Ernest Holmes, a Cadillac, and the invention of the tow truck

[Bruce Nunnally]

While perusing a recent issue of the Caddie Chronicle, the newsletter of the Potomac Region of the Cadillac La Salle Club, we came across the interesting tidbit that the first tow truck was not built atop some heavy-duty truck chassis, as one would expect, but atop a 1913 Cadillac.
As the Chronicle and other sources have related the story, Ernest Holmes, a mechanic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, got a call on day in 1916 from his old business school professor, John Wiley, who had driven his Ford Model T off the road and upside down into a creek bed. Holmes eventually got the T out of the creek bed and upright, but it took eight hours and six men and untold amounts of manual labor.

- See more at: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2014/06/05/ernest-holmes-a-cadillac-and-the-invention-of-the-tow-truck/?refer=news#sthash.RHeBqJQO.dpuf