Ken Eberts gave us not only precise images of great cars, but pictures of their contemporary surroundings that tugged at our collective heartstrings. He came to The Packard Cormorant at a sad time, but it was the beginning of a long and fond association.

Ken had sent us a Packard Twelve cover painting our Summer 1991 issue when our mutual friend, Packard designer Dick Teague, passed away. Everything shifted to documentary mode as we hastily tore that issue apart to honor Dick’s memory. We kept the cover, knowing Dick, whose first great restoration was a 1904 Packard Model L, would appreciate it.

One item didn’t make that issue was Dick’s concept car, the “1992 Caribbean.” It applied all the traditional Packard hallmark designs to a modern gran turismo. Dick had been working on it for months, stricken by cancer, “functional,” his family said at the end, “only minutes a day.”

I’d given it up for lost when Ken Eberts surprised me by sending along the finished product: “Dick wanted you to have this. He asked me if I would do it for him and enclosed the drawing which I believe you two had agree to publish. Dick designed and drew it in its entirety. My part was just rendering it in color. I think it is his last design.” We ran it the following year.

“I remember that Christmas Eve”

St. Johnsbury, Vermont, 24 December 1918— I remember that Christmas Eve. The Great War had ended on Armistice Day six weeks ago. Johnny Came Marching Home, and with him my Dad, who had commanded a platoon in the mud of Flanders.

The first thing Dad had done when he got back was to buy a car he’d dreamed about for fifteen years, since the first one seen chugged down Macon Street—a Packard. He couldn’t afford a new Twin Six. But the family doctor had ordered one, and Dad acquired his 3-38 Six—a handsome runabout painted emerald green and black. He cashed in every spare security he owned, added an old life insurance policy and a backlogged salary from General Pershing’s Army.

Doc’s old Six was still a beauty. With its gleaming paint set off by brass and nickel, buff-colored artillery wheels and pinstripes, it was symphony in motion. You’d see it coming a mile away: the big, black, ox-yoke radiator flanked by enormous headlights, with auxiliary lights built in underneath, and an elegant brass “6” riding the radiator cap…. —From my piece accompanying Ken’s painting, Autumn 1993.

How Eberts art jogged our memories

In the world of automotive artists, Eberts ranked with the best. His amazing eye for detail focused on artfully researched, nostalgic scenes, placing vintage motorcars in their original settings. It was easy to conjure up words to go with his work.

A co-founder of the Automotive Fine Arts Society in 1983, Ken’s work adorned the prestigious Pebble Beach and Meadow Brook concours posters. His painstaking style can be found in scores of works shown by established galleries from coast to coast.

Over the years we had the fun of publishing Ken’s Packard visions, for the marque that had special appeal to him. Back in 1991, we quoted a thoughtful summary of his artistry by William Jeanes, former editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver. In Ken’s memory it is appropriate to quote those words again:

“His work has a deja vu quality that may make you say to yourself, ‘I’ve been there before.’ The places are real, the cars are real, and the details of his settings are painstakingly accurate. Yet the moments never actually happened. Or did they?”

They happened, all right. Ken was a dear man whose work was inimitable. No one dies as long as they are remembered. Ken’s noble art assures that he lives on in our hearts.

Related articles

“Facing Disaster with a Smile: The Dick Teague I Knew,” 2024.

“The Packard: The Ne Plus Ultra aof Automotive House Organs,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2021.

“One Brief Shining Moment: Packard’s 1929-30 Speedster,” 2023.

“Packard Tales and Memories of Bud Juneau,”  2021.

“Why Packard Failed: The Patrician and Its Relatives,” Part 1 of a two-part article, 2022.

Virgil Exner

(From Part 1….) Motorcar designers rarely become household names. Yet every kid in late-Fifties America knew of Virgil Exner. Through them, their parents knew of him, and bought his cars. To become as famous as Ex was by, say, 1958, a designer has to create something singular—something that heralds a new epoch. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Ex did just that. He was the “father of the tailfin.” And the tailfin (copyright Chrysler Corporation, 1956) was as recognized a symbol of late Fifties America as Elvis Presley.

Ex at Chrysler

Virgil, his son  recalled, “wasn’t exactly the most welcome person who ever showed up at Chrysler Corporation:

Predecessor stylists viewed him as a usurper. Dad set up a small studio and began working on his own, without a definite production goal but relatively free to come up with some good workouts. With these he hoped to point Chrysler in what he felt was the right direction.

Certainly past directions had been doubtful:

Dad called the Chrysler Town & Country a “lumber wagon.” He looked upon it as a car that “hadn’t been uncrated.” He liked woodies, but was very much a believer in the all-steel station wagon [pioneered by Plymouth in 1949]. Of course he thought the boxy 1949 Chrysler body styles were just awful. [Chief body engineer] Henry King was a good designer, but really his talents were kind of wasted through that era.

Changing the image

Exner’s first projects were a remarkable line of show cars, designed to prefigure production car styling. President Keller and Tex Colbert, who replaced Keller when K.T. became Chairman in late 1950, had always liked Chrysler’s clean-lined prewar idea cars, the Thunderbolt and Newport. They wanted more of them. “Old K.T.” is often blamed for Chrysler’s boxy look in the early 1950s. In fact, he was acutely aware of, and meant to change, this styling disadvantage.

In 1949, Keller had asked Pininfarina to explore future styling directions with a trim four-door sedan on a New Yorker wheelbase. Later, in 1951, Ghia in Turin produced the Plymouth XX500 special. Virgil, Jr. told this writer that the XX500 “was brought over by Ghia to show Chrysler their ability and craftsmanship. It was pretty dumpy, but it started the whole idea in Dad’s mind that they could build real experimental cars, as opposed to mock-ups.”

Chrysler engineer Fred Zeder, a fan of Exner’s, remarked: “We like to see just how these ideas work out in an actual, operating automobile.” Rival companies “build dream cars which quite obviously couldn’t be produced on an assembly line.” Exner chose Ghia over Pininfarina because Ghia could produce one-offs at modest cost. His first Ghia special, the K310, cost only $10,000, an astonishingly low figure, even then.

The Ghia-Chryslers

A classic car enthusiast and a student of world industrial design, Exner brought a sophisticated approach to Chrysler styling. He admired what he called the “Italian Simplistic School.” Italian designs “were thoroughly modern, with subtly rounded shapes and sharp accents indicative of genuine character.”

While Exner’s show cars were influenced and built by Ghia, most of them began life on his own drawing board. The K310 (K for Keller, 310 for its supposed horsepower) seriously influenced production design, notably the 1955 Imperial–as did its convertible counterpart, the C200.

Successor models were the Ghia Special, GS1 and d’Elegance. Here Exner introduced bold, squared-off grilles and combination bumper-grilles that were later seen in production cars. (Incidentally, the GS1 was evolved by Ghia into the VW Karmann Ghia—independent of Exner, of course, downsized, and minus GS1’s huge egg-crate grille).

Shown at Chrysler dealerships nationwide, the K310 and its successors sparked new interest in Chrysler design. Exner then began to contribute to production car styling. His influence on the restyled 1953-54s was slight, though he did spark more shapely, rounded forms than those of 1949-52.

The show cars that directly led to Exner’s glory years were the Parade Phaetons. Three 1952 Crown Imperials with production front clips were mounted on extended, 147 1/2-inch wheelbase chassis. Later they were updated with 1955-56 styling. Based on clay models from Exner’s studio, they featured a strong character moulding along the beltline, a rear fender “kick-up,” and big, open wheel wells. Even Exner didn’t anticipate the influence these cars would have–owing in part to events beyond his control.

Salvaging Chrysler

Chrysler Corporate sales in 1953-54 were grim. Four years of dull styling, coupled with a production blitz and heavy dealer discounting by GM and Ford, left Chrysler in a slump. By 1952, Ford had regained second place in American car production for the first time since the 1930s. In early 1953, Keller asked Exner’s opinion about the 1955 models then aborning. Exner had a look and replied in one word: “Lousy.”

“K.T. Keller kind of liked that,” Virgil, Jr. remembered, “since he was quite a strong character. So he said to my Dad: ‘Okay, you put it together—you have eighteen months.’ Dad swiped stuff off the parade phaetons and did manage to put the ‘55 line together in time. He did it with a tiny group of only seventeen people, including the modelers and four or five designers.”

(Virgil, Jr. refers here to the Imperial, Chrysler and DeSoto. The 1955 Dodge and Plymouth, although new, were not based on the Parade Phaetons, but designed separately by Henry King and Exner associate Maury Baldwin. Exner signed off on them too, of course. He had now become chief of Chrysler design.)

The “Forward Look”

The outcome of all this was the dramatically restyled 1955 model line. Almost overnight, they altered Chrysler history.

The most obvious descendant of the Parade Phaetons was the 1955 Imperial, one of the classic designs of the Fifties: uncluttered and understated, except for the gaudy ornaments on hood and deck, and the “gunsight” taillights, a throwback to the K310.

