We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heath Towson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heath below.
Hi Heath, thanks for joining us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?
In my first job out of college, I was employed as the programs and operations coordinator for a non-profit. I was required to manage lots of projects and programming for our historical museum, managed by our non-profit. Because we had such a limited budget for programming, I had to learn to use what we had in house, could fundraise for or could afford for minimal expense. Ultimately, many of the projects turned out much better because I had to think more carefully about setting a budget for programming and utilize resources in the community and our staff, rather than writing a large check or outsourcing a project.
When you are first launching a business, the temptation is to want to spend lots of money on marketing or buying items for the business. When I first started Mountaineer Motor Tours, the biggest purchase was buying the 1923 Ford Model T, which did not leave a lot of extra money for marketing or other materials. I think in some ways, this makes you much more creative as a business owner, when you do not have unlimited resources at your disposal.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Heath Towson and I am the proprietor/chief historian for Mountaineer Motor Tours. Mountaineer Motor tours is my business, which provides historical tours for visitors and locals of Asheville, North Carolina in a 1923 Ford Model T touring car and a 1931 Ford Model A sedan. I became interested in antique cars from my grandfather and father, who shared their love for American muscle and British sports cars with my twin brother and me. We were fortunate enough to grow up only several miles away from Asheville’s only antique car museum, the Estes-Winn Antique Car museum. It is an incredible museum that showcases the car collection of one man: Harry Blomberg. Harry owned Harry’s Cadillac and Pontiac since 1938 and since that time, accumulated a collection of antique cars, ranging in years from 1913 to 1959. Many of these cars were sold in Asheville new in their respective eras or have a connection to an influential person in Asheville.
I am a native of Asheville and attended several historic public schools, which included Claxton Elementary School, Asheville Middle and Asheville High School. When in middle school, I joined the band and became enamored with playing drums. Drums turned into an obsession for me and was one area that I could succeed in and truly apply myself. I had never been an excellent academic student and was a terrible athlete! Being a fairly shy young man, drums truly gave me a means to express myself. As I moved into high school, I began to study many of the famous jazz and rock drummers and became fascinated by the classic drums and other musicians they were playing with. With two other friends, we formed a jazz funk trio called Spitfire, that played gigs around Asheville and was even interview on our local public radio station, WCQS. This continued to lead to more success in the Asheville High School band and other ensembles around Asheville. At this point, I decided that I wanted to pursue music as a career, but was not sold on becoming a touring musician after hearing horror stories from my private percussion teacher and wanting to have some stability in my life. During my senior year, we were required to prepare a senior exit project, which combined writing a detailed research paper and learning something new, that would culminate in some kind of physical project. This would then be judged by a panel of teachers and community members. I ended up researching the history of the snare drum and building my own custom snare drum, which I still have and play on to this day.
Deciding to pursue music as a career, I ended up being accepted to Appalachian State University, where I enrolled as a student in the Music Industry Studies program, with a concentration in music products merchandising. This degree was a combination of music performance, marketing and traditional business/accounting courses. I was obsessed with the big band jazz ensemble and went to weekly jazz jam sessions. I continued to study and research famous drummers like Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Max Roach and Elvin Jones. My original intention was to start my own custom drum company, but mid-way through my sophomore year, the economy went into the 2008 recession and the music products industry tanked. There weren’t many jobs available and demand for custom craft instruments dropped immediately. I decided to stay the course with my degree and took other classes like recording and marketing. The last requirement to graduate was to obtain an internship for course credit. In a chance encounter during my senior year, I was asked to pick up jazz drummer John Riley from the airport and bring him back to ASU, where he would be leading a clinic with our jazz band. We ended up having a great conversation on the way back from the airport and he mentioned the Percussive Arts Society offering an internship and that he thought I should apply for it. He ended up sending a board member a recommendation for me and recommending me for the job.
A month later, I had obtained the internship with Percussive Arts Society and moved my worldly belongings to a studio apartment in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. I was to report to their offices and historic instrument museum, the Rhythm! Discovery Center. Most of my internship was helping lead guided tours and educational drum circles, cleaning and doing maintenance on the drums in the museum and working with their curator to catalog instrument donations. Rhythm! and PAS had an incredible collection of historical instruments, photographs, recordings and sheet music. There would be many days when I would spend the majority of their archives just exploring and photographing things for their website or an article. I also learned to become a good public speaker and historian after leading close to 120 private tours a year for people of all ages and demographics.
