Chattanooga salutes tow truck industry

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- Driving his Tin Lizzie over the rough Old Byrd's Mill Road in 1916, John Wiley jerked the wheel to avoid a bump, landed upside down in a creek and inspired a wondrous invention of the automobile age: the tow truck.

Some 70 years later, the invention and the entire $7 billion-a- year towing industry are saluted at Chattanooga's International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum, which pulls people in from all over the world, if only during their lunch hour in many cases.

Stephan Klochner, 22, of Hamburg, Germany, was so intrigued he dropped by twice while visiting friends in Chattanooga. "We don't have tow truck museums in Germany," he said. When Wiley wrecked his car, he called a former student of his business school to help him, Ernest Holmes. Holmes took nearly a day to right the car, stringing a wooden block in the top of a tree and getting a half-dozen men to help him pull the rope. On his way home, Holmes started thinking: With the horseless carriage becoming more popular, he needed a way to lift disabled cars and haul them to his repair shop so he wouldn't have to work in the mud or the dark alongside the road. He bolted a tripod of poles on the frame of a 1913 Cadillac, attached a pulley and ran a chain from the back, creating the world's first tow truck. He patented the invention and shifted his work to manufacturing wreckers, leading the industry for decades and providing allied forces with more than 7,000 wreckers during World War II. The towing museum opened in 1995 a few blocks away from Holmes' old shop. Friends of Towing, with 350 members in 21 countries, built the collection and the $1.5 million hall. "This honors not only Mr. Holmes, but the industry he started and the hard-working men and women who carry it on today," said Frank Thomas, museum curator and former salesman for the Holmes Co. Collectors lent the 17 antique trucks now on display, ranging from a 1919 maroon-and-gold Holmes 485 wrecker towing a 1913 Locomobile with wooden-spoked wheels to a 1974 F-350 Ford with a Vulcan cradle snatcher. "That number there, 485, wasn't just a model number. It told you how much it cost, too," Thomas said, pointing to the collection's oldest wrecker. Thousands of people looking to give themselves a lift have visited, and not just car enthusiasts or people in the towing industry. "Curiosity brings people in here sometimes because they just can't believe there is a museum dedicated to something like this," Thomas said. "But I think most of them leave with an appreciation for the industry and an understanding of why it's important."

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