Chryslers had their own look, with huge “Twin Tower” taillights and smaller grilles surmounting a horizontal bar up front. DeSoto kept its established toothy grille, topped by an ornate bonnet badge. Its most radical feature was a “gullwing” dashboard, housing instruments and controls under the steering wheel and a glovebox/radio speaker at right.

Taking the lead

The 1955 Dodge and Plymouth also saw remarkable improvement, with longer, cleaner lines and curved body sides. Vastly altered, they didn’t seem related to their predecessors. Both enjoyed enormous buyer approval. All five makes were successful: Chrysler Corporation recorded the highest dollar volume and unit sales in its history, with a seventeen percent slice of ‘55 output compared to only thirteen in 1954.

In retrospect, there’s no doubt that the 1955 “Forward Look” Chrysler products were among the best American designs of their decade. Without the garish two- and three-tone paint jobs so many fashionably wore, they still look clean and well balanced today.

These were the cars which began to wrest the design leadership that had belonged to General Motors since the late 1920s. By 1957, Chrysler held one-fifth of the market and GM was hastening to keep pace. So was everybody else. It must have galled Raymond Loewy to see his famous coupes, now called Studebaker Hawks, sprout tailfins in a hasty attempt to ape Exner.

Birth of the tailfin

Virgil Exner had become a vice president, with a design staff of over 300 and a name known nationwide. His interest in the tailfin, the feature for which he was best known, became evident on the 1956 models. His son thought he was inspired by the Ghia Gilda, a dramatic fastback which was mainly one long fin. Also influential were the Alfa Romeo BAT and Chrysler’s own Dart show car.

“He was a staunch believer in fins,” Virgil Jr. continued:

The idea was to get some poise at the rear of the car–to get off of soft, rounded back ends, to get some lightness to the car. Fins were a way to do it aesthetically, and were genuinely functional. They ran tests at Chrysler and without trying to rationalize, they did work. They moved the centre of air pressure back, a little closer to the centre of gravity, provided more inherent directional stability. True, the effects weren’t much evident below 80 mph! It wasn’t a pure style, but it was functional. Dad always tried to make his tailfins as simple as possible, as opposed, say, to the 1959 “batwing” Chevrolet.”

Flite-Sweep styling

The best of Exner’s finned creations were the first “Flite-Sweep” models of 1957-58, particularly the simple, dramatic Chryslers. The most important thing about them was their revolutionary lowness, which was no accident. Exner had demanded that they stand five inches lower than the ‘56s. This was a huge reduction.

Chrysler engineers said it couldn’t be done. They did it anyway, with the help of such space saving innovations as 14-inch wheels, thin-section air cleaners, pre-formed headliners and (importantly) torsion bar front suspension.

With acres of glass, low beltlines and slim roof pillars, Flite-Sweeps were unchallenged by any rival and prefigured the shape of American cars for the next half decade. Coupled with such innovations as “Torsion-Aire” ride, TorqueFlite automatic and potent V-8 engines, they represented a pinnacle, a company reborn. They were Virgil Exner’s finest hour.

But time is always running. In mid-1956, as the Flite-Sweeps were about to be introduced, forty-seven-year-old Virgil Exner suffered a massive heart attack. Colbert brought in Bill Schmidt, late of Studebaker-Packard, as his temporary replacement. Ex recovered and returned to work a year later. But his post-1958 designs lacked the chiselled smoothness and drama of their predecessors, and sometimes just looked odd.

Tailfins grew higher, clumsier and less functional; Ex’s penchant for classic era features led to “toilet seat” spare tires on rear decks and “freestanding” headlamps, which on cars like the Imperial only looked bizarre. He did win a design award for his 1960 Plymouth Valiant and its clone, the ‘61 Dodge Lancer—Chrysler’s first compacts. But after all, he had always preferred light cars.

“Plucked chickens”

The last line of full-size Chrysler products designed completely under Exner came in 1962. It was a very mixed bag. The Chryslers were basically ‘61 models shorn of fins—Ex called them “plucked chickens.” Dodges and Plymouths emphasized his long bonnet/short deck concepts, but they were prematurely downsized, stubby in appearance. Sales dropped, overcome by full-size competition from GM and Ford.

Meanwhile Chrysler Corporation was suffering political upheavals and financial scandals. Shortly after the ascension of President Lynn Townsend in mid-1961, Elwood Engel replaced Exner as vice president of styling. By the early Sixties, GM styling was again pacing the industry.

Exner, who closely influenced the, chunky, chiselled 1963-64 models, remained a styling consultant through 1964. But it was clear that his Chrysler career was winding down.

Trail’s end

In 1961 Virgil joined his son in a private design firm, Virgil M. Exner Inc., in Birmingham, Michigan. Here he produced artwork for an Esquire project: three classic revivals, the Duesenberg II, Stutz Blackhawk and Mercer Cobra. Exner Inc. also engaged in automotive projects for U.S. Steel and Dow Chemical. Ghia’s Selene II, the Renault Caravelle and Bugatti Type 101 bore traces of his hand.

Virgil Max Exner died in 1973, leaving a legacy of imagination and innovation. Not only was he one of the few car stylists known broadly in America. He was the first to topple General Motors as Detroit’s styling leader. In a very real sense, too, Ex had saved Chrysler in the mid-Fifties. His cars were among the last that could trace their shape to a single gifted individual.

Bibliography

Richard M. Langworth: Chrysler and Imperial: The Postwar Years, 1976; Studebaker: The Postwar Years, 1979; Encyclopedia of American Cars 1930-1980, 1984. With Jan P. Norbye The Complete History of Chrysler Corporation: 1924-1985, 1985. Michael Lamm and David Holls: A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design, 1996. Author’s interviews: Maury Baldwin, Robert E. Bourke, Gordon M. Buehrig, Virgil M. Exner, Virgil Exner Jr., Eugene Hardig, Raymond Loewy, John Reinhart.

The great designers

“Virgil Exner, Part 1,  Studebaker: How Ex Marked His Spot,” 2024.

“Brooks Stevens: The Seer Who Made Milwaukee Famous,” 2022.

“The Greatness of Alex Tremulis,” Part 1 of a three-part article, 2020.

“‘All the Luck’—Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017.

“Indie Auto: Did Detroit Give Us the Dinosaurs?” 2023.

“Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” 2019.

A name we all knew

Motorcar designers rarely become household names. Harley Earl, who invented the styling profession at General Motors in the 1920s, was better known after he retired. His successor, Bill Mitchell, more widely recognized, loved the limelight. He was always ready to be photographed riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in his chrome leather jacket.

Pininfarina’s name got round in America because it appeared on everything from Nashes to Ferraris, but relatively few knew of Nuccio Bertone, or even, later, Giorgio Giugiaro. The name Raymond Loewy was known to some through his gifted self-promotion. But Howard Darrin—similarly talented—was more famous as a 1930s custom body builder than a 1950s car designer.

Yet every kid in late-Fifties America knew of Virgil Exner. Through them, their parents knew of him, and bought his cars. To become as famous as Ex was by, say, 1958, a designer has to create something singular—something that heralds a new epoch. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Ex did just that. He was the “father of the tailfin.” And the tailfin (copyright Chrysler Corporation, 1956) was as recognized a symbol of late Fifties America as Elvis Presley.

Young Virgil

Like many automotive designers, Exner grew up with cars in his blood, transfused from the places he frequented. He was born and immediately adopted by German-American parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1909. Barely 17, he enrolled at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, near the busy factories of Studebaker. He dropped out of university for lack of money after 2 1/2 years and applied for work at a local firm, Advertising Artists, which produced Studebaker catalogues.

Michael Lamm and David Holls, in their seminal book, A Century of Automotive Style, tell us that Exner began by painting picture backgrounds: “But when his boss noticed how good he was, he gave Ex the task of illustrating Studebaker cars and trucks…. He also developed a knack for sculpting in clay, all of which later helped him as a car designer.”

In 1934, hearing about Harley Earl’s Art & Colour Studio at GM, Ex hied to Detroit and his first design position, at Frank Hershey’s Pontiac department. An early assignment was contributing to the visual unity of 1935 Pontiacs with the iconic “Silver Streak.” This was a broad band of grooved bright metal that ran from the grille down the hood and repeated on the deck. The Silver Streak was a Pontiac hallmark through 1956. When Frank Hershey was transferred to Opel in 1937, Exner became Pontiac’s chief stylist. But by that time he was already being courted by the famous Franco-American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy.

Ex meets Ray

Loewy, who had secured the Studebaker account in 1936, was in serious need for design talent. His eye soon lit on Virgil Exner. Harley Earl liked and admired Ex and wanted him to stay at GM. But Loewy offered a big salary increase and a New York location. Virgil moved his family to Long Island, only to find himself back in familiar South Bend in 1941, after Studebaker insisted that Loewy locate his design team at its factory.

