My friend and Autopian contributor Emily Velasco seems to have fallen down a deep rabbit hole of old Los Angeles photos, and from deep within that hole she’s been tossing out some amazing old pictures of cars in LA, including the one you see above, which has a detail I’m sure you’ve already clocked, so let’s talk about this, because I think it’s fascinating.
What we’re looking at there is bandleader Paul Whiteman, of Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, which, I just now read, “represented the apex of Jazz to the general public.”
Want to hear Paul’s orchestra? Too bad, here you go:
Paul was successful, and as a successful guy, he needed a swanky car, which that Cord L29 definitely was. But even swankier are those tires.
I mean, just look at them, this time without Paul in the way:
These are Vogue tires, which were known for their novel and ornate sidewall designs. The distinctive patterned-white sidewall tires were the result of Vogue tire West Coast distributor Lloyd Dodson seeing whitewalls on chauffeured vehicles around LA, and realizing there could be a market selling fancy tires to rich Hollywood types, so he borrowed some money and started a tire company with his brother.
Vogue’s site suggests the company invented the whitewall tire in 1914; tires at the time were almost all black, due to the carbon used in the vulcanization process, which was a change from earlier all-white non-vulcanized tires. Vogue also started putting gold stripes on their tires, for even more classiness.
Let’s look closer at these patterned tires:
That’s pretty fun. I have to wonder why this never really caught on? You’d think there would be people who would love tires with patterns on them, right? It’s not like there’s any major technical challenge to this – I know colored rubber tires have been tried but never caught on, in part because of the difficulty of making non-black rubber that’s as durable, but this is just basically printing color on the sidewall, so it shouldn’t have those issues.
That pattern above really works well with wire wheels, too. I can imagine some really compelling patterns could be made that worked with modern tires, possibly even ones that, when in motion, made some interesting animated patterns or something. We can dream, right?
Okay now for the odd NASCAR trivia tie-in: the first non-American built car and the first (and only) Jaguar to win a NASCAR race was in 1954, and the car, a Jag XK120 driven by Al Keller, was sort of owned by Paul Whiteman!
I say sort of because the car was actually owned by Ed Otto, co-founder of NASCAR, and they wanted to avoid any conflict of interest issues, so the car was entered under Paul’s name.
Here’s a video about that unusual “international” NASCAR race:
Man, those old XKs were fantastic-looking. Think how they’d look with some patterned whitewalls!
Vulcanization originally referred exclusively to the treatment of natural rubber with sulfur to cross link the polymers. Charles Goodyear discovered the process sort of by accident in 1939 by dropping some suplher and rubber into a hot frying pan.
You know I have heard this story many times, but never has how the sulphur and rubber mixture found its way into the Goodyear kitchen in the first place been explained. The home life of 19th century inventors must have been something.
Anyway, the white rubber is Vulcanized, adding carbon black came later.
Natural rubber tires are amazing, there are some WWII vintage tires here that show no deterioration
1839
Sigh, of course 1839.
By 1939 inventors had mostly departed the kitchen.
Metzeler made blue snow tires in the 70s and Michelin had colored mountain bike tires in the oughts.
Bicycle tires are often skinwalls where the tread is,glued to the casing so the sidewalls are actually the casing. This led to some less expensive tires having tan sidewalls. My cyclocross bike has Panaracer tires with tan sidewalls and it looks right because CX bike run tubular tires
Might work in combination with a fender skirt with an opening just big enough for one instance of the pattern. Tire cartoons. I believe the world needs this.
More of these posts about vintage LA automobile photos! A regular car noir feature!
Yes!
And LA covered with oil wells..
Whiteman’s a funny case: musically, he was much more like Pat Boone/Vanilla Ice than Elvis*/Eminem (in that the scary new Black music was being watered down for white tastes), but his musicians were top notch, and most of them had long careers playing jazz as hot and innovative as their Black peers. In fact Bing Crosby (who sings on the clip here) was an incredibly important jazz singer—when he wasn’t singing with Whiteman. He and Louis Armstrong had a mutual admiration society, but Bing liked money, and singing with Whiteman brought him lots of it, as did his later recordings with the anodyne John Scott Trotter (who, much later, did orchestrations on the Peanuts TV specials). So nowadays Crosby is remembered as a bland crooner, but circa 1930 he was a big deal among white and Black jazz audiences.
*due respect to Chuck D, but there’s no real evidence that Elvis was particularly racist, and his early recordings were bold and dangerous, not whitewashed (although they included elements from white musical traditions as well as Black)
It’s interesting Vogue claims to have invented the whitewall. When carbon black first started being added to tires, they originally only did it to the tread, so there were plenty of tires with black tread and natural white sidewalls. As manufacturing processes evolved, carbon black was used throughout the tire. But, folks liked the classy look of whitewalls, so companies began adding a white layer to the sidewalls. One story I’ve heard is that when tires were all white, if you were rich enough to afford a chauffeur, they would keep your tires clean. So a bright white tire was a status symbol.