After 3 years at Rhythm!, I became homesick for Asheville and Western North Carolina, deciding to go in a different direction. I decided to apply for a masters in accounting at Western Carolina University and go work with my father at his accounting firm. When I returned, the feeling of Asheville was starting to change as the city was and I wanted to understand the city on a deeper level. I began reading Thomas Wolfe and any local history books that I could get my hands on. I started returning to places from my childhood and speaking with people from a younger age I hadn’t spoken to in years to remember what made the city special. When I went to work with my dad, one thing that really got me curious was our office building. Our firm is housed in the Sawyer Motor Building, which was the second car dealership built on Coxe avenue in the South Slope in 1926. It is a multi-level building, with each floor connected by ramps like a parking garage where each floor severed a different purpose of the dealer including sales, service and car inventory. I went on a search to find pictures of the original building which took me on a journey I never would have expected. I started learning about the incredible automotive history of Asheville and I started wondering how I could share this?
In 2018, my wife and I took a trip to Havana, Cuba, which had long been a dream of mine because of the history of the country and the antique American cars roaming the streets. We took a tour in one of these cars, a 1957 Mercury Convertible to Hemingway’s Finca Villa home outside of Havana. I loved that it was a private tour with just us and the guide, where we could ask him many questions and get the local take on things in Havana, rather than a large tour bus with other tourists like we had done the day before. It actually made us feel like more of a local riding in this car, rather than just another tourist. My mind began to start working about how this kind of experience could be brought back to Asheville. I started to think about what kind of cars would represent Asheville and Mountain culture the best. It would be several more years before I stumbled upon the right car. I started to really think about this during the COVID lockdown when classic cars became an even more important escape. In a chance opportunity in 2021, a part time job opened up at the Estes-Winn museum as a docent. One of my co-workers had a 1923 Ford Model T that he and legendary NASCAR mechanic Larry Ingram, brother of NASCAR hall of fame Jack Ingram had modified. He mentioned to me that he wanted to sell it to buy another project and that he thought it would be perfect for my tours. I ended up buying it and started to modify it to become the first tour mobile! We dubbed her “Mabeline” the model T and started driving it around Asheville to work making sure everything was functioning correctly on the car.
I feel that having these very experiences has given me a unique set of skills that have transferred into a truly unique tour. Many people that come to Asheville are looking to connect with locals and learn about how the city has changed over time. I really enjoy seeing people’s reactions to the Model T driving in traffic and doing things that any other car is doing. When people take our tour, they feel like a celebrity and laugh and smile the whole time. My greatest joy is helping people who are not as familiar with history or classic cars, come away with an appreciation for both. My goal is to provide a very high quality tour experience for people that really wanted to study Asheville on a deeper level and have a memorable experience that they could not get anywhere else.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I first purchased the Ford Model T, it was about 90% ready to go and still needed some fine tuning. It had very old tires that really needed to be replaced to be safe for driving. The tires that were on it appeared to be about 30 years old and were very hard and cracked. The problem is, local tire shops were not interested in changing the tires, as they have to be changed by hand in a process similar to changing a bike tire. The old tires, being so hard and worn were extremely difficult to pry off the rims. A co-worker’s son who is an aspiring car guy and I spent a long afternoon prying the old tires off and mounting new tires on the rims after studying several youtube videos. The feeling of accomplishment was incredible after we took the car around the neighborhood for a successful test drive.
The next big hurdle was dealing with the engine not running correctly either. We kept having problems with the carburetor and fuel delivery on the car, which would sometimes make the car stall or run roughly. I did not want this to be a problem with people on the tour. We replaced parts on the carburetor and rebuilt it, but it did not respond to any of our efforts. Then, the fuel pump went out on top of that right before a tour. Luckily the patrons were very nice about it and we were able to arrange a tour at a later date. After several months of trying to track down the problem, we ended up replacing the carburetor and fuel pump and the car ran so good! It is much easier to start, runs smoothly and drives so much better. I am very grateful to my good friend and mechanic Reid Moffitt at Preservation Auto for working through these trials and tribulations with me.
Starting the tours in early fall, we had to contend with unpredictable weather and sorting our the car. I pushed myself on days where it was colder or there was a threat of inclement weather to make sure that my tourgoers had an excellent tour. The only thing you can do is just keep moving forward.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I think there are times that you do have to pivot in a career, but you also find that every job prepares you for the next one with skills that you learn along the way. When I decided to major in music business rather than music performance, I knew that my dream of being a professional musician was not realistic due to the competition from other musicians and the particular life I wanted to lead. This lead to working in the industry/business side of the music industry, which went belly up in 2008 when the economy went into a recession for several years. After getting burned out in the non-profit sector and music industry, I decided to use my accounting minor to work on and eventually graduate from Western Carolina University with a masters of accounting and enter public accounting in tax and auditing. Eventually, my love of history and education prevailed and I knew I had to start this tour company, despite many of the unknowns coming out of the COVID 19 Pandemic.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mountaineermotortours.com
- Instagram: @mountaineermotortours
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mountaineermotortours
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heath-towson-564904126/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr8eAoZMGHdPCj56HFHRIqA
Image Credits
Photographs are by Camilla Calnan Photography