In Indiana, Exner and clay modeler Frank Ahlroth were soon joined by Robert Bourke, who would later create Studebaker’s famous 1953 “Loewy coupe.” Following Pearl Harbor, Studebaker designers and engineers were harnessed to the war effort. Exner, Bourke and Ahlroth found themselves designing air-cooled turbocharged aircraft engines. In their spare time, the trio worked on ideas for the eventual postwar Studebakers. Meanwhile, as Bourke remembered, “Raymond Loewy was busy convincing management to accept these radical designs for the postwar era.”

“Weight is the Enemy”

Given the size of the design department and the minimal time for cars, Exner’s group had revolutionary ideas. Integral fenders were unheard of in those days. So were vast areas of curved glass, or doors cut into the roof. Loewy detested the use of chrome as embellishment. He preferred slim, tapered shapes, and practical devices like glass or clear plastic headlamp covers to improve streamlining.

Loewy also preached lightness, warning of the cost of excess weight in fuel consumption and performance. Throughout the studio, on walls, floors and ceilings, he posted signs reading: WEIGHT IS THE ENEMY.

Loewy told this writer: “I tried to convince management that there existed among Americans a segment, profitable to Studebaker, that could not find the kind of car they wanted among GM, Ford and Chrysler offerings. What these consumers wanted was a sleeker, compact automobile with European-type roadability and good acceleration.” A leading newspaper, he added, “credited me with being first to use the word ‘compact.’”

Raymond Loewy in those years was no longer a hands-on designer. Having brought his company to prominence, he preferred now to hire good talent, supervise their work, approve what they produced, and sell it to clients. Thus Loewy was rarely at South Bend. Virgil Exner became his point-man with Studebaker management. Inevitably, an antipathy developed between Loewy and Exner—and, more seriously, between Loewy and Studebaker chief engineer Roy Cole, a stolid Midwesterner who had never cared for the flamboyant Frenchman.

A certain discontent

Ex, who was doing a lot of the work, easily bought Cole’s argument that Loewy was more figurehead than contributor. “The problem was basically a disagreement in philosophy,” the evenhanded Bob Bourke remembered:

Ex felt that a man was either a designer or a promoter, but not both. To make matters worse, he felt Loewy received all the credit from management and the public.

Although I understood Ex’s viewpoint, I still held R.L. in high regard. I recognized the necessity of being a good salesman in this profession. Mr. Loewy also had a great “eye.” While he may not have created a certain line or contour, he knew instinctively when a designer had better than average talent and drive, and he would always bring out the best that designer had to offer the client.

While Ex and Cole nursed discontent, the Loewy team began evolving postwar Studebakers. They began slowly, but with more urgency as the war neared its end. More personnel came on board. Exner found himself heading a distinguished circle: Bourke, Gordon Buehrig, Holden Koto, Ted Brennan, John Cuccio, John Reinhart, Vince Gardner and Jack Aldrich.

Reinhart would later design the image-shattering 1951 Packards and direct styling for the 1956 Continental Mark II. Gardner would contribute to the Mark II and other Ford designs. Buehrig was noted for his rakish prewar Auburns and Cords. Koto would aid Bourke on Studebakers through the ‘53, and he and Bourke freelanced the front clip of the ‘49 Ford. Loewy considered this team the best in the industry.

Studebaker’s radical postwar plans

The 1947 Studebakers were the first all-new designs from a prewar car company. They were conceived by the Loewy Studios under Virgil Exner. As early as 1942, they had settled on a full-width body rather than freestanding fenders. Later they integrated the fenders with the body sides, but left enough of a bulge to avoid a slab-sided appearance. They developed a curved one-piece windshield; a wrap-around backlight (for what became the 1947-52 Starlight coupe) and a long, tapered rear deck. Although many rival companies developed similar ideas, Studebaker put them into production at years before anyone else.

The break between Raymond Loewy and his ambitious young designer came in the spring of 1944. As Exner recalled, one morning Roy Cole walked into his office, accompanied by Studebaker President Harold Vance. Cole had a proposal. Would Ex undertake secretly to design a production car, independent of the Loewy Studios?

He didn’t trust Loewy to come up with anything practical, Cole explained, but couldn’t prove he was right without competition. Vance nodded agreement, but cautioned that Ex would have to work on his own time at home. Neither he nor Cole were willing at that point to risk confrontation with Loewy, who was still under contract.

Exner told this writer that he didn’t take much persuading:

I agreed to start immediately. I cleared out one of my bedrooms at home and they sent me an eight-foot drafting board. Then we went into my basement, and they built me a quarter-scale clay modeling table. Eugene Hardig, who was then chief of chassis drafting, came out every day…. We worked on seating and chassis layouts…. This lasted about three to four months. On completion the rival design was still a pretty good secret, even at Studebaker.

Ex knew that his actions would seal his fate with Loewy, but he was young and ambitious, determined to show what he could do. Many can imagine how he felt, working against tight deadlines at home, visions of a revolutionary new car dancing in his head.

Dimensional shuffle

A curious error now came to Exner’s assistance. The initial dimensions Cole gave him for the new Studebaker Champion, like those handed to the Loewy team, were impractical. They called for a wheelbase of only 110 inches and a width of just 67 inches–much too small for a “family car.”

Ex remembered: “Roy Cole had a thing: His philosophy was that a car cost so much a pound. He stuck to that rigidly, and these were the dimensions he laid down. They were a little tough to work with.” That was an understatement. Cole’s proposed chassis was too narrow, the car too short, the entire geometry unworkable.

Exner pleaded for more generous dimensions. Surely they could allow 70 inches of width and open the Champion wheelbase to 113? (It expanded to 120 inches on the senior Commander, 124 on the stretched-out Land Cruiser.) Anxious to please his favorite stylist, Cole relented. Exner continues:

We then built an all-new wooden mock-up. The body drawings were simply opened up and a three-inch strip put down the center without changing the profile, and the wheels were moved back. Then the front end looked too short [so] I convinced Mr. Cole that we should add three inches to the fenders and two inches to the hood.

An inch here, an inch there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real changes. There was one other factor: Roy Cole didn’t bother to advise the competition. The “official” Loewy Studios team, still ostensibly under Exner, laboured on with a foreordained loser—“sort of an underhanded deal on the part of Cole,” Bob Bourke recalled…

because he was trying to get Loewy out of there. We did two full-sized plaster automobiles, and when management viewed them, they said they were just too narrow. In a matter of a week, we cut them right down the middle and expanded them out to where the Exner jobs were, but by then the Exner model was being tooled for production.

The break with Loewy

When Studebaker selected Exner’s rival model, Loewy exploded, jumped aboard the Twentieth Century Limited (which made him no happier because the train was designed by his arch rival Henry Dreyfus), and headed in high dudgeon for South Bend. There he fired Exner for disloyalty and insubordination. This had been foreseen: Ex was immediately rehired by Roy Cole as chief body engineer.

From a study of his design ideas and subsequent career, as well as the prototypes, it is virtually certain that the high hood and complicated stainless steel grille were Exner contributions to the original Loewy shapes. These were in some contrast to Loewy’s preferred sloping hood and minimal chrome. But Exner’s idea was probably more in keeping with contemporary tastes. “Ex favoured this type of hood more than I did,” Bourke said. “I was equally to blame, however, as I had done many studies for Ex along these lines.”

With Exner out, Bob Bourke became the head of the Loewy Studios at Studebaker. Through Roy Cole, Exner enjoyed job security, competing (unsuccessfully) with the Loewy team for the 1950-51 facelift with its famous “bullet-nose.” But Ex’s disloyalty to Loewy, and moreover to the likeable Bourke, did not endear him to many.

Nearing retirement, Cole realized he couldn’t protect Exner forever, and canvassed industry friends in need of a stylist. He found a berth at Ford, and the Exner family was about to move to Dearborn when Ford signed a design contract with George Walker. Cole then called his friend K.T. Keller, President of Chrysler. The rest, as they say, is history.

Continued in Part 2…

Related reading

“Why Studebaker Failed,” 2020.

“Why Packard Failed,” 2022.

“‘All the Luck’—Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017.

“Indie Auto: Did Detroit Give Us the Dinosaurs?” 2023.

“Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” 2019.

“You wouldn’t believe how slow my Sunbeams were”

It sounds blasphemous, but I’ve never been able to relate to Ferraris, possibly because I could never afford one. Give me a quirky English rig with an interesting past and a shape you don’t see every day. There’s something about leather and walnut, the way the rain beads on the bonnet…. It reminds you of the time when almost everybody in Britain could build a sports car, and many did. As an old Triumph worker said when the last TR6 left the line: “It rides hard and smells of oil. They just don’t make cars like that anymore.”

Sunbeam-Talbot had a good competition pedigree before the Second World War. But in 1935 the firm was bought by the Rootes Group, William and his brother Reginald. They were interested in production not competition, so not much happened for awhile.

Enthusiasm revived when a successful rally driver, Norman Garrad, joined the company as competitions manager. After the war, Rootes launched a two-liter sports saloon, the Sunbeam-Talbot 90. Norman thought he could make it into a rally winner.

