We provide excerpts from The Great American Car Wash Story. Former ICA Executive Director Gus Trantham and veteran commercial writer John Beck wrote this book in 1994. It represents the most complete history we have found of the industry in
North America. Enjoy.
Chapter 17
LIFE IN THE LAND OF WHIRLING BRUSHES
There’s not much doubt that one of the aspects of automatic car washing that caught interest of the motoring public was the way a car entered into a maze of great swirling brushes and torrents of water, which parted like the Red Sea to swallow the car with bristles that gave way to the exact configuration of the car body and then closed behind the car as it disappeared up the tunnel.
The early Life magazine story photographs of the Rosseau was in Detroit highlighted this with a dramatic picture of a car emerging from the center of this Niagara of bristles and water together with a picture of an operator carefully monitoring the entrance of a car into this enchanted land of car washing.
Anyone who was there in the beginning knows full well that the launching of car washing as an industry was lofted on the wings of brushes. And it was the brush, after the blow/dryer, that finally caught Sherm Larson in its car wash clutches. By 1954, after Sherman Vacuum Equipment Company had moved its headquarters to Detroit with its own iron casting foundry, its business was waxing hot in vacuums for car washes and edging into blowers. Then after his success with the blower/dryer system, several car wash operators who were happy with the quality of Sherm’s work suggested that he undertake the design of a better brush unit than was currently available. This led to the burning of a lot more midnight oil, which Sherm seemed to have in plentiful supply, as he labored to come up with a dependable concept, with Sherm working on the designs, building test models all the way from cutting the metal and welding to the actual assembly of the brush.
The result: an automatic three-brush unit that turned out to be patentable. At this point, Sherm realized that he was in the car wash business with both feet. In 1956, the Sherman plant was moved to a newer and larger premises on Cloverdale Street in Detroit with 15,000 square feet together with inside and outside cranes and plenty of room to expand. This soon led to the design and manufacture of a five-brush automatic, then an eight-brush, and soon Sherman was offering complete systems and supplies from coast-to-coast assisted by a network of distributors that included the Smith-Thacher organization in New Jersey.
But Sherman was finding, as were all of the car wash manufacturers, that there was lots of room for improvement in one key element of the brushes… and that was the bristles.
