the Futurliner that is most impressive: 33 feet by 8 feet. It’s the height. The driver sits 11 feet in the air, gripping a steering wheel that’s positioned in the center of an airplane-like cockpit. Driving it must be like taxiing a B-17 down the runway.
Mark Gessler said that when he went for a spin in it last year he had the memorable — if unnerving — experience of looking down at 18 wheelers.
Mark is the president of the Historic Vehicle Association, an organization based in Gaithersburg that arranged for the Futurliner to be displayed at the Washington Convention Center through Sunday. It's one of 12 custom trucks that General Motors built in 1940, mothballed during World War II then sent across the United States in the early 1950s as part of an ambitious endeavor called the Parade of Progress.
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“It was a World’s Fair on wheels,” Mark said of GM’s effort. The Parade of Progress eschewed big cities in favor of smaller U.S. burgs. After the 44-vehicle convoy pulled into town, a tent was erected, and the dozen shiny red, white and silver Futurliners parked like a squadron of Sabrejets.
The sides opened to reveal exhibits on that magical place called the Future. One Futurliner carried a display on jet engines, another on microwave technology. There were moving dioramas on automobile assembly and traffic infrastructure.
Mark said the idea wasn’t to sell GM cars — although surely that was a subtext — but to introduce the American people to scientific and engineering achievements. Wasn’t it grand to be alive at a time when possibilities were endless, where Progress was a Parade: entertaining, orderly, inevitable.
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The idea, as someone put it at the time, was “to set a boy to dreaming.” (Girls, presumably, were allowed different dreams in those “Father Knows Best” days.)
The Parade eventually stopped in 1956, when it made more sense to reach the American public through television than by parking on a dusty fairground. GM sold off the Futurliners. This particular example, No. 10, was sold to a Detroit beer company — Goebel Brewing — and converted to hold an exhibit on beer-making. It ended up in the hands of a Michigan Cadillac dealership, where it became a literal advertising vehicle.
It eventually was bought by a man named Joseph Bortz, who donated it to the National Auto and Truck Museum in Auburn, Ind. A group of volunteers — including many who once worked at GM — completed a painstaking restoration in 2005.
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This is the first time a Futurliner has been in Washington, the city that eventually would bail out General Motors, which was the world’s largest company at the time of the Parade of Progress.
Futurliner No. 10 is the first truck added to the National Historic Vehicle Register, a list of historically significant vehicles. Others include the prototype Shelby Daytona Coupe, a precursor to the cars that eventually would beat Ferrari, and the Meyers Manx, the first dune buggy.
Mark feels that cars can be as worthy of historic recognition as famous buildings. For better or worse, the automobile has influenced this country. We bend our cities to its needs. We take photos of ourselves posed next to our favorite cars as though they were beloved family members.
As I stood in the shadow of the mighty Futurliner, I thought about how today’s Americans think of the future. Differently, that’s for sure. It isn’t just that our thoughts of tomorrow aren’t quite so rah-rah and rosy — what with our planet dying at our own hands and all — but that we don’t think big.
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I mean that literally. Getting small is what we’re about today. Nanotechnology. The human genome. (Mark Gessler made his fortune in biotechnology.)
How would a car company create a Parade of Progress in 2015? Probably not with a fleet of 15-ton vehicles and animatronic exhibits. Maybe with a tiny device that conjured a hologram in your living room. Or an app for your smartphone.
It wasn’t the future that got small. It was us.
To see a video on the Futurliner, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
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