Driving a 90 in 1952,  Stirling Moss won fifty pounds by finishing second behind Sidney Allard in the punishing Monte Carlo Rally. This convinced Norman that Rootes might have a competitive car after all. Moss wasn’t sure. “You wouldn’t believe how slow my Sunbeams were,” Sir Stirling later told my friend, the late motoring writer Graham Robson. Graham replied: “Yes I would!”

Finding your Rootes

Reginald and Billy Rootes were empire builders who envisioned a kind of mini-General Motors. By the late Forties they controlled four old-line companaies: Hillman, Humber, Singer and Sunbeam-Talbot. I’ve owned six of their cars, at least one of each make except for Singer. I am a certified “Rootes-oholic.” Or maybe just certifiable.

For three years running, teams of Sunbeams appeared at the great French endurance race, the Twenty-four Hours of Le Mans. You can read about them in my book, Tiger Alpine Rapier: Sporting Cars from the Rootes Group. But don’t pay the silly prices quoted on Amazon. Use Bookfinder.com to find a cheaper copy.

My first Rootes product was a powder blue 1962 Sunbeam Alpine Series 2, which I bought new and ran the wheels off, including a memorable twelve-hour overnight rally in Fairfield County, Connecticut. It replaced a Triumph TR3, and getting back into a car with roll-up windows and a top you could put up without a tool kit was true luxury.

Hilda, the friendly Hillman

Years later came Hilda, a 1960 Minx convertible. Remember the three position top with the intermediate “landau” position? Hilda was a lovely low-mileage car without any rust.

She had one peculiar and quaintly English trait. Whenever you drove through a puddle deeper than two inches, she just stopped. The drill was to get out, remove the distributor cap, dry the insides out with a rag, and voilà—she was off and running again.

My fondest memory of Hilda was driving flat out at the Bridgehampton, Long Island road course. Hilda was so slow you could drive the whole track, hairpins and all, with your foot flat on the floor and never come to grief. This proved to be a good thing. Far behind a TR5 down the straightaway, I easily dodged its flying bonnet when it came unstuck. It flew past like an errant bat or a stealth bomber. It is a wonder we all didn’t go to jail that day.

There’s safety in Humbers

Not many Rootes collectors care about Humbers, but they might be missing something. My 1967 Imperial—last year for the big luxury Humbers—was one of the nicest cars I’ve owned, with its smooth and quiet 3-liter six, swathed with Connolly hides, wool and walnut. It was the top of the line, with a body by Thrupp and Maberly in London. Rootes bought that coachbuilding company to handle the final finish on its luxury cars.

Never mind the broad chromium smile and the chunky lines. The Imperial was as quiet as a bank vault—a wonderful road car and a good handler despite its bulk. It was a Series 5, with the squared-off roofline and large glass area. I gave it up after a few years of hunting for spare parts. The supply in the USA is not large, and was twice laid up for months for lack of a crucial part.

Humber rated a chapter in my sporting Rootes book. The motoring writer Michael Sedgwick, our beloved “Sedgewarbler,” said: “Langworth is going way over the top with that one. All I can remember about Humbers is that they gave me a bad case of mal de mer every time I drove one.” Oh well!

Few realize this, but the oddly named Super Snipe (down-market from the Imperial) actually competed with distinction. In the 1950 Monte Carlo Rally, Norman Garrad fitted out a Mark II for the Dutch drivers Maurice Gatsonides and K.S. Barendeg, who finished second in class. Snipes also finished near the top of their class in the 1962-63 East African and RAC Rallies.

Meet the Tiger

But this is the 60th Anniversary of the Rootes Sunbeam Tiger, so let’s get on to most exciting car Billy and Reg built. I am one of the diminishing few who set out to drive one the moment it was announced—and bought one new a few months later.

“The original Sunbeam Tiger,” wrote Mike Bumbeck in Hemmings Classic Car, “was a beastly V-12 built in 1926 for setting land speed records at the hands of Major H.O.D Segrave. The mighty Tiger was later configured to run flat out around the Brooklands high-banked track. This altogether determined race car could hardly be thought of as light, agile, or friendly. The next Sunbeam Tiger, named after the original, was a different car in every way.”

I vividly remember my first encounter with the Tiger sixty years ago. I was a penurious two-striper in the U.S. Coast Guard. I had no right even to think I could afford one.

But I’d owned an Alpine, and the idea of an Alpine with that sweet little Ford V-8, conjured up by the great Carroll Shelby, was exciting. So I toddled off to the Rootes showroom on Park Avenue in Manhattan to see what this new car was about and maybe talk them into letting me drive one.

The demo was black, with a tan mock-pigskin interior. The first thing I saw was the walnut instrument panel—so different from that nondescript grey dash on my old Alpine. I climbed in and noticed the second thing: a 140 mph speedometer.

“I’ve got to get one!”

Remember, I’d been driving an Alpine, so the rest of this car seemed more or less familiar. But not the driving!

The plate glass windows of the Rootes showroom retracted into the street, so you could literally drive a car off the floor. They rolled one down and I exited onto Park Avenue. Gingerly, I worked my way to the waterfront, got onto the East Side Drive and put my foot down. Lightning struck! I had one thought: I’ve got to get one of these!

On September 14th, 1965, I bought B9471128. (Does that make it the 128th built? I’m not sure.) It was Midnight blue, with a factory hardtop painted to match, and one of the better-grained walnut dashboards (they varied).

It cost $3902, a king’s ransom. Still, that was only $100 more than the noisy, hard-riding, vastly overrated Austin-Healey 3000, $1700 less than a Jaguar E-type, $2000 less than Shelby’s already legendary Cobra.

I put 25,000 miles on it before trading it in on an air conditioned VW Karmann Ghia two years later. Yes, I know—foolishness! But at the time it made sense, with the long, hot business  trips I was then obliged to endure. (The Ghia was like my Hillman. You could drive it all day with your foot to the floor and never be arrested.)

With its effortless performance, that Tiger was the most soul-satisfying two-seater I ever owned.  It was also one of the cars I should never have sold—as it kept reminding me by reappearing!

The cat came back

Then, back came my Mark I to haunt me—twice. The first was a night in 1969, outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when I spotted it under the floodlights at a used car dealership. I pulled over and looked inside. Sure enough, there was the burn mark I’d made with my pipe next to the console ashtray. Incidentally, the odometer now showed 5000 fewer miles than it had when we traded it in.

Recalling what fun that car had been, I was so excited that I forgot the speed limit and was immediately ticketed by a state trooper. Through a mutual friend in the car business, I tried to buy it back at a trade discount, but the dealer wouldn’t budge.

Then in 2017, there it was again, advertised in Hemmings, by the same owner since 1984! The value had increased somewhat, however…

By that time I’d already acquired another Tiger, but #1128 seemed to have aged well: still with the smooth dark blue paint job, still with the hardtop. The soft top had been replaced with a light blue non-stock top, the front bumper guards were missing and the wheels were changed, But all in all it still looked good. I hope it is happy and healthy, wherever it is. If anybody knows how to track it, I’d sure like to know.

Why the Tiger failed

How could so fine a sports car fail? That is a short, sad story. The Tiger was never a hot seller. I’ve talked to dealers who were flogging leftovers at cost in order to get rid of them by 1966. Had things been otherwise, the wealthy corporation that was Chrysler—which acquired Rootes in 1965—would have kept it in production.

In Rootes showrooms, the Tiger was an anomaly compared to the Hillmans (should I say Hillmen?), Singers and Humbers. It also looked too much like the cheaper, slower Alpine. Unique styling is vital in a car like this. And the competition was tough. In 1965 you could buy a flashy Corvette Sting Ray for as little as $300 more than a Tiger, and 24,000 Americans did. The Tiger lacked that essential visibility which made the String Ray and E-type successful in the vital American market.

What all this led to is well known. After a half-heated attempt to stuff in a Valiant V8, to avoid selling a Chrysler product with a Ford engine, Chrysler simply dumped the Tiger. Pay no attention to the intriguing, well-known photos of “future” designs. They are trifles light as air. No Chrysler executive ever came close to commissioning a prototype. Only about 7000 were built between 1964 and 1967. The Tiger expired because it didn’t sell.

One more for the road

In 2013, I found another Tiger: a red 1966 Mark Ia. It had a straight, rust-free body and a flawless “resale red” paint job, but needed lots of mechanical work, new wheels and a new dash. I hung in there with it for eight years, an expensive restoration. It lives now in Massachusetts, with a collector of V-8 sports cars.

Somehow, I never warmed to it as I did to our original Mark I. Chrysler was building them by now, and engaged in a certain amount of cheapening. The slick metal covers that so neatly hid the Mark I convertible top were replaced by a vinyl boot. The Sunbeam letters were shaved from the nose. The cowl showed seams and square bonnet corners where the Mark Is had rounded corners and seamless joints. Memories of our Mark I were still too strong, I guess.

