THE CHRISTMAS PRESENT The story of this car begins in the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where Charles A.

Ward—narcotics possession—and Herbert Huse Bigelow—income tax evasion—met.

Bigelow and Ward struck up a rapport, and upon their release, Ward found employment at the Brown & Bigelow Company of St.

Paul, Minnesota, the United States’s leading manufacturer of promotional calendars.

Bigelow drowned in a fishing accident in 1933, and Ward was elected to take over the firm.

By the time of his death in 1959, the former convict had built B&B to total annual sales of $55 million.

It seems an unlikely source of grand fortune—about as unlikely as the Bigelow-Ward friendship—but consider that each of those years, B&B turned out 50 million promotional calendars for tire manufacturers, oil companies, and the like, at a time when there were only about 160 million Americans.

Few people went about their workday without seeing one of Charles A.

Ward’s products, as recognizable...