It doesn’t matter if you grow up in a small town or a big city, almost everybody enjoys a holiday parade. For kids, it’s exciting to see the bands march by, to catch the candy tossed by prom queens from passing floats, to watch antique cars toot by. Harry Pearce of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., enjoyed the parades he saw as a boy in Bismarck, N.D., but he also remembers them coming to a halt every time Clarion Larson’s 1907 Wolfe touring car overheated.
“I was around 8 years old when I was first exposed to the car,” says Pearce about the rare water-cooled Wolfe he owns today. “It was around 1950 — my father was a lawyer in Bismarck and his friend Clarion was the music teacher at the local school. They got the car going, but the water pump didn’t work well.”
Wolfe automobiles were made in low numbers by The H. E. Wilcox Motor Car Co. of Minneapolis between 1907 and 1909. Published production in the “Standard Catalog of American Cars: 1805-1942” states 30 cars were built in 1907 and 153 in 1908. Some Wolfes were made in 1909, before the brand name was changed to Wilcox that year. The Wilcox was built through 1911. One advertisement said the Wolfe automobile was “Made by Westerners for the West.” Another ad called the Wolfe “The Car From the Northwest.”
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