Still, six Rootes cars over a lifetime isn’t a bad testimony. That’s at least three more than Winston Churchill owned, and he liked them fine. So did I.

Further reading

“Harrington Le Mans: Sunbeam’s Lovely Gran Turismo,” 2020.

“Cars & Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Gears, Part 3, Humber,” 2023.

“Chequered Past: Of England and the Automobile,” 2023.

“The Vintage Triumph and Triumphs in My Life,” 2015.

“Automobile Quarterly: The Memories,” 2021.

First published as “The Teague I Knew” in The Packard Cormorant, 2023.  A longer version was published in The Automobile (UK), January 2024. The quote below is from “Horatius at the Bridge” in Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babington Macaulay.

“And how can man die better than facing fearful odds…”

Franklin, Michigan, April 1971— “Don’t touch it!”

On the garage floor next to a huge Pope-Toledo, a tiny electric compressor was going chuffa-chuffa-chuffa, inflating a tire on this enormous touring car. Richard Arthur Teague, Vice President for Design of American Motors, was on his knees watching it.

“Isn’t it neat?” Dick enthused. “Found it at a hardware store. Look at it go!”

“Yeah, Dick,” I said, “and it’ll be about finished in a week or so.”

I finally tore him away, but I’d no sooner begun asking how he planned to style AMC out of its latest predicament than he lunged into a cardboard box and began hauling out Packard literature.

He held up a bound volume of the ultra-rare Packard Magazine: “Did you ever see one of these before?” He’d rescued the trove from destruction at the East Grand Boulevard factory during Packard’s last days in Detroit.

When tumbrels rolled

“Good Lord, it was awful,” Dick remembered. “There were only a few of us left, they were emptying the factory.

Every hour the tumbrels would roll—you know, like the French Revolution—hauling that aristocratic heritage to the dump. I finally hired a truck, loaded as much of it as I could, and drove it out of there.”

Dick was a Packard stylist from 1951 to the consolidation at South Bend in 1956. His last production effort was the 1957 “Packardbaker,” where he cleverly gave a Studebaker body a family resemblance to the “real” 1956 Packards. Ironically it was Studebaker, which had dragged Packard down, that survived longer.

Most car designers in those days—I don’t know what they do now, click computer keys?—passionately loved the automobile. Most of them could recite automotive history and recall the great names of the industry, from hardboiled executives to racing drivers.

But Dick Teague was unique. He was widely read, brought up to appreciate everything on wheels, devoted to history and restoration. The fabulous 1904 Packard Model L at the Henry Ford Museum, originator of the radiator shape he applied to the last prototypes, was Dick’s car.

His collection ran from his Pope-Toledo to a 1961 Ferrari Berlinetta and the AMX III showcar. He placed his library at the disposal of Automobile Quarterly for our book, Packard; A History of the Motorcar and the Company.

“More rivals than a big city tomcat”

His background wasn’t always cars. A prodigy at five, Dick had played Dixie Duval, the young girl in a low-grade spin-off of Hal Roach’s “Little Rascals.”

A year later he’d lost his right eye in a car accident, and with it his depth perception. (He used to appall us by removing and juggling his glass eye or taping it with a pencil.)

His disability never affected his talent. He grew up sketching cars and airplanes. During the Second World War, ineligible for the draft, he served as a tech artist for Northrop Aviation.

Afterwards Dick joined the industrial design firm E.H. Daniels, who had a contract with a fledgling car company, Kaiser-Frazer.

It seemed a plum of a job, since K-F had barrels of cash and a clean-slate design program, unburdened by prewar “baggage” like the other manufacturers.

The problem was that they hired lots of competing stylists, such as Dutch Darrin and Brooks Stevens, even a company that made car seats. “We had more rivals than a big city tomcat,” Dick remembered.

Then in 1948, General Motors came to L.A. looking for artists, interviewed fifteen of them, and chose Dick Teague. He headed for Detroit, where he contributed to the aircraft-inspired 1949 Oldsmobile.

There he met and married Marian, the love of his life, and reeled off the odd freelance project. Many first heard of Dick for the “modern Mercer” he conceived for Road & Track in 1951. It was the best cover R&T had yet published—Dick’s revival of greatest sports car of its era, the T-head Raceabout.

Packard highs and lows

The Packard Cormorant records all he did for Packard, so it isn’t necessary to repeat that here. But no car lover can fail to appreciate the originality of Dick’s mind.

It was he who first reasoned: why does a backlight have to slant back? Why not let it slant forward, eliminating glare, affording rain protection, even sliding down for ventilation? That idea (less the sliding feature) appeared on Dick’s 1953 Balboa showcar, and was later swiped (with the sliding feature) by Lincoln and Mercury.

Many of us know his most famous story, from what he called his “last days in the bunker,” when the “tumbrels rolled” for “Black Bess.”

That was the 1957 Packard prototype (complete with the slant-back rear window). Dick said it was “made with a cold soldering iron and a ball peen hammer…a very spartan mule.”

One day, Engineering Vice President Herb Misch said, “Find it,” and Dick brought it up to a little showroom.

“I can’t do it myself,” Misch said, “so I’m going to make you the executioner. Cut the thing up…it’s all over.” Let Dick himself finish the tale:

“My God, Red, what have you done?”

So I called Rex Lux, an old welder in the studio, who had been around since the cornerstone. There were two or three other cars in the studio, including another black one, a Clipper. I said, “Okay, it’s official, cut the black one up.”

Red had been there since he was a kid and was hanging on by his thumbnails. I came back around 4 p.m. and he was just finishing. The pieces were lying all around like a bomb had gone off.

It was probably the dirtiest trick I ever played but I said: “My God, Red, what have you done? Not this one, man—the one over in the corner!”

The poor guy had to have had a strong heart, because if he didn’t, he would have died right there. His face drained, and when I told him I was just kidding he chased me around the room. You’ve got to have a sense of humor in this business.

With Packard gone, Dick went to Chrysler: “the worst year of my life.” He refused to talk about it—“too painful to remember.” He worked awhile for his old Packard boss Bill Schmidt, then an independent consultant.

In 1960 American Motors design chief Edmund Anderson asked him to come aboard as a stylist, and Dick joyfully signed on with another company headed for the bunker. But this time he put up an extended fight.

“Ruddy ordnance vehicle”

Dick’s first task was to restyle the 1961-63 Rambler American: “You remember, that dumpy thing with the concave body side molding? An English designer had been hired around the same time. ‘My God, Dick,’ he said to me, ‘it looks like a ruddy ordnance vehicle.’ It did, too!”

Dick’s 1964 replacementl was a quantum leap forward—the first Rambler American that could honestly be called good looking.

When Ed Anderson retired, Dick was named to replace him. He started with projects already on the books, like the 1965-67 Marlin, a hasty attempt to ape the Big Three “glassbacks.” But once he could produce ground-up designs, Dick created sleek, flowing shapes, the diametric opposite of conventional Detroit cars.

From a styling standpoint, the 1968 Javelin, his answer to the Mustang and Camaro, bested both of them. Then, cutting a foot off the Javelin wheelbase, he created the AMX, more of a sports car than anything in Detroit other than the Corvette.

When I joined Automobile Quarterly in 1970, Dick was at his apogee. Every time AMC was counted out, he would reach into his bag of talent and produce Salvation.

In 1970 it was the Hornet, a clean-limbed compact, and the Gremlin subcompact, which Dick made by cutting off the Hornet’s back end. It was a desperate tactic, but it worked. The Gremlin sold like nickel hot dogs because with V8 power it wasn’t your typical buzz-box.

“Elephant foreskins”

The 1975 Matador coupe was his purest work. Elegant and smoothly integrated, it looked like 100 mph standing still. I visited him that year driving a new Granada from Ford’s press fleet.

“Good grief,” Dick said, gesturing toward its severe body creases. “Look at all that tortured sheet metal.” Then, pointing to the Matador in his driveway: “Why don’t you get a real car?”

I promised him I’d borrow a Matador as soon as I was back in the graces of our friend John Conde, AMC’s public relations manager.

A few days before, I’d met John at AMC headquarters, where Dick’s newest creation, the Pacer, was on a turntable, observed by a host of component salesmen and other supplicants. I said it was cute.

“What? Just look at that ugly toad,” John fumed, as heads turned. “One door wider than the other…all that glass…doors full of air. I told Teague a hundred times, that little troll won’t do!”

I repeated this to Dick, knowing he’d laugh—he took neither himself nor anyone else too seriously. Actually, he’d been betrayed by the production engineers. Had GM with its resources handled Pacer engineering, “the first wide small car” would have been a greater success.

Nearing retirement in 1985, Teague was getting bored. The government was in the design business big-time now, and controlled everything.

“What are you doing today?” I asked him once. “Government crash tests,” he quipped. “That’s what we’re reduced to. Every day we swing the pendulum at our bumpers, extended out from the body with elephant foreskins.” I cracked up, and he said: “Well, what would you call them?”

