If you grew up in California, Oregon, or Washington between 1950 and 1990, chances are pretty good that you rode to school in a school bus made by the Crown Coach Corporation of Los Angeles, California. And chances are also pretty good that if there was a fire, medical emergency, or auto accident in your neighborhood, the fire engine that responded to that emergency was also made by the Crown Coach Corporation.
Crown was an unusual company in many respects. First, it was run by three generations of the same family: founder, son, and grandson. Second, the management and every employee took a fierce pride in quality of workmanship and dedication to customer service. In this era of cheap plastic products that break the day after the warranty expires, and when today’s customer service starts with “For English, Press 1” and ends with being parked on hold for 30 minutes to annoying elevator music, or being directed to a completely useless FAQ web page, words like quality and customer service sometimes seem like a foreign language now. At Crown, these weren’t just words, but a way of life.
On November 10, 1997, I conducted a telephone interview I had pre-arranged with Bob Brockway, the 75-year-old former President of the Crown Coach Corporation. He graciously told me the story behind the Crown Corporation, for a book I was writing about that company, and gave me the names of other former Crown employees, whose story were also told, along with Bob’s story, when I published the 200-page, hard-cover Crown Firecoach History (ISBN 0-9611166-4-1).
Bob’s grandfather, Don Brockway, founded the company in 1904. Don’s son took over the helm in 1945, and his grandson ran Crown from 1962 to 1979, so Bob had a lot of interesting stories to tell me, spanning three generations and three-quarters of the 20th century.
Bob Brockway’s wife, Merle, has a terrific memory for dates and details, and talking on an extension phone, she nudged Bob’s memory on several points during the interview.
***
The Brockways were an old New England family, who settled in Connecticut in the colonial era. The citizens of Connecticut sent one of the Brockways—former state senator John Hall Brockway of Ellington (1801-1870)—to Washington, D.C., as a congressman in 1839, and re-elected him to a second two-year term that ended in 1843.
Despite this long prestigious history, and despite their connection to the bus and fire engine industry, to the best of Bob and Merle’s knowledge, their family has no connection with Brockway Tucks of Cortland (near Syracuse), NY, a highly successful truck manufacturer which became part of Mack Trucks in 1956, and built its last truck in 1977.
In the 1880s and 1890s, many a young man headed west to seek adventure. Bob’s grandfather, Don M. Brockway, was one such adventurer, heading west to hunt buffalo for a railroad company. It seems buffalo liked to wander onto the tracks, causing expensive delays for passenger and freight trains, so the railroads hired young men to kill the buffalo. Besides, the hunted buffalo could then be used as meat to feed, and hides to clothe, the crews who were laying the track for America’s westward expansion.
The U.S. Government had its own dark reasons for encouraging buffalo hunting. Like the track crews, American Indians depended heavily on buffalo for meat and clothing. So driving the buffalo to near extinction would starve and freeze the tribes into submission, moving them peacefully off the lands desired for new communities, and into government reservations. Buffalo hunting thinned the herds from 40 million before the Civil War, to about 1200 by the time the practice was finally abolished and outlawed in 1894.
With no more Buffalo left to hunt, Don Brockway’s western adventures next brought him to the new city of Los Angeles. The city had been founded in 1781 and incorporated in 1850, but it didn’t really begin to develop until after the Civil War. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department was organized in 1869, and the Los Angeles Fire Department wasn’t founded until 1887. A breakwater for a growing shipping port was constructed in 1899. A symphony orchestra was established in 1898, and a stock exchange in 1899. An electric street railway was established in 1901, and William Randolph Hearst started the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper in 1903. So when Don Brockway arrived in the 1890s, Los Angeles was still small, but already starting to grow toward the sprawling city it is today.
Soon after his arrival in this new young city of 50,000, Don Brockway took a job at Ernst and Rucker, the city’s first (and at that time only) hardware store. He married, and his son Murillo M. Brockway was born June 11, 1900.
Don Brockway wasn’t really happy selling bolts, door hinges, and cabinet door handles for pennies and nickels. He had a great passion for wagons and carriages, and like many young men heading into the dawn of the 20th century, he liked to tinker. So after finding a business partner and a handful of investors, in 1904 Don Brockway established the Crown Carriage Company, in a small wooden shed. A larger and sturdier brick factory was built at 6th and Los Angeles Streets in 1910. Both of the company’s first two factories bore the simple but catchy marketing slogan “Business Wagons for Business Men” on the front wall of the building. In those days, the power source of choice was still the humble horse.
