Rumble seats, cont.

Here's the rumble seat photo I posted on the last Sepia Saturday.  I don't know much about it other than they are friends of my mother. The guy on the left looks a little like my Uncle Bob. (this would have been before he was my uncle because I wasn't born yet). The girl looks like my Aunt Phyllis. She was married to my Uncle Glenn. I don't know who the other guy is. The car pictured below shows what it would look like if it was shined up. I don't think it's the same kind of car, though.

So who invented the rumble seat? It was Sir Hubert Malcolm Rhumble, a prominent carriage designer of England’s late 1800s. He designed a coachman’s seat that stuck in the car lexicon, according to the Automobilist Magazine in August 1958. In early vintage automobiles the trunk lid folded back to form a seat area, sometimes called a “mother-in-law” seat. In that era, it must have been the stuff of some pretty good jokes.

 Silver screen stars James Cagney and Joan Blondell, fresh on the publicity trail with a flim-flam 1931 comedy, “Blonde Crazy,” joined Mae Madison in the a ’31 Model A Deluxe Roadster with a rag top and an add-on rumble seat sustaining the momentum of this odd conveyance. This was styling personified.