“J. Pierpont Teague” 

In retirement Dick was celebrated and in demand everywhere. We expected him to be around a long time, to regale us with his memories.

But then from his family, word began to filter that Dick was ill, and that cancer was one bunker from which he wouldn’t emerge, though as usual he’d fight like hell before he gave up.

It made no difference to his enthusiasms. Two weeks before he died, he phoned me to say his last design—a “1992 Packard”—would be on its way for use in The Packard Cormorant. By then his family said Dick was “functional” only twenty minutes a day.

Yet a week after he died his friend Ken Eberts, the great automotive artist, sent it along: “Dick wanted you to have this. He asked me to help finish it, but it is entirely his concept. I think it is his last design.”

Unlike many in his profession, Dick was never proprietorial about his work, quick to credit his colleagues, always ready to lighten up. When worshipful Packard folk would praise his famous 1955-56 “cathedral” taillights, Dick would say:

“Yeah, I was a big hero—J. Pierpont Teague. They raised my salary five dollars, which in those days was a great thing.” (Actually, it was rather more than that, but such was the Teague humor.)

And that’s what I remember most about my dear friend, who died far too young, for he still had so much to give. Everybody who knew Dick loved him. That’s a very large crowd. I’m proud to be a member of it.

More on Packard and its cars

“One Brief Shining Moment: Packard and Its 1929-30 Speedster,” 2023.

“Queen Mary: We Love Our 1950 Packard Eight Club Sedan,” 2022.

“Why Packard Failed,” Part 1 and Part 2, 2022.

“Brooks Stevens: The Seer Who Made Milwaukee Famous,” 2022.

“The Packard Magazine: Ne Plus Ultra of Automotive House Organs,” Part 1 and Part 2, 2021.

“The Packard Adventures of Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017.

Having written about cars and Winston Churchill for fifty years, I finally produced a piece on them both. From exotica like Mors, Napier and Rolls-Royce to more prosaic makes like Austin, Humber and Wolseley, the story was three decades in coming. But I am satisfied that it is now complete.

Humber for the Man

After the war, Lord Rootes and Churchill became close friends, exchanging Christmas gifts and farm animals, even collaborating politically. “So sorry that we did not do better in Coventry,” Rootes wrote after the 1950 general election.

Churchill was offered a new Mark III Humber Pullman that October, but demurred. The Tories had lost only narrowly, and he was sure he’d be returned to office soon. The following year they won. He remained prime minister until he retired in 1955.

By then he needed a new limo, but Humber had discontinued the Pullman. Churchill was forlorn: “I’m sure you could build one for me if you tried,” he wrote his friend. “You can’t let me down now, I need another Pullman that I can stretch out in.”

The sympathetic Billy Rootes found a low-mileage Mark IV and expensively rebuilt it. Technically works property, it remained on loan to Churchill for the rest of his life. It is now at the Louwman Museum in The Hague, Netherlands.

Churchill was a loyal Rootes customer. He bought a Hillman Minx in 1948, a Hillman Husky in 1958. In 1955, marking his 80th birthday the previous November, the Rootes Group presented him with a 1956 Humber Hawk Mark VIA estate, “a token of our appreciation of his services not only to the country, but to all of us.” The Hawk often accompanied Churchill on his holidays in France, where it was ideal for transporting his oil painting paraphernalia. 

Auxiliaries

Notable among Chartwell’s postwar farm vehicles was an army-surplus Jeep supplied by Wolfe’s Garage in Westerham (still doing business). Phil Johnson, a mechanic, devised a step to help Churchill climb in and out: “I altered it several times to his instructions. He was a meticulous man.”

In 1954, Churchill was presented by the Rover factory with a new Land Rover. It bore the number plate UKE 80. Rover said this stood for “UK Empire” and eighty years.”

UKE plates were current at the time in Kent, so it must have been easy to get one. I suspect Rover might have hunted around for the owner of UKE 80 to get the number they wanted, plates being transferable in Britain.

The technician who delivered the Land Rover offered to find some rough terrain to demonstrate where it could go: Sir Winston’s response was that he wanted to see terrain where it couldn’t go.

Dead shot

He often rode shotgun to his son-in-law on Chartwell Farm. Once they drove up to a square of uncut wheat, where workers had cornered a rabbit. Aged 80, Churchill alighted, grabbed his piece, and dispatched the hare with one shot. “He was a great marksman,” said Christopher Soames. The Land Rover sold at auction for £129,000 in 2012.

At the end there were two Morris Oxfords: Farina saloons, mostly used by Clementine Churchill. George Weatherley of the Cambridge-Oxford Owners Club has tracked both; they are currently insured, but not taxed. In 2013 the ’64 made £51,000 at auction, through its famous association. There is however no Churchill record of a Vanden Plas 4 Litre R allegedly owned by Lady Churchill, destroyed in a banger car race a few years ago.

“Familiars”

The Churchill car roster lists several “familiars”—not Churchill’s, but known to or used by him.

The best-known over his last years was a 1934 Rolls-Royce 20/25 limousine by Thrupp & Maberly, hired from Frank Jenner of Westerham.

Jenner said he bought the car because Sir Winston hankered for a Rolls-Royce, perhaps recalling his old Silver Ghost with more pleasure than it gave in 1921. In it, Jenner said, Churchill made his last journey from Chartwell to London, in October 1964. He died there three months later. This beautiful Rolls is available for hire from Advantage CarHire.

To the last, Churchill’s staff remembered the sense of urgency so characteristic of the man. In the old Humber, “Murray, the detective, would sit at [the chauffeur’s] side, quietly murmuring, ‘slow down here’ or ‘pull in to the left a little more,’” wrote Roy Howells, a male nurse.

“At the back Sir Winston would be…tapping on the glass partition and calling out, ‘Go on!’ Whenever he felt Bullock was slow in overtaking he would lean forward and bellow, ‘Now!’ It does Bullock great credit that he never really took the chances his passenger would have liked….”

Addendum: Churchill’s last ride

BBC Regional News reports that the Austin Vanden Plas hearse which transported Sir Winston’s coffin at his funeral has been fully restored. The work was by done by Jo Burge of Classic Marine Engines in Suffolk.

The Vanden Plas was used for some time on funeral work, but deteriorated over the years and was head for the scrap heap. Bristol Memorial Woodlands had it restored—a frame-off project which took Burge three years. “It wasn’t really the car we were restoring,” Burge told the BBC. “It was the story.”

“Sir Winston was not a motorist but enjoyed good transport as a means to an end,” recalled Phil Johnson. “Comfort and reliability came through as paramount. He saw cars as incredible time wasters and they were surely not his scene.” Well, they are ours—and intertwine amusingly with the saga of the great man.

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The Tucker was a dramatic break with tradition. Its engine was a 166 horsepower flat opposed aluminum six, rear-mounted for optimum weight distribution. Its frame was lower than the centerline of the wheels. Suspension was fully independent. The ratio of pounds to horsepower was lower than any previous American car. Top speed was said to be 120 mph.

Other imaginative features included a “cyclops” center headlight that swung with the front wheels, a protrusion-free dashboard, and a ”storm cellar” compartment into which the front seat occupants were supposed to dive in the event of collision. The doors were cut into the roof for ease of entry. Individual glove boxes were in the door panels. A “pop-out” windshield ejected in a crash.

Tucker styling, by Alex Tremulis, was arresting, and the car was supposed to sell for under $2500. All this was mind-boggling to people for whom the newest cars were the 1947 Kaiser, Frazer and Studebaker—which, though freshly styled, were entirely conventional under the skin.

Francis Coppola’s 1988 film Tucker: The Man and His Dream,  starring Jeff Bridges, colorfully recounts the story. But it tends to cast Preston Tucker himself as the victim of a cabal led by rival manufacturers and the politicians in their pockets.

There is no doubt that certain Michigan politicians looked askance at Tucker. Alas Preston himself made promises he couldn’t keep. While Studebaker and Kaiser-Frazer built millions of cars, Tucker built only 51. By 1950 his enterprise had dissolved under charges of fraud, and the trial of Preston and seven of his colleagues.

Tucker redux

For awhile it looked like Tucker was going to set the industry on its ear. He rented the largest plant under one roof in the world, sold $15 million worth of stock, and built prototypes which performed impressively well.

But as a serious mass-production car, the Tucker was dead on arrival, from the standpoints of both cost and its quirky features. Illustrative of these problems is the story of Tucker engine development.

The first Tucker engine was a huge 589, installed only in the prototype or “Tin Goose.” Starting it required 30 to 60 volts of external power. It had other problems, according to Richard E. Jones, writing in The Milestone Car: “No satisfactory hydraulic valve actuating system or practical fuel injection were developed.”

Preston Tucker continued to promise fuel injection, but the necessary level of performance was never met. Ex-Cell-O fuel injection was tried, but in February 1948, Tucker asked his engineers to test their engine with a carburetor, because “considerable work was still required on the injector.”