There
aren’t a lot of those early horse-drawn Crown business wagons surviving today.
One of the oldest is a Crown stage coach that’s now on display at the
Bob Brockway did find one other early horse-drawn Crown surviving. It was an old peddler’s wagon, with roll-up canvas sides to display pots and pans and other household wares, and was parked in a field near Bakersfield, CA. In better days, a single horse had pulled this wagon 110 miles each way, a good day’s journey one way, over dirt and gravel trails between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. This was long before Interstate 5 allowed trucks to make the same journey in 90 minutes, at 75 miles per hour. Bob tried unsuccessfully to buy the peddler’s wagon, but the farmer was unmoved by Bob’s tales of how his grandfather had built it, and would not sell. Bob wryly and somewhat bitterly commented that it’s probably still rotting in that same farmer’s field.
A large portion of Crown’s business in those early years was horse-drawn mail packets for the U.S. Post Office, but Bob has yet to find any of these surviving.
Around 1910, motor trucks began to replace horses as the preferred motive power for heavy hauling. Don Brockway reluctantly began making truck bodies to mount on motor truck chassis, but he somewhat stubbornly refused to believe that the horse could ever really be replaced.
In 1916, Crown began building transit buses with open-air wood bodies, mounted on the then-popular Federal truck chassis. But horse-drawn business wagons continued to be the main focus of Don Brockway’s manufacturing efforts.
That began to change after the end of World War I in November, 1918. Soon after, Don’s son, Murillo Brockway, returned from Navy service. By year’s end, Crown had built enclosed-body school buses for two California school districts: Visalia High School and Tustin Union High.
In 1919, another event occurred in Los Angeles that would later prove important in Crown’s story. In that year, the Kinner Airplane and Motor Corporation was founded, with its factory at Tweedy and Long Beach Blvd. in Los Angeles. In 1920, Kinner introduced its Airster biplane, with a 28-foot wingspan, 21’4” length, and a 60-horsepower engine (which was increased in 1927 to 100 horsepower). The Airster could carry a load up to 450 pounds, and had a 420-mile flight range. The prototype Airster biplane crashed, but the second Kinner Airster, named The Canary, was sold for $2,500 to Amelia Earhart.
In 1921, Murillo Brockway officially joined his father’s carriage and truck-body firm. Murillo could see what his father couldn’t, that gasoline motors were the future. Murillo persuaded his dad there was a good market for making gasoline-powered buses. Don Brockway could hardly deny how increasingly common the sight of motor buses was in Los Angeles streets. Especially school buses carrying children to the increasing number of public and private schools being built in the growing city and its suburbs.
And so Murillo Brockway developed and oversaw a project to build Crown school-bus bodies, and to mount them on the popular Reo and Diamond T truck chassis, plus the locally-built Moreland truck chassis, which had been in production in a Burbank factory since 1911. Moreland Trucks would later become an important part of the Crown Company’s history, too.
Crown employees assigned to the motor bus division found the first name of their new boss, Murillo Brockway, difficult to remember and pronounce, so they nicknamed him “Brock.” The second-generation Brockway at Crown would be fondly known as “Brock” to his dying day, and retired Crown employees I spoke with still call him “Brock” today.
Brock’s decision to enter the motor bus business, specializing in school buses, turned out to be the correct one. In 1923, to meet growing demand for buses, Crown moved into its third factory, a much larger structure on San Julian Street in Los Angeles, which was named the "Brockway Building." Production switched entirely to bodies for commercial motor trucks, plus school buses and transit buses.
With
this move, horse-drawn vehicles were dropped from the company’s product line,
and the company motto on the building changed from “Business Wagons for Business Men” to “Business Bodies for Business Men.” Despite this
shift, the company name was still Crown Carriage Company. The new factory was
on its own railroad siding, so new Crown trucks and buses could be shipped to
customers all over the western
Just
before the move to the new factory, and the change in product focus from
horse-drawn to motor vehicles, Murillo Brockway’s son, Robert M. “Bob” Brockway
was born on November 21, 1922.
In
1925, Kinner Airplane began making monoplanes (single-wing aircraft), and Crown
obtained exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Kinner Airster biplanes.
