What Excitement! In 1904 John's Father Bought a Steven-Duryea

Okay, this is not the Steven-Duryea automobile that Charles Kellogg bought in 1904.  Continuing his father's fascination with cars, John bought the one pictured much later.  Shown in 1939 with John and children  Diane and Ken, it's a blue 1938 Lincoln Zephyr, the first expensive car John purchased.  John loved showing it off.

Pieces of a Life quotes John Kellogg's autobiography in talking about that other car, the Steven-Duryea. "In 1904 Buffalo received four new cars; one of them was ours.  I was five years old.  Cars then lacked windshields, tops, doors, mufflers and many other things we now take for granted.  To keep clean, folks had to wear goggles and linen dusters.  Vividly I recall the family driving the 25 miles to Buffalo to get outfitted.  I was asleep and they did not waken me.  I was heart-broken.

Our car came from Massachusetts and was a Steven-Duryea.  Like all others it had one large cylinder that shook the car when it exploded.  Cars were so very simple then.  If something broke, there was no service station to which you took it for repairs.  The village blacksmith forged your parts back together.  Each person with a car kept their own wood barrel of gasoline; recall, ours was down in the apple orchard.

Lacking mufflers, cars made a terrific racket.  Horses were just plain scared of them.  Horse owners at first tried to minimize the impact by putting blinders on horses; with these the horse could see only straight ahead.  These helped some.  Still the noise was so loud that often the horses ran away or their owners held them at great risk.  I have been in a car many times when the frustrated owner would lash out at us with his whip.  We went much faster, so in several seconds were out of danger.