It took another decade for General Motors to get fuel injection to work reliably (sort of). Yet the decision to postpone fuel injection occurred months before Preston promised that his car would have it.

Bust upon bust

Finally, Tucker opted for the famous Aircooled Motors 335 cid six. From it, he promised 275 horsepower and speeds up to 150 mph. Did its price reflect reality? Richard Jones wrote: “The average cost of the ninety-one engines delivered through the end of August 1948 was $1418 each. And this was exclusive of $128,000 expended by Aircooled for engineering, tooling and development work.” Subtracting $1418 from the projected price of $2450 leaves $1032 for the rest of the car. Retail. Out of that, Tucker promised to wring features like the swiveling third headlamp, disc brakes, seatbelts, independent suspension, etc., etc.

Tucker realized the impractical cost of the 335 engine when, in August 1948, David Doman was assigned to create a cheaper alternative, the “335U.”  The dreamlike quality of the Tucker episode is nowhere better illustrated than by Doman’s brief: The new engine must pack the same horsepower and displacement, but cost a third less.

Doman tried, using a two-piece crank and cylinder block and two heads covering three cylinders each. But there was never any sign that the 335U could meet the boss’s requirements. Preston then ordered another 125 of the original 335 (at $1500 each).

Richard Jones correctly summarizes the 335 as fitted to the fifty “production” cars: “[O]ne of the most impressive automobile engines of that day or this, [whose] quality and aircraft standards precluded mass production.”

On the road

There are similar things to say about the rest of the Tucker drivetrain. Former GM president Ed Cole, interviewed by Michael Lamm in 1973, mentioned Tucker’s first configuration of “driving the rear wheels with a pair of converters, and transmitting axle torque through a converter.” Tucker had to abandon that. John R. Bond of Road & Track, in another interview, said: “…you had all that weight out back and a pretty long wheelbase…the handling was catastrophic.”

Most of those who have driven a Tucker agree that, like the early Corvair, it’s perfectly safe, provided you are competent to handle drastic oversteer. We all know what happened to Corvair owners who could not. Some sued General Motors.

Things about the Tucker that first looked good did not bear up in practice. The famous swiveling center headlamp was itself a compromise. Tucker originally wanted a fixed center headlamp and the flanking lamps turning—along with the front fender assemblies. Tucker designer Alex Tremulis talked him out of that—what professional wouldn’t? But the center swivel-light would itself have been banned as a hazard to navigation, frying the eyeballs of oncoming drivers at the apex of every curve.

Bright ideas, unintended consequences

There were the novel Tucker doors, cut into the roof for easy of entry and egress. But there were no rain gutters, and in a downpour they bid fair to soak the hapless passenger.

There was the “storm cellar” compartment ahead of the seats, which Tucker said one could “drop into” during a crash—as if you’d have that kind of time.

The “storm cellar” seems to have been a fallback safety position. Tucker wanted seatbelts, but staffers convinced him they would imply, at that time, an unsafe car. (They did exactly that when Nash briefly offered them as a 1950 option.)

The movie depicts Tuckers with modern metal-to-metal seatbelts. If ever installed they would have been the contemporary fabric-to-metal type. But, like the disc brakes he also vainly promised, seatbelts seem to have been forgotten by the time Tucker framed his final promotion.

It’s too bad. Many of the concepts were novel, interesting and good. It had a remarkably low drag coefficient (though I can scarcely believe the claim of .30). Tucker’s elegant lowness, lightweight rear engine, and safety features however crude were all commendable.

But Preston Tucker lacked the business acumen to find sufficient time and money for their development. To dub him, as the film does, a genius thwarted in a willful conspiracy led by Detroit—whose main problem in those days was to get enough steel to build leftover prewar designs—is to fantasize.

Business models compared

Compare Tucker with the other major postwar attempt at a new automobile: Kaiser-Frazer. K-F was launched by a sales executive who loved automobiles, Joseph W. Frazer. Frazer needed cash, so he teamed up with Henry Kaiser, doyen of wartime shipbuilding, backed by the best banks and credit in the country. Tucker didn’t find, nor apparently did he seek, an angel of such stature. One wonders what might have happened had he met Henry Kaiser.

Kaiser-Frazer’s initial capitalization was $52 million—and it wasn’t enough. Chevrolet had set $100 million aside just to redesign its 1949 models. Henry Kaiser later admitted, “we should have raised $200 million.” Tucker raised $15 million.

From incorporation to first cars took Kaiser-Frazer eighteen months; It took Tucker two and a half years. From moving into its new plant to its earliest pilot models took K-F only six months; it took Tucker eighteen.

Kaiser-Frazer’s first full year of 1946, which didn’t see any cars until June, ended with 12,000 units built and was followed by 140,000 in 1947. Tucker’s first full year of 1947 saw no cars, and fifty were built in 1948.

K-F’s maximum employment reached nearly 20,000; Tucker predicted 35,000, hut never broke 2000.

Kaiser-Frazer satisfied the Securities and Exchange Commission by admitting in its first stock prospectus that its program was a pure gamble. Tucker floated one stock issue and promptly created a mess for itself through several false statements and unsubstantiated claims in its prospectus. Preston was caught making indirect payments to promoters, planning to assign work to his mother’s machine shop in Ypsilanti which didn’t have the capacity. And the SEC, rightly or wrongly, never let him live it down.

Business strategies

Like Tucker, Henry Kaiser promised features that didn’t appear—unit body construction, torsion bar suspension, front-wheel-drive. Unlike Tucker, Kaiser substituted a car he could deliver. If it wasn’t what he had originally intended, at least it was a vehicle on four wheels that people could drive and buy.

Kaiser mapped out a production line covering millions of square feet with the help of an ex-Chrysler production expert. He was building 200 cars a day almost from the start. Tucker sent fifty cars down a conveyor and called it a production line.

When Republic Steel’s wartime blast furnace in Cleveland was put up for bids by the War Assets Administration, Tucker’s bid was highest. Then without warning in August, 1948, the WAA awarded it to Kaiser-Frazer. War Assets claimed K-F had raised the money, which they had. Tucker claimed WAA never told him the price was going up. But Jess Larson, WAA’s administrator, told Tucker his bid was inadequate and asked Tucker to demonstrate the ability to run the blast furnace on May 28th, long before Kaiser’s bid arrived.

It is interesting to look at what later happened to the Republic Steel furnace. When Kaiser got it, Republic protested, saying Kaiser-Frazer had “pulled strings.” Affronted, Henry Kaiser called for a congressional investigation. Larson told Congress he would mediate between K-F and Republic.

The feud ended with the plant going to K-F as high bidder, but allowing Republic to operate it through mid-1949, paying K-F to do so—but less than it would have had to pay War Assets in rent. Republic came out ahead, and in 1949 signed a five-year contract with K-F to retain the furnace while supplying K-F and other customers with steel. Everyone was happy.

Timeline anomalies

If the Kaiser-Frazer comparisons don’t tell you something, consider the Tucker timeline. The plant was taken over in 1946, yet the stock application didn’t come until June, 1947. What was happening in the meantime?

Tucker began selling stock in September, 1947, but was still trying to decide on an engine the following spring. The first 500 Aircooled Motors engines didn’t get ordered until May. What was happening in the meantime?

The first Tucker cars were delivered in prototype form in March 1948, but by August when the plant closed it had built only fifty. (Happily, most all of them survive.) Yet Tucker claimed to have a production line that would build 1000 cars a day by mid-1948. What was happening in the meantime?

One can only conclude of Preston Tucker that brilliant though he may have been, he made impossible promises. This alienated some of his best people. When patent attorney and Tucker board chairman, Col. Harry A. Toulmin, Jr., quit the company in September 1947, he pointed to “fast sell” practices such as promoting stock on the basis of an unfinished, untested single prototype.

The Tucker trial

It was cold in Chicago, that windswept January Sunday in 1950, and the atmosphere was reflected in the U.S. Courthouse on Atlanta Street—the same courthouse where the feds had finally convicted Al Capone.

Sadly, Preston Tucker was nearly without friends by the time of the trial. There were seven other defendants in court, and not one of them spoke very highly of him. Somewhere along the way he had alienated nearly everyone, which is quite an accomplishment. Former Sales VP Fred Rockelman, who had lengthy industry experience at Chrysler, was long estranged.

Another vice president, Herbert Morley, testified that $800,000 in Tucker receipts couldn’t be accounted for in 1947. In 1948 Morley had complained that Tucker’s mother was unable to build transmissions at her Ypsilanti Machine and Tool Company.

Even chief designer Alex Tremulis, who warmly supported Tucker’s engineering abilities, admitted that Preston wanted many impractical design ideas, such as front fenders that turned with the wheels and a periscope rearview device.

Now the jury was out—had been for some time. One may easily wonder what was going on behind Preston Tucker’s placid countenance, waiting for a verdict that could bring him a cumulative 155 years in jail and fines totaling $160,000.

