The first automobile ever to roar down the muddy streets of the village was driven by Dr. Charles Schamu, a dentist who lived and worked on Third Street.
It was about 1912 – the same year the Titanic went down – and Dr. Schamu had purchased a Hupmobile, manufactured in Detroit by the Hupp Motor Car Company. The Hupp brothers, Bob and Lou, began making cars in 1909 and stayed at it through 1940.
Schamu had one of their conservatively styled upholstered two-seaters.
A wintertime photograph of Dr. Schamu in his Hupmobile shows that it was a convertible with the top down for the purpose of the picture. The mustachioed doctor playfully posed his well-bundled 3-year-old son, Carl, gleefully gripping the steering wheel. And Schamu wrapped tire-chains around his back wheels to help him negotiate the slushy streets.
The four-cylinder, 20 horsepower, 1,100-pound Hupmobile with 86-inch wheel base listed for $750 equivalent to some $17,500 in today’s currency. The car’s steering wheel was affixed to a three-foot column poking up from the dashboard with a hand brake and stick shift on the floor.
The front grill bore a bronze nameplate: “Hupmobile” in Palmer method script, below which hung the starting crank.
‘Dash and individuality’
Despite its fancy nameplate and solid construction, the Hupmobile was marketed as an inexpensive alternative to high-priced rides such as Oldsmobiles and Chalmers autos.
While we don’t know for sure exactly where Schamu bought his Hupmobile, he may have done business with Fred Marshall, who sold cars down city at 612 E. Jefferson St.
One early advertisement described the Hupmobile as “the first small car ever built in this country with real dash and individuality in design…the smartest and the best little car marketed in America at anything like the money.”
The ad also encouraged consumers to consider buying a Hupmobile as the family’s second car, an indulgence most Liverpudlians would not consider for another 50 years.
In a way, the Hupmobile was a forerunner of what we now call the “compact car.”
L’pool historical photos
The photo of Dr. Charles Schamu and his son in their Hupmobile will appear in Around Liverpool, a book of historic photographs compiled and captioned by Village Historian Dorianne Elitharp Gutierrez and researcher Joyce Mills, slated to be published by Arcadia later this year as part of its popular Images of America series.
Breach of contract?
WCNY public TV and radio stations have filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court in Syracuse charging that Liverpool Community Church reneged on an agreement to buy WCNY’s former studios at 508 Old Liverpool Road.
The Public Broadcasting Council of Central New York Inc. claims that Liverpool Community Church broke a contract to purchase WCNY’s former longtime broadcasting home near Galeville.
In February 2014, the Free Methodist church signed a contract to purchase the building for $305,000 and made a down payment of $50,000, the Public Broadcasting Council alleges in the lawsuit. The church then failed to complete the purchase, the council claims.
As yet, WCNY has been unable to attract another buyer for the building. It implores the court to order the church to buy the building for the previously agreed-upon price.
Zogg awaits new tenant
Last August, Liverpool Community Church sold the historic A.V. Zogg Building, at 400 Fourth St., to prominent Thai educator Pramote Nakornthab, a professor of political science retired from Cornell University and president of First Global Community College in Thailand.
The church, which had been housed at the Zogg Building for 11 years, sold it for $1.1 million, according to a deed filed with the Onondaga County Clerk’s Office.
Nakornthab has yet to contact the village planning board about his plans to start a preparatory school on the site, which had opened in 1929 as the first standalone high school in Liverpool.
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