In
1927, Crown built the world’s first school bus with dual rear wheels, an
important step toward larger passenger capacities. Mounted on a Reo truck
chassis, its windows were roll-down canvas curtains, not window glass. The
first of these new school buses was sold to
Also
in 1927, Crown Carriage Company became Crown Motor Carriage Company, Inc. This
new name was more reflective of its product line, which now included “auto
trucks, commercial deliveries, auto truck cabs and bodies, paint shop,
commercial designing and lettering, auto blacksmithing, forgings, and repair.”
1929
saw a big change in the aircraft division at Crown. For the first time, the
Kinner Airster biplanes sported the Crown brand name, and were designated Crown
Model B-3. But then the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, hurling the
nation into the Great Depression, where one-third of all Americans became
unemployed. The stock-market crash sent Kinner Airplanes into a tail-spin,
jeopardizing Crown’s licensing agreement with Kinner. You can’t license from a
company that no longer exists!
Kinner
Airplane was recapitalized in 1930 by Holley Carburetor of Detroit, temporarily
saving Crown’s airplane division. In 1933, Kinner became Security-National
Aircraft Corporation, with a new factory in
In
1930, Crown introduced a 43-passenger school bus mounted on Mack Truck chassis.
For the first time, Crown buses had metal instead of wood bodies, and the
framing was aero steel—probably obtained from Kinner Airplanes. The windows
were all-metal, drop-sash type, eliminating the antiquated roll-up curtains.
In
1932, M.M. “Brock” Brockway took over day-to-day operations at Crown, although
his father, Don Brockway, continued to be the president until 1945. Brock
wasted no time introducing big changes.
That year, Crown unveiled the nation’s first school bus with all-steel body and “integral” design—meaning that the body and chassis were welded into one unit, for greater strength and improved safety of the student passengers. Another innovation was “protex” safety glass, with wire mesh molded into the center of the glass panel, for greater resistance to shattering.
The first Crown cab-forward school bus, built in 1932 and still surviving today. (couretsy Bob Brockway)
The driver’s cab was
mounted over the engine and radiator, for improved visibility. The first of
these new school buses was built in 1932 for the
In
1933, the corporate name changed to Crown Body and Coach Corporation.
Crown’s
last venture into conventional front-engine school buses was a fleet of a dozen
“Metro” school buses on Reo truck chassis for the
Also
in 1935, Crown introduced its “Super Coach” school bus, with integral body and
chassis, all-steel construction, air brakes on all wheels, and forward cab.
Their 11 rows of forward-facing seats could carry 67 high-school or 78
elementary-school students. The first of these went to
In
1936, Crown made its first-ever fire engine, mounted on a White Trucks chassis,
for the
1937
improvements to the Super Coach school bus included using a midship-mounted
Hall-Scott engine carried under the school-bus floor, and an increase in
capacity to an unprecedented 79 students.
The
new Super Coach was such a hit that demand soon outstripped the production
capacity of the
In
1939, Crown acquired the chassis department of Moreland , which had been
building trucks in
More
improvements to the Crown Super Coach were made in 1940. Based on the long
experience of Moreland in the truck chassis business, many improvements were
made to the Crown school bus chassis. In addition, the engine moved to the
rear, an escape window was added at the rear, and an emergency exit door on the
right. The headroom at the seats and in the center aisle was increased.
Also
in 1940, Crown introduced what may have been
World
War II—1941 to 1945—were very slow years for Crown. Government regulations
restricted vehicle manufacturers like Crown from making vehicles for most
non-government customers. Unlike better-known vehicle manufacturers such as
Ford, Dodge, and GMC, government orders at Crown were scarce. For example, the
army asked Crown to build a few fire engines, which were mounted on
Ford/Marmon-Herrington chassis.
During
World War II, Bob Brockway—grandson of Crown founder and president Don
Brockway—attended dental school, graduating about the time the war ended.
Before Bob could establish his dental practice, grandpa Don died in 1945, and
Bob’s father, “Brock” Brockway took over as president of Crown Coach. Bob soon
found himself working in the engineering department of his father’s company.
Many soldiers who served in World
War II were stationed in southern
Besides their staple school-bus business, Crown had also branched out to make city transit buses, inter-city buses, and specialized buses, including “mail-packet” buses. Postal clerks sorted mail in these buses, while traveling between cities, much as they had done aboard horse-drawn Crown mail-packet wagons two generations earlier.