But we never found out. Nor did we learn if Tucker could build another car. As the jury eventually told, he was cleared of 31 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud and illegal stock procedures. And by 1956 he was dead of cancer. Or, some said, a broken heart.

Conspiracy theories

The old song about General Motors “doing in the little guy” has oft been repeated over Tucker. Preston’s well-publicized defenses referred to a dark, clandestine attempt to thwart him. It’s rather odd, then, that Tucker electronics were supplied by GM Delco.

In Tucker’s defense, his case was an example of big government (as big as it was then) run paranoid. But that was a haphazard time after a major war. The Securities and Exchange Commission was not concerned only with Tucker in those days. In fact, its hands were fuller than they’d ever been.

Government watchdogs looked for promoters with an idea and enough money to push it, selling stock in a company designed to produce in the end nothing. Bureaucrats are dogged folk with great staying power, especially when somebody they’ve already scored a few points against takes to charging that they’re out to get him. Ask Donald Trump.

What about Senator Homer Ferguson, Republican from Michigan, and his Michigan appointee to the SEC, Harry A. McDonald, who leaked news of the SEC investigation to the press? Beyond doubt they acted unethically, especially McDonald. It would be the height of naïveté to believe the interests of their state’s main industry didn’t occur to them when they heard about Tucker. Yet even as McDonald ran his little plot to publicize the Tucker investigation, the company had a history of SEC violations dating to its first stock issue.

In retrospect

Preston Tucker, wrote auto historian Michael Lamm in 1973, “was essentially a smalltime promoter who’d gone big-time. He was out of his pond. He remained a stranger and perhaps even a threat to the SEC, and he didn’t know anyone in government. Preston was careless in some of his pencil-work, perhaps in a bit of his talk, too, and when the SEC jumped on him about those initial fifteen irregularities, the irregularities did exist.”

Well said. Nevertheless. Preston Tucker conceived one amazing automobile. Nevertheless, the government did overreact, despite all he did to earn it. If GM didn’t try to stop him, certain representatives of the state of Michigan did. With a different approach, three times more capital, and wiser business heads, the story might have been different. But hindsight is cheap, and far too easily indulged.

Notes and further reading

This piece is reprised from “Tucker: Brief Reflections,” The Milestone Car no. 11, Spring 1975; and “Postwar Cars: The Tucker Bubble,” Car Collector, January 1989.

See also “The Greatness of Alex Tremulis,” in three parts, beginning here.

And: “Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” in two parts, beginning here.

A colleague in Devon, introduced over Churchill subjects, writes: “I’m curious about your motor writing. I’m a RoSPA qualified advanced driver and had one of the first righthand drive Audi Quattros. Our local group had a fascinating talk by an automobile writer who reviewed 502 cars and wrote the book, he said, on the Mini.”

A: The automobile: still plugging along

Yes, I still write feature articles for Collectible Automobile (US) and The Automobile (UK).  I also write the value guides for Collectible Automobile. The latter are very droll: “Would you really pay $50,000 for one of these? … The instruments are down by your knees, where you won’t have to look at them.” (Which is why I write those columns without a byline.) Recent automobile articles are archived here. To access websites for the two magazines click CA or TA.

Two subjects—Churchill and the automobile—have kept me occupied most of my life. For an article that combines them both, see “Churchill’s Motorcars,” archived in three parts beginning here.

My relationship with Publications International, publishers of Consumer Guide and Collectible Automobile, is the longest of my career. It’s been fun all the way. It began in 1977, when I co-authored with Jeffrey Godshall a thin little illustrated book called 1957 Cars. Jeff was a talented car designer and writer, lost to us in 2019, greatly missed by the autoholic  fraternity.

You remember 1957…. No? Well, too bad. That was a very good year for the automobile. Think Everly Brothers: “And he’s got a new Fifty-seven too.” (I can’t find a copy of 1957 Cars anywhere, neither on Amazon nor Bookfinder.com.)

The Mini and its descendants

Ah the Mini. A brilliant idea by the inimitable Alec Issigonis, failed in execution, or at least in marketing. It was never really right for the American market, but a huge success in Europe. It led in turn to the somewhat larger BMC 1100 (ADO16), and then to the Maxi, which failed badly.

A friend owned a derivative, the Vanden Plas Princess 1100: a “Watch Charm Rolls.” Outside it was mostly stock 1100, but the inside was swathed in Connolly leather, wool carpets and burled walnut. It was a little gem—overpriced and completely wide of the market.

The more basic version of ADO16, sold as the MG 1100 in the USA, briefly bid to rival Volkswagen. The Bug was reaching its maximum appeal when the 1100 arrived in 1962. The British rival had four doors, much more room inside, more luggage capacity, and similar fuel economy. But right away there were problems.

Debacles

Kjell Qvale, who sold many British cars in California and liked them particularly, told us a sad story. The engineers back in England, he said, were baffled by the 1100’s service problems.

The cars were burning out engines in Los Angeles and burning up clutches in San Francisco. Why such opposite problems in two cities so close on the map? They’d never set foot in the United States.

So it went with the British industry, whose approach to foreign markets was often myopic.

In 1973 at Automobile  Quarterly, we published a panel discussion on UK automaking—what was left of it. British Leyland were offended—scroll to our title spread here.

To dispute our conclusions and show how bright they were, Leyland organized a 1974 press tour of factories. I remember my first visit to MG at Abingdon-on-Thames. It was like something out of Dickens.

(The odd thing was that the American industry started doing the same dumb things a few years later, with very similar results.)

An English obsession

That was the first of twenty trips to the UK. It sounds irreligious, but I’ve never been able to relate to Ferraris, possibly because I could never afford one. Give me a quirky English rig like the Sunbeam Harrington Le Mans, with an interesting pedigree and a shape you don’t see every day.

There’s something about the smell of leather and wool, the way the rain beads on the bonnet, that reminds you of the days when almost anybody in England could build a sports car, and most of them did. A worker in Coventry once said to me about the Triumph TR6: “It rides hard and smells of oil, mate. They just don’t make cars like that any more.”

In 1977, we brought “Babs,” the Land Speed Record car, back Pendine Sands on the 50th anniversary of the crash and death of the great Welsh racing driver John Godfrey Parry Thomas. (After the crash Babs was buried in the sand. Years later she was dug up and restored by an intrepid Welshman, Owen Wyn Owen.)

We hosted automotive tours of England, and were welcomed at fabled shrines like Morgan and Aston Martin Lagonda and Rolls-Royce. Grand memories.

A vanished world

My friend above wrote from the West Country, which I knew well, having explored and rented cottages from Dorset to Somerset, Devon to Cornwall. We had close friends in Bristol, who co-founded the Triumph Mayflower Club. There I visited a “niche manufacturer” by the same name, Bristol Motors, run by an affable gent with the misleading name of Anthony Crook.

Bristol had only one showroom, in Kensington High Street, London. Its cars were built by hand: big, potent gran turismos most often powered by American V-8s. Tony Crook sold out in 1997 and the firm struggled on into receivership in 2020. He was kind man and a brilliant innovator who loved the automobile.

Back in the 70s and early 80s, Britain was a driver’s paradise. The roads, unhampered by extremes of temperature as in the USA, were billiard table smooth and immaculate. You could drive as fast as was reasonable and (if sober) overtake on curves.

Over the years I drove 80,000 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats, the Hebrides to Dover.I once drove a Triumph Dolomite Sprint from Carlisle to London in four hours. It was like dying and going to heaven.

Alas came speed cameras and too many cars. Recently a friend in Oxford was dinged for doing 32 in a 30 mph zone. More recently you can’t even bring a car in there. One Saturday on one of my last visits to Dorset, I had to use an Ordnance map and one-track lanes to get round the traffic in and out of Dorchester. I don’t drive there anymore.

The greatest advertisement in the history of the automobile, “Somewhere West of Laramie,” was written for a medium-priced car during a dull era and a duller economy, by a cocky little 40-year-old redhead, Edward S. Jordan.

The Jordan was what we then called an “assembled automobile.” Outside suppliers provided its components—albeit of high quality. Ned Jordan explained the idea in a 1945 monograph, The Inside Story of Adam and Eve: 

We were pioneers of a new technique in assembly production, custom style sales and advertising…had only one air compressor to power the assembly line…bought only the finest component parts from the most experienced quality parts makers…designed a chassis for those parts that possessed the most ideal weight distribution yet attained. Then we “dolled them up” just as every good car is dressed today.

Not many care about the cars, though a few hundred survive, and from the mid-1920s they were pretty snappy numbers. Some Jordans are even designated “Classics” by the Classic Car Club of America. What mattered was the magic Ned Jordan wove around them: the most romantic (and often risqué) prose ever expended on an automobile. After Packard, Jordans were the first cars seriously promoted to women.

Ned, Kate and John Henry

Edward S. Jordan was born in 1882, in the lumber town of Merrill, Wisconsin, the only boy in a family of six. He was talkative, brash and a bit rude. He had heaps of determination but little money. Ned wore white spats and bright ties and well-tailored suits, but he wasn