I have your book Stude­baker 1946-1966 orig­i­nally pub­lished as Stude­baker: The Post­war Years. As an employee of the old com­pany at the end in Hamil­ton, Ontario,  it brought back mem­o­ries of many old Stude­baker hands: styl­ists Bob Doehler and Bob Andrews were good friends about my age.

I am look­ing for­ward to the last chap­ter dis­cussing how Stude­baker went wrong, espe­cially since I also have the­o­ries. It would fun to com­pare notes. I am on a panel in Phoenix/Glendale next June and made a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion to the Avanti Club in 2006. My grand finali was your a quote from your book: “For many years, Ray­mond Loewy Asso­ciates would be the only thing stand­ing between Stude­baker and dull mediocrity.”

P.S. Like you I  owned a 1962 Gran Tur­ismo Hawk, a sur­pris­ingly impres­sive car. I drove it back and forth to Hamil­ton when we were work­ing on the last 1966 pro­duc­tion Stude­bak­ers. I put a ’53 Star­liner deck­lid on it and ’54 Star­liner wheel cov­ers; I thought each addi­tion was an improve­ment. —B.M., via email

Thanks for the kind words. My GT Hawk was one of the best cars I ever owned: fast yet easy on gas, styl­ish, fun to drive. It leaked oil and the famous “flex­i­ble frame” was a lit­tle creaky, but it was a sat­is­fy­ing car, if overly sus­cep­ti­ble to the dreaded tinworm.

At the end of my book is a list of what Stude­baker did wrong, beginin­ning with chair­man Paul Hoff­man accept­ing every union demand after World War II. James Nance, the last pres­i­dent of Packard, who pur­chased Stude­baker in 1954, told me: “The trou­ble with Stude­baker was that they wouldn’t take a strike. Every­body else took strikes after the war and rea­son­able com­pro­mises were reached on wages and ben­e­fits. Stude­baker didn’t, and they never caught up.”

What Nance and Packard didn’t know when they bought Studebaker—but learned to their hor­ror when Packard’s accoun­tants finally got into the books—was that Studebaker’s break-even point by the mid-Fifties was 50,000 or more cars higher than their vol­ume in their best year on record. A Stude­baker designer told me he once priced the 1953 Star­liner using Gen­eral Motors costings—and found that GM could have sold the iden­ti­cal car for $300 less (which was a lot more then than it is now).

Stude­baker proved the alba­tross that dragged Packard down with it, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for Nance to find the finances to bankroll the highly com­pet­i­tive all-new 1957 line that might have allowed Studebaker-Packard to go on longer than it did.

And yes, Ray­mond Loewy, for  all his pos­ing as the actual  cre­ator of styling tri­umphs like the 1953 Star­liner and 1963 Avanti, was the key to the cars being as disct­inc­tive as they were. He had an eye for tal­ent and hired and directed fine design­ers, such as Bob Bourke (Star­liner) and Bob Andrews, John Epstein and Tom Kel­logg (Avanti).

Studebaker’s sales and mar­ket­ing peo­ple blunted those good designs by inept plan­ning and pro­mo­tion. In 1953, for exam­ple, they built a sur­feit of sedan mod­els, find­ing to their shock that peo­ple mainly wanted the beau­ti­ful Star­liner hard­tops and Starlight coupes. Their pro­duc­tion mix was the exact oppo­site of what the pub­lic desired.

But Studebaker’s styling was con­sis­tently good. Try­ing to save the rump com­pany in the Six­ties, Pres­i­dent Sher­wood Egbert hired Brooks Stevens, who deftly facelifted the Lark and Hawk, and came up with novel ideas like the sliding-roof Wag­o­naire sta­tion wagon—but these were all reskins of the 1950s mod­els. Stevens and Loewy then offered  excit­ing ideas for all-new designs for 1966 and beyond, but by then it was too late. Stude­baker shut down its main fac­tory in South Bend, Indi­ana, in 1964, and the Hamil­ton Ontario plant closed after build­ing the last 1965-66 mod­els. But no—Studebaker didn’t have to fail.

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