factual depiction in movie?

[gainesvillegym]

I am curious, in the movie Tucker places an ad/article in a magazine about the car, and the response was the tucker family recieved 150,000 letters from across the nation asking for more info on the car.

1st, 150,000 letters is a lot of mail

2nd, Is there a copy of this ad/article online that I could see/read. ad /copy design must be incredilbe to get such a response

the response to the ad acts as "guarantor of success" for the car throughout the movie

thanks in advance for any replies

regards

jlb

[Tuckerfan1053]

The figure cited in the film comes from The Indomitable Tin Goose which is the only biography of Preston Tucker (and sadly out of print). Copies of the ad show up on eBay from time to time, but I don't think I've ever seen it on the web (though a number of sites have had various Tucker ads on them, but I can't find any links at the moment).

[Larry Clark]

I am not sure there is any remaining hard evidence to be found concerning the supposed 150,000+ number. However, I believe it is quite probable given the excitement for the car and the era. To illustrate the point, Ford Motor Company claimed that they took 300,000 orders for cars on 10/26/46 when they introduced their first post war car. Kaiser-Frazer took one million orders by August 1946. The letters to Preston Tucker began after an article (not an ad) by Charles Pearson concerning Preston Tucker's new car that ran in the January 1946 edition of True Magazine. The article would later be a bone of contention with the SEC since Pearson went to work for Tucker and had in the article statements that were clearly untrue (the article opened by saying, "The first super-super automobile job to get off the drawing board into the production stage is being put together at Detroit..." but the first drawings by Alex Tremulis came nearly a year later and the Tin Goose arrived nearly 18 months later). Still, people loved what they read and saw and the avalanche of letters began. Tucker attempted to leverage this demand to gain financial support (something that dot.com companies also did in the late 1990s). Larry