shipping confirmations in full-page ads. He was soon the world’s largest distributor in the fastest-growing industry in history. Throughout the West, frontier regions that had long revolved around the horse were now dotted with sleek, modern Howard dealerships.
He wasn’t done yet. Durant, for the umpteenth time, took a huge financial leap before looking, and emerged bankrupt. Howard bailed him out with a reported $190,000 personal loan. Durant repaid him with GM stock and a generous percentage of gross sales, guaranteed for life. A poor bicycle repairman just a few years before, Howard soon had hundreds of thousands of dollars for every penny he had brought to California.
In the mid-1920s, Howard began to live like the magnate he had become. In 1924 he funneled $150,000 into the establishment of the Charles S. Howard Foundation and built a home for children suffering from tuberculosis and rheumatic fever. It was the first of a lengthy list of philanthropic projects he spearheaded. He also began to live a little. Finding his elder sons, Lin and Charles junior, attempting to play polo with rake handles and a cork ball, he divested Long Island of its best polo ponies and gave them to his boys, who became internationally famous players. A few years later he outfitted a gigantic yacht, the Aras, rounded up a crew of scientists, and sailed them all down to the Galápagos for a research expedition. He returned with a rare blue-footed booby and a collection of other animals, which he donated to a zoo.
He also lived out a fantasy that he had probably cultivated since childhood. He stumbled upon a magnificent ranch sprawling over seventeen thousand acres of California’s remote redwood country, 150 miles north of San Francisco, near a tiny lumber village called Willits. Fulfilling a long-held desire to be a rancher, Howard bought it. Though he stayed in a mansion in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame whenever he was on business, Howard thought of the ranch as his true home. For all his love of the automobile, Howard was still attracted to the romance of frontier simplicity. He strove to make the ranch, called Ridgewood, a model of rustic self-sufficiency, complete with massive herds of cattle and sheep, several hundred horses, a dairy, a slaughterhouse, and fruit orchards. Dressed in embroidered western shirts, Howard surveyed his ranch from a stock saddle on a cow pony. But he couldn’t resist a little modernity here and there; he sped around his lake in gleaming speedboats. On the hills of Ridgewood, removed from his business, “Poppie” Howard watched his sons grow.
On the weekend of May 8 and 9, 1926, Charles Howard took Fannie May to Del Monte, California, to attend the opening of a new hotel. They left their fifteen-year-old son, Frankie, behind at Ridgewood. Early that Sunday morning, Frankie borrowed one of his father’s old trucks and set out for a morning of trout fishing with two friends. At about 9:00 A.M., they gathered up a big catch and headed back toward the main house. Driving along a canyon road about two miles from the house, Frankie saw a large rock in his path and swerved to avoid it. A front wheel dipped over the side of the canyon and Frankie lost control. The truck flipped headlong into the canyon. No one saw it crash.
Frankie’s friends found themselves at the bottom of the canyon, thrown clear. The truck was near them, wheels facing skyward. Struggling to the vehicle, the boys saw Frankie pinned under it. They ran to the ranch house and notified the ranch foreman. There was no hospital anywhere near Ridgewood. The closest thing was the house of the town physician, “Doc” Babcock, who kept a few spare beds to cope with the cuts and bruises suffered by the local loggers. The foreman fetched Babcock and they rushed to the scene. Babcock climbed through the wreckage and used what little medical equipment he had to try to revive Frankie. He was too late. When the Howards arrived by special charter train from Del Monte, they were told that their son was dead, his skull and spine crushed.
Howard retreated to Ridgewood and remained secluded there for months, prostrate with grief. Doc Babcock came to console him and found the auto magnate wrestling with the question of how he could best memorialize his son. Babcock had an idea: Build a hospital in Willits. Howard embraced the idea, underwrote the entire cost, and arranged to have Ridgewood’s orchards, fields, and dairy supply the hospital with food. Ground was broken by an ox-drawn plow in 1927, and in 1928, with Doc Babcock at the helm, the modern, well-equipped Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital was open for business. Howard remained on its board of directors for the rest of his life.
He would never truly recover from Frankie’s death. In his Buick office in San Francisco he kept a large painting of Frankie, kneeling beside a dog. Many years later, a teenaged job applicant named Bill Nichols casually asked Howard if he was the boy in the picture.
“Do you think it looks like me?” Charles asked.
Nichols said yes. When he looked up, tears were running down Howard’s face.
In the 1920s California was not the place to be for a man in a sinning frame of mind. The temperance folks had given America Prohibition, and had thrown in a ban on gambling while they were at it. A guy couldn’t cavort with women, and thanks to the ban on cabaret dancing, he couldn’t even watch women cavorting by themselves. If he was discovered in a hotel room with a woman not his wife, his name would appear in the section of the newspaper reserved for public shaming. Everything was closed on Sundays. The only place to go was church. There he could hear the usual warnings about alcohol, gambling, dancing, and cavorting. When the Southern California ministers were really whipping their congregations into a froth, they would get rolling on the subject of “the Road to Hell,” a byway that ran south from San Diego. At the end of it stood the town of Tijuana, “Sin City,” a place where all those despicable things, and a whole lot more, were done right out in the open.
You can’t buy that kind of advertising. Thousands of Americans a day were sprinting for the border.
For all the fire-and-brimstone buildup, the avenue that led down to Tijuana was a little disappointing. One might expect the Road to Hell to be well-paved. It wasn’t much more than a meandering dirt lane, one car wide in spots, cutting through the blandness of sagebrush and ducking down to an anemic border river. If travelers were on foot, they could usually wade across and catch a burro taxi on the other side. If they had wheels, they could take a somewhat rickety-looking bridge, followed by a road dipping into Tijuana.
Now, there was some sinning. Only recently a sleepy village, Tijuana was fashioning itself into California’s guilty pleasure. For every restraint in force north of the border, Tijuana offered unlimited indulgence. During Prohibition, one third of the businesses revolved around alcohol, including the longest bar in the world (241 feet), in the Mexicali Club. The minute San Diego outlawed cabaret dancing, Tijuana bristled with high-kicking girls. When boxing was illegal in California, you could find an abundance of the sweet science in Tijuana. You could get married anywhere, anytime; enterprising matchmakers tailed American couples down the streets, offering to get them hitched for cheap. Those who declined were offered quickie divorces, while single men were steered into one of the many brothels, a cottage industry in Tijuana. The town was wide open every hour, every day. In 1929, when the Depression came and poverty began to replace temperance as the narrower of American life, Tijuanan businesses kept prices at bargain-basement levels, so that northern tourists purring past the clapboard shops along the Avenida Revolución could afford to live high in every conceivable way: lobster dinners, fine spirits, salon services, dancing. The place had a state-of-nature feel to it; former jockey Wad Studley recalls seeing a truckload of Mexican soldiers pull up in the middle of the desert, force a rape suspect out onto the sand at bayonet point, send him running, then use him for target practice.
Tijuana’s greatest tourist attraction was its racetrack, which benefited from the hard times afflicting the racing industry in the United States. Thoroughbred racing had a lengthy and celebrated history in America, but at the height of the temperance and antigambling reform movements in the first decade of the century, a series of race-fixing scandals involving bookmakers inspired a wave of legislation outlawing wagering. The