In 1946, Bob recalled, Crown built
a combination 12-passenger, mail, and freight bus for Bangor & Aroostook
Railroad in far-off
In 1947, Crown once more ventured
into the fire engine business, with a pumper on International Harvester (IH)
chassis for
In 1949, Roy Hardy, an executive
at the Mack Tucks plant in
Two years earlier, the
American-LaFrance Fire Engine Company of
While Crown was developing its new fire engine division, things weren’t exactly stagnant in the bus business, either. In 1950, Crown rounded the front, rear, and sides of its popular Super Coach school bus. The new design looked better and was safer. The high-crowned roof provided an impressive 76 inches of center-aisle head room—not many elementary and high school students are 7’4” tall …in 1950, or today! Downey, California, bought the first of thousands upon thousands of these rounded-front Crown school buses, which would be built over the next 40 years.
First of the rounded-front school buses that would become familiar to west coast school children for decades, was built in 1950 for the school district in Downey, CA. (courtesy Bob Brockway)
This is the type of school
bus nearly every
Also in 1950, Bob Brockway met and married Canadian-born Merle.
In 1951, Bob Brockway, not yet 29
and newly married, was drafted into the Army. The Korean War was already well
underway, and would last until 1953. Bob was given the rank of Lieutenant, but
his two years of duty weren’t in
Shortly after Bob Brockway was
shipped off to
The new fire engine line, dubbed Crown Firecoach, would be in production for 34 years. In addition to sales all over California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada, Crown Firecoach fire engines would see service in New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Mexico, and even Kuwait! After retirement, Crown Firecoaches would find new homes with private collectors in nearly every U.S. state, and even as far away as Scotland and New Zealand.
The prototype Crown Firecoach fire engine, completed in 1951 and designated serial number F-1001(F for Firecoach) remained at the Crown factory for another two years, before it was finally sold to West Covina, California. Today, this historic first Crown Firecoach is privately owned by a collector of antique fire engines in Oregon City, Oregon.
Crown built over 1800 Firecoach fire engines between 1951 and 1985. This typical example was built for Atwater, CA, in 1958. (Ed Hass photo)
In 1953, Crown built two Firecoach
fire engines that both had the serial number F-1002. The first was sold to
Also in 1953, Freedom, CA, bought a Crown fire engine on IH chassis, the last Crown fire engine that was not part of the Firecoach product line. It, too, still survives in the hands of a private collector.
With the Crown Firecoach line gearing up for quantity production in 1953, Richard Kearny Willmore—known as “Red” for his hair color—was promoted from head of school bus sales, where he had been since 1943. His new title was Manager of the Crown Firecoach Division. Roy Hardy, who had designed the Firecoach fire engine, reported to Red Willmore, who in return reported directly to Brock Brockway.
When Bob and Merle Brockway returned from his Army Dentist duty in France in 1953, Bob’s dad gave him a choice: either establish his own dental practice, or go back to work at Crown. So in 1954, Bob became Executive Vice President of Crown Coach Corporation. Crown already was top-heavy with vice presidents of engineering, marketing, sales, etc., but Bob was the top vice president over all of them.
In 1954, Crown built the
first-ever diesel-powered, transit-type school bus. Powered by a horizontal,
under-the-floor Cummins diesel engine, it was sold to
1956 saw the introduction of 10-inch brakes, for an unprecedented 1555-square-inch braking surface. Again, unlike today, quality and safety were more important considerations than costs and profits. These brakes became standard on all Crown buses and fire engines built after 1958.
In 1957, Bob oversaw the
engineering and production of four special Firecoach fire engines that were
shipped to
1957 was also the first and only time that Crown merged its fire engine and bus-building experience, building a special small (only 33 passenger) bus for the Los Angles City Fire Department—the only Crown bus ever to sport the Firecoach brand name. This unique bus/fire engine was restored in 2000 and is privately owned.
A Crown Firecoach fire engine, built for Honolulu, Hawaii, in front of the Crown factory on East 12th Street, Los Angeles, in 1961 (Warren Bowen photo)
In 1962, “Brock” Brockway died, and Bob followed in his father’s footsteps, to become president of the company his grandfather had founded in 1904.
After the 1965 riot in the Watts
section of
In the
All through the 1960s and 1970s,
Crown school bus capacity ranged from 78 to 91 students. But in the 1970s, Crown
began to receive more and more requests for smaller-capacity school buses, in
the 40-passenger range. Not wanting to have to expand to make a new product
line, Crown decided instead to become southern
In August, 1979, Bob Brockway was 57, and he was ready to retire and sell the business his family had run for 75 years. Three years earlier, a Peterbilt Truck dealership had opened across the street from the Crown factory. Owner and manager of that dealership was Jack Courtemanche, a former Mack Tucks dealer who had served as campaign finance manager for Governor Ronald Reagan. In a separate interview with Courtemanche, also in 1997, Jack told me that he had always been impressed with the quality of Crown buses and fire engines, and he negotiated with Bob Brockway to buy the Crown Coach Corporation.
