LOTE to present ‘The Great Race’ revisited
On Saturday, Feb. 25, Jeff Mahl, great-grandson of the winner of the Great Race of 1908, will present his great-grandfather’s story at Pine Island United Methodist Church. Doors open at 1 p.m., and the show starts at 2.
The Great Race was an international competition with automobile teams representing Germany, Italy, France and the United States. The United States, with George Schuster at the wheel of the Thomas Flyer, won the 22,000-mile race.
Hear the epic story as Mahl transforms himself into his great-grandfather and tells the harrowing story of how he won the New York to Paris Great Race.
More than 250,000 people filled Times Square when the race began at 12:15 p.m. on Feb. 12, 1908.
“The race would be from New York to Paris, cover 22,000 miles and take 169 days,” Mahl said. “This race would be the longest automobile race in history. Remember at the time (1908) there were only 110 miles of paved roads in the country and snow plows hadn’t been invented yet.”
Schuster was the driver of the Thomas Flyer, an automobile manufactured by the E.R. Thomas Motor Company in Buffalo, New York.
The Flyer left Times Square with a New York Times reporter in the back seat. His orders were to take five photos every day and file a story. From the time the team left Times Square on its journey through Albany; Chicago; San Francisco; Seattle; Valdez, Alaska; Japan; Vladivostok; Omsk; Moscow; St. Petersburg; Berlin and finally Paris, obstacles were presented in the first and only around-the-world automobile race ever held.
Once they crossed the Bering Strait, the cars entered the Russian wilderness of Siberia where they were advised to give up and take the Trans-Siberian railway. The drivers were told that in Siberia they would face “Chinese brigands, Manchurian tigers, fever, plague, pestilence and famine.”
A Smithsonian Institution article of March 2012 said, “He (Schuster) continued to sacrifice himself for the journey when no one else could or would, walking ten miles in the dead of night to find gasoline and navigating the car out of gullies they couldn’t avoid. His acumen had kept the car running through blizzards, freezing temperatures and sandstorms. At each overnight stop, he repaired the fresh damage and readied the Flyer for the next leg of the journey. And he was so unheralded that newspaper reports frequently misspelled his name when they bothered to mention him at all.”
Schuster was the only American to go the full distance from New York to Paris. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame on Oct. 12, 2010.
Tickets to Mahl’s presentation are $20 and profits from the event will be donated to the Pine Island Elementary School. Ticket sellers are Joan McCaffrey 239-283-5379, Hana Ashfield 239-283-8150 and Linda May 239-292-1997. Tickets will be limited.
Vintage cars will be on display before the show and an ice cream social will be held after the show.