Duesy Ace A.J. ‘Jim’ Hoe
Imagine having a Duesenberg Model J restored for just $6000! According to Ken Purdy’s book “Wonderful World of Automobiles,” that’s what a mechanic he called “The Duesenberg Man” charged to put a beat-up Duesenberg into “like-new” condition during 1960.
Andrew James Hoe was that man — a 47-year-old former engineer and master mechanic at the time the book was written. According to Purdy, A.J. “Jim” Hoe had worked on some 225 Duesenbergs between 1946 and 1960. Duesenberg historian Randy Ema thinks the actual number of cars that Hoe worked on was probably a bit lower. In 1956, Hoe told a Denver Post reporter that he averaged two cars a year in his shop. However, there is no doubt that the Connecticut-based craftsman restored and repaired many Duesenbergs, did great work and knew the cars inside out.
Hoe came from a line of interesting characters and was one himself. His great-grandfather was Robert Hoe, an English-born American mechanic who manufactured steam-powered printing presses in New York City before his death in 1833. Hoe’s grandfather was Richard March Hoe, an inventor whose Cylindrical-Bed press of 1843 sped up printing and whose continuous-roll printing press of 1870 revolutionized newspaper production. Richard M. Hoe also held an English patent on an improved process used to grind saws. Richard M. Hoe was a Freemason, had an estate in the Bronx and died in Florence, Italy, in 1886.
“Jim” Hoe was born in 1913. He drove his first Duesenberg in 1925 at the age of 12, according to John F. Wallace, who interviewed Hoe for the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club’s in the ’50s. Hoe had traveled from his Bedford Hills, N.Y., home to spend the summer with his cousins in North Dakota. His uncle
