It was in the later 80’s when my high school friend Al Gartzman said he was sure that he found a lead on a gentleman who owned one of the Futurliner busses. Al knew that I was into anything that was from the 50’s called Dream Cars especially those cars and other concept vehicles that were from the GM period.
I remember during my first conversation with the owner who indicated that he not only had one of the General Motors 1953 Parade of Progress busses but he had the GM Futurliner parked in his backyard. How could that be, a GM Futurliner in your backyard? Computers in my life at that time hardly existed and I asked him to send me a picture and sure enough there in his backyard a very remote outlying suburb of Chicago was a Futurliner. Over the next several months our conversation continued and he slowly revealed that he didn’t have just one Futurliner maybe two…more conversation pursued and he was fessing up to owning three, then four and then in the end five. I was very excited to know where almost half of all the original 12 Futurliners were and yes I didn’t have a desire to own anything that big especially multiplied by five!
After about a year of our conversing on the phone he invited me to pay a visit to his backyard I got to feast my eyes on a Futurliner. It was bigger, much bigger, than I ever realized from the pictures and I have to say that I was awe struck. I was still at that point content to let him be the owner and for me to be the viewer. There was always the question as to why he collected five Futurliners and in a moment of truth during one of my visits to his backyard, Mike decided to fess up. He went into his house and showed me sketches and blueprints of what his real intentions were for the busses. He said, “Joe, I know that you are in the restaurant business, you are really going to love my idea”. One of my favorite restaurants is Victoria Station. (For those of you who do not know what Victoria Station was it was a restaurant that used freight box cars as dining cars with a core building for the restaurant kitchen. The freight box cars coming off the core in which they would seat the customers at tables for their dining).
I remember my skin would creep with the thought of the GM Futurliners being “chain sawed” to cut off the front end of the Futurliner so they could be attached to a circular kitchen building that would look like an old bus stop core. I knew at that very moment that I was going to have to intercede and discussions started for me to purchase the busses to save them from a fate worse then the crusher. Weeks later we agreed upon a price and at that moment I had to decide what to do with the busses.
Like my mother used to say when I was a kid at dinner, “sometimes Joe your eyes are bigger than your stomach”. My plans at one point were to restore all five busses and to keep them as part of the Bortz Auto Collection of American dream cars, design study and concept cars.
Two of these busses were moved in front of a storage building that I had on Hwy Route 41, next to the Full Moon Restaurant between Chicago and Milwaukee and never did I go up to the building that where there wasn’t people 24 hours a day crawling over the busses to take a look at them.
Another idea that crossed my mind was taking one bus and setting up the open back end so I could fit in our 1954 Pontiac Bonneville Special concept car in the back end and than close the side doors. What a neat idea to go to a show and take the bus and have everybody excited to see the bus drive in to the show and after a calm would come over everybody after absorbing the impact of the bus to open up the two sides and start the excitement all over again when everyone saw the 1954 Bonneville Special on display in the back open sides of the bus.
Reality soon set in and I realized that the cost to restore one bus much less five and then the trouble and expense of trying to store five high busses in a building wasn’t even practical. I soon realized that it wasn’t it in the cards to accomplish such a grandiose idea as I still had several dream cars to restore.
I decided the best thing to do was see to it that the busses fell into the hands of other collectors who could hopefully carry on the task of preserving and ultimately restoring each one of the fleet of five. Four of the busses were placed in the hands of private individual collectors including two Canadian gentlemen. I knew that the perfect museum for the last of the five buses would be the Car & Truck Museum (NATMUS) at Auburn, IN and so the Bortz Auto Collection made the donation of the last bus.
That bus has been fully restored and now tours the nation every summer. Obviously, the result of that decision will guarantee the place for the iconic Futurliner in the history books for centuries to say.
Most of all, having saved the five busses from being cannibalized will always be a point of pride in what has become a “calling” to preserve what most people consider the most iconic American automotive artifacts done by the best American designers in the most important period of American automotive design.
It is now my sincere hope that General Motors in its current passage will sort out and preserve the history of their concept vehicles that they currently hold and that those treasures will not be at risk of being lost to future generations to view.