attn: Tucker Relatives

[daleman]

Hi!
My name is Dale, and my great grandfather was Harry Miller. I would be interested in speaking or emailing to any Tucker who knows of the relationship between my great grandfather Harry, and Preston.

Regards,
Dale D.
daleman@adelphia.net

[TuckerCar]

Dale-

Welcome to the Board. That is certainly an interesting connection you have to the Tucker saga. Once in a while we do get family members of Tucker employees that show up on the Board. The Tucker famly itself is of course advancing in age and do not visit the Board.

On that note, I should also mention that we have always made efforts to invite such relatives and employees to serve as guest speakers at our conventions.

If you or anyone in your family has any interesting tales of Tucker or Harry Miller, we'd all like to hear them either here on this Board, or in person at our conventions.

[Tuckeroo]

Though I am merely a devout researcher of the Tucker saga and not a family member, I do have one story I'd like to share, which I believe appeared in Charles Pearson's The Indomitable Tin Goose (I'll be sure to follow up with verification later). Harry Miller's wife was called as a witness for the prosecution in the trial against Preston Tucker. The prosecution was testing the veracity of Tucker's claim to his level of experience in developing racing cars. Regardless of what the prosecution did or did not establish about Tucker's experience in the field, Mrs. Miller revealed under cross-examination that Preston Tucker had covered all of the funeral expenses for her late husband; thereby establishing the kinship of the two men.

Also in the book, Vera Tucker spoke of a road trip she took with Preston and Mr. and Mrs. Miller. On this trip, the car radio failed to work and Preston and Harry insisted on stopping to fix it. Vera and Mrs. Miller did there best to stay cool in the sweltering heat as they watched the two men disassemble the entire radio. To there credit, they got it working again and they were on their way!

There are many great sources about both Harry Miller and Preston Tucker, but rarely have I seen anything in depth about the two working together. Not all of the Miller sources shine a favorably light on Tucker, particularily when it came to the 1935 Ford FWD racer debacle. I get the sense that they were both bold visionaries whose visions sometimes hit the retaining wall of reality. Consequently I imagine that when things worked out to plan, the two visionaries worked well together, and when they didn't work out to plan the two fell on harder times. Taken together and on their own, the two men made some of the most facinating and amazing cars in history.