I drank coffee with John Taylor. John Taylor was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no John Taylor

John Patterson Taylor was born in Dryad, Washington on October 18th, 1907. Dryad is now merely a wide spot on Washington State Highway Six on the road out of Chehalis toward Astoria. When Johnny was born, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states yet, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan hadn’t yet been born, Iraq was still Persia and Albert Einstein was likely still working in the German patent office. This was the world in which John Taylor was born.

In 1926, following on heels of his brother, John traveled east on the Lincoln Highway looking for work in the industrial centers of the Mid-west. Both Taylor brothers were offered work, almost immediately, at the REO plant in Lansing, where they were making the very popular “Flying Cloud” sedan. On his trip back home to collect his belongings, he told me, they had to twice re-grind the valves in their borrowed Model-T, and had to change the tires about every 150 miles. Once you got past Nebraska, the “highway” wasn’t even paved.

When he settled in Michigan, he was given the job of a “tack spitter” in the REO Body Shop, and later at Fisher Body. There they had a big barrel of chewing tobacco sitting on the floor where he walked into work, and he had been instructed to put a plug in one cheek, and a handful of tacks in the other, and “spit” them onto his magnetized tack-hammer. Then, he would neatly pound a tack every two inches or so into the interior fabric head-lining of the REO’s as they crawled past him. Then, he was instructed to do this over and over and over again.

Also, this was before OSHA.

He worked steadily at Fisher Body and REO, where he met his young bride Edith Hale. She worked in the office, and it was not infrequent that she would catch a glimpse of Ransom Eli Olds himself. Of course, this wasn’t all that unusual because the man lived in Lansing, and it was part of the landscape to see the man walking around town. In 1928, though, sales of Flying Clouds and Buick’s had fallen dramatically, John had been laid off, and had found another job at the Lansing Arctic Dairy. He became the quintessential Milk Man, complete with a draft-horse drawn milk wagon, and wire delivery baskets.

John was a man of his times, and his times were becoming interesting…

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