Different colors were common on bicycles prior to carbon black, too. According to antique bicycle nerds and some old catalogs, my 1912 Iver Johnson would have likely had black tires new, but brick reds were also popular. I went with a cream color (that’s aged to a tan) to stand out more as an antique and because I liked the look. The rubber is definitely not holding up as well after 10 years and pretty low miles than even older black tires on other bikes that spend more time in the sun and get more miles. As the tires were a nightmare to get on the (new) wood wheels, I’ll probably cut them off when the time comes and go with black (and a different brand that will hopefully be easier to get on even if the tread pattern doesn’t look right). That said, I have brown Schwalbe tires on my rocket bike that are only a few years newer that seem to be holding up as well as black would, though the green/tan wall Panaracers on my USAAF bike are somewhere in between. Then again, perhaps I’m only noticing the micro cracking more because of the color, at least with the Panaracers. The Linus tires on the antique are definitely not as elastic as they should be. So, just going by these unscientific observations of my dubious color coding fashion choices of bike tires, besides forecasting and logistics, I’d say another big reason for the failure of colored car tires is how much faster the rubber ages.
‘Cause you’re gonna melt all…this…stuff!
That was a fun movie that people seldom seem to mention. And I agreed—I always had a thing for Carol Kane and her kooky characters.
Leave off the last two, and check out Kimmy Schmidt if you haven’t!
My grandmother knitted some tires for me.
Wow. So much going on here in one article…
A wealthy Whiteman (Paul) making a living playing Blackman music (Jazz) in 1923 with an all-White orchestra driving around in a long-ass Cord (L92) with 5 fancy checkered White styling features plastered on the functional (better) Black vulcanized rubber tires in Los Angeles who doesn’t really own a Nascar-winning Jaguar but had as name appropriated to it to avoid any conflict of interest with Southern NASCAR fans.
Hmm… just can’t make this stuff up!
Keep up the good work Torch!
Personally I would have gone with ‘Anything Goes’ as the ’20s jazz is much straighter and less familiar to modern ears as ‘jazz’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qYqkAV7Xxw
The antidote!
Ever looked at sidewall tread carefully, like on an off-road tire? The lugs are not consistent. I suppose it has to do with efficiently creating a design that works for multiple diameters, tire manufacturers don’t spread the pattern out evenly across the tire’s circumference, they just add, remove, or scale a few lugs until it all fits. When it’s all black you barely notice.
Which makes the idea of a contrasting sidewall pattern so much harder. You’d have to customize the whole design for each size, or else any imperfection would stand out like a crooked tooth. Although I suspect that back in the day of these photos, there were fewer different tire sizes, so this may have been more doable.
It’s also for noise. Inconsistent lug patterns are less prone to making noise, the different frequency of the noise from different sized lugs can cancel themselves out.
TIL
In 1967, I thought my ’66 Mustang, 289, 4-Speed, glass pack mufflers, yellow fog lights and chrome reverse wheels was ever so cool with Michelin radials with a red line on the sidewall.
I’m always surprised red-lines haven’t made a comeback. Given the exploding desire for distinctive stuff, it’s odd that tires are still so much all the same.
I’d like to see red-lines make a comeback.
Coker Makes white walls for those that still want them, the issue with Vogue’s is they were adopted early by the Inner city low rider crowd and the rich clientele they were targeting did not want to be associated. Just my take on them, as I agree they look good on many a stately car, but they almost exclusively seem to be on clapped out Chrysler 300’s around here.
Firestone at least made some similar stuff well into the ’60s. The white part was smaller, but there was a fair amount of ornate checkering above it on the sidewall. Mustangs often came with them, you can still see the vintage ads. It’s definitely cool-looking, if only b/c of how different and how homogenous stuff would soon become.
On another note NASCAR finally awarded a long ignored win to Bobby Allison.
After close to 60 years of sitting with their heads up their asses…
If all tires were white and half Vulcan, maybe we could have peace in our galaxy again.
Or at least America?
What a fucked up country.
I mean, yeah it’s a fucked up country, but I don’t see the tie in with this article. Did I miss a paragraph?
Ok.
Bobby Allison is your hint for today.
Or Mr. Spock?
Good luck…
Well you have a point there, Jane Wyman, Majel Barrett, Cynthia Blaise, Winona Ryder, and Mia Kirshner are all white.
Jane Wyatt. Close!
Bah, I’m old. Kirshner is the best one anyway.
Come on. You can get this one…lol
Dad always ran whitewall tires, I remember cleaning them with Brillo pads as a kid (’80s). Our neighbor ran Vogue tires with the gold lines on his Cadillacs.
I had one SUV (’89 Cherokee) with white letters.
BTW, the Cord and tires are glorious.
Love those L29 Cords, plus it has those fancy pants tires. Don’t see mnodern tires with patterns but I do on occasion see tires with the custom lettering on them.
Except for the Cybertruck sidewall which has a specific pattern to match the overlapping hub.
Since native rubber is white, before vulcanization became a thing many turn of the century (1900, not 2000 children) cars actually had white tires.
It’s not the vulcanizing process that turns rubber black, it’s the addition of carbon black (basically carbon in powder form) which started being used in the second decade of the 20th century. Carbon black made the rubber last even longer that just vulcanizing and also turned it black, obviously. White tires were always vulcanized. Vulcanization is what allows rubber tires to exist since it turns rubber from a malleable, sticky substance into something stronger and more durable.
Good to know. I thought the carbon black was part of vulcanization.