One of the terms of the sale was that Bob Brockway would be retained as a consultant to Crown. But although Bob worked at the plant 2 to 3 days a week, he recalled that Courtemanche rarely consulted him about anything.
Wanting to protect the name and reputation of his family’s company, Bob Brockway also made as a condition of the sale that, if Courtemanche should ever sell the company, Bob had to approve of the buyer.
In January, 1983, Jack Courtemanche’s old fiend Governor Ronald Reagan—now president Ronald Regan—invited Jack to Washington, D.C., as an assistant to the President, and later as First Lady Nancy Reagan’s chief of staff. Before he left for D.C., Courtemanche found a corporate buyer for the Crown corporation, and Bob Brockway approved of the buyer.
After the deal was approved, this
new corporate owner appointed Lew Werner, formerly a member of
Bob Brockway stated that had he known the buyer would put Werner in charge, and had he know the character of the company’s new president, he would never have approved the sale of his family’s proud old company. Like many of today’s CEOs, Werner’s top priority wasn’t quality or customer satisfaction, but cutting costs, so as to increase profits and drive up the stock price.
Almost immediately, Bob recalls, Werner began cutting corners on quality to save money. For example, Crown had always prided itself on using 5/8-inch marine-grade plywood for its school bus floors. But this high-grade lumber was expensive, so Werner switched to using particle board at half the thickness and a tiny fraction of the cost. These cheap (in cost and quality) new floors did not stand up to daily washings at school-bus maintenance garages. And this was just one of many, many cost-cutting and quality-cutting measures at Crown. Crown’s decades-old reputation for quality quickly eroded, and sales fell off.
At the Firecoach division, things were so dismal that fire engine production was completely discontinued in 1985, after more than 1800 Firecoach fire engines were built in 34 years of production. Citizens of many cities wouldn't accept lower quality in transporting their kids safely to and from school. And they for sure didn't tolerate reduced quality in protecting their lives and property against fire! Santa Monica, CA, received the last new Crown fire engine off the line; a Firecoach started for Clovis, New Mexico, was never completed.
As it so often does for modern CEOs, the attempt to dive-up stock prices by cutting quality back-fired: as sales plummeted, so did stock prices! Soon, Crown could not pay its bills, and the company’s biggest creditor, General Electric, took over in 1987.
The Crown/General Electric bus operation hobbled along in Chino for another 4 years, until the last Crown bus rolled off the line on April 5, 1991. Rival school-bus manufacturer Carpenter bought the rights to the once-revered Crown name, and introduced a line of school buses with the Crown-Carpenter name. There were two models: one could seat 84 students, the other seated 90. But the damage to the Crown name seemed irreversible, and sales of the Crown-Carpenter line were bleak. I witnessed delivery of two of the last Crown-Carpenter school buses to Monterey, CA, in 1998. In 1999 Carpenter announced it was dropping the Crown name. After 95 years, there was no remaining direct corporate descendant of former buffalo-hunter Don Brockway’s 1904 carriage works.
The remaining inventory of spare parts for Crown buses and Firecoach fire engines was sold in 1991 to West Coach, a bus dealer and service agency, founded by former Crown employees. Until the supply of spare parts runs out, they are the best source of parts and repair service to keep aging Crown buses and fire engines running, and the last remaining link at all to the once-proud Crown corporation.
Bob Brockway misses his days at Crown, and he regrets that he has lost touch with many of his former colleagues and employees. One of his friends and closest associates was not directly a Crown employee: he was a professional photographer named Warren Bowen. For many years, Bowen had photographed every new school bus and fire engine that Crown made, but by the time I interviewed Bob Brockway in 1997, Bowen had long since passed away.
Brockway is proud of all he accomplished, proud of his family’s 75 years building quality vehicles, and proud that so many Crown buses and fire engines are still serving school districts, transit companies, and fire departments from New England to Mexico, from Florida to Washington State, from Tijuana to Hawaii. He has no regrets that he chose a career in his family’s business over his dentistry practice. He’s proud that there’s a collector’s club just for Crown school buses, and another just for Crown Firecoach fire engines. And he’s proud to count himself a member of both organizations, and a friend to many of the members of both Crown collectors clubs.