Scoot Business

Burly, six-foot Henry Ruthvin Smith is one postman who does not go walking on his holidays. After 16 years of lugging a fat mailbag over a regular residential route in Columbia, S. C., even the walking he had to do for the Post Office Department got to be too much. But while other postmen with the same problem met it by foot baths or retirement, Mailman Smith used his head. Last week, with the blessing of the Postmaster General, he was awheel in one of the strangest contraptions that ever carried Uncle Sam's post. Footsore grey-coats throughout the land watched his progress, hoped that it spelled an end to bunions and broken arches.

Postman Smith made his escape in a four-wheeled scooter powered by a small gasoline engine. He stands at the back of his doodlebug, put-putting along at four to twelve miles an hour. For a delivery, he leaves his scooter contentedly burbling at the curb, manages to save not only foot-power but some 23% of the time formerly needed to cover his route. His superior, Superintendent of Mails B. H. Kaigler, intends to recommend the scooter's adoption for mailmen in residential districts everywhere.

Having built one scooter, Postman Smith is the smallest operator in a new automotive industry that has grown mightily within the past three years and is now engaged in trying to work itself out of the recreation-vehicle class. Visualized by scooter-makers is a flourishing trade in which one-lung puddle-jumpers will be used for messenger service, light deliveries, transportation of commuters from home to railroad station and back.

Unlike Postman Smith's contraption, the commercial scooter is a two-or three-wheeled affair. It can go up to 35 miles an hour, runs 120 miles on a gallon of gas. Underslung between small, pneumatic-tired wheels, it has handlebars like a motorcycle, a footboard on which the driver puts his feet, an enclosed engine housing over the rear wheel on which he sits. Unlike either bicycle or motorcycle, it can be ridden sitting straight up, with a minimum loss of dignity. The rider straddles no crossbar, has no engine between his knees to oil his slacks.

Largest scootermaker is Moto-Skoot Manufacturing Co. of Chicago, which sold 4,500 two-and three-wheelers last year, expects to sell 10,000 in 1939. Head of Moto-Skoot is 27-year-old Norman A. Siegal, who used to race Fronty-Fords on the dirt track circuit, decided three years ago that there was more money to be made in slower transportation. Racer Siegal sold his share in a Chicago Loop garage for $1,090 in 1936, hired three workmen, and in a corner of a West Side factory began making Moto-Skoots. By the end of the year he had sold 186 of them at $109 apiece and had taken over the whole factory. In 1937 the output was 2,700. This year, looking back on retail sales of more than $500,000 for 1938, Siegal has 75 men at work in a new factory on Chicago's South Side, likes to hear his employes call him the Henry Ford of the scooter business.

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