Come On Baby, Do The Loco-Motion!

The glam event couldn’t have happened on a glitzier date: In 1900 the first steam-engine auto rolled off the ferry in Vineyard Haven. It was driven by a man named Elmer J. Bliss. Islanders heralded the sight of the dazzling invention with a snappy new sobriquet: They called it a locomobile.

There is no description on record of summer Edgartown resident, Elmer J. Bliss, but we can easily imagine him with goggles and a Snoopy / Red Baron scarf as he stomped on the accelerator to crank up his motor to a risqué 11 miles an hour.

The media was opposed. The editor of the Vineyard Gazette wrote in high dudgeon, “Up-to-date autos are mere ugly, crawling machines, not an ounce of the artistic or poetic about them.”

Well, yeah, but that hardly stopped summer show-offs from arriving in droves with these roaring vehicles.

The biggest crybabies about horseless carriages were, of course, horses. When an engine opened up like a gatling gun, it scared the you-now-what out of surrounding horses and, since you-know-what distributed here, there, and everywhere, is always the biggest problem with the equine population, no one wanted any more of the stuff than was strictly necessary and routinely easy to clean up.

Selectmen voted to ban autos from clipping along faster than a heady 6 miles an hour.

No sooner was the speed limit in effect when a man named E.A. Mulliken of Quincy and Cottage City – or wait! maybe it was his chauffeur; no one ever ascertained; it was very Gatsby-esque – juddered down the road from Lake Tashmoo at a speed of (he said) 9 miles an hour. Witnesses claimed he was trucking along as fast as 15 of those big boy m.p.h’s. 

At the same inopportune time, Ariel Scott of West Tisbury lumbered south up Tashmoo Road. Perhaps he sang, “Zippety doo-dah!” as he perched atop his low-tech wagon with a one-horse engine, namely a single actual horse.

The locomobile and the wagon verged towards one another. At the snarl and pip of the car’s engine, the horse freaked and bolted into the nearest ravine, selfishly forgetting about his driver whom he was pledged to protect and serve. Mr. Scott flipped high and somersaulted into the ravine where his head smacked the hard ground. He died the next day, July 19, 1902, the first date that a Vineyarder lost his life in a car accident.

Ariel Scott, your death will not be in vain! We will defend this scenic place from an invasion of locomobiles! Oh. It’s too late? Well, whatever . . . 

A little historical commentary about the wheels in spin in this saga of metal-over-horseflesh: Many philosophers have opined that, at the base of all wrong actions and tragic events, there lies an over-weaning human trait, namely stupidity. I’d like to offer another human trait, although stupidity certainly plays a large part in it. That trait is competitiveness. Our Island’s rivalry with Nantucket has steered our course for many a day, and not always in the right direction.

In 1906, Nantucket declared itself off limits to locomobiles. (Oh gawd! if only they’d hewn to that; they could manage it; you can walk across that little island in half an hour; I’d be living there today; hanging up my hat on this traffic-girded rock, and jamming off to Nan-took-it!)

So, back to 1906: the suits at the Martha’s Vineyard Herald decided to take an 180-degree “oh yeah?” offensive: All of a sudden, the Vineyard was the place to bring the loco-mocos which their essayists had earlier described as “ugly” “wheezy” and “monstrous.” Suddenly, editor E.E. Landers invited all car owners to get their back bumpers over here:

“Our concrete streets and roads are great for automobiling. Nantucket doesn’t want you but we do.”

E.E. Landers, a pox on you and your house! I mean, not really. Not even sure how a pox could be organized these days, or even where your house was located.

So in the first decade of the new century, big shot visitors to the Island arrived with their hooptys. One of these trend-setters was Broadway comedian, Sol Smith Russell – huge in his day -- who bought a lot on top of Tower Hill overlooking Edgartown harbor, with views across the glittering sea to the flocky grey-green moraine of Chappaquiddick.

Point was, a rich guy didn’t need to live smack dab in town anymore. Give him a car, and he could light out for the Territory. The shores and plains of Katama became the new suburbs of that old-fashioned floozy, Edgartown Village. Same could be said for Sengekontackett and the Lagoon in Oak Bluffs, and Lambert’s Cove and Hine’s Point in Vineyard Haven. Roll out the land! Tack up the houses, the bigger, the better! We got the rubber and the oil and the internal combustion to make this dream possible.

One good thing about the locomobile on Martha’s Vineyard: Up Islanders could get out more, and stop it with all the in-breeding, already! But that’s a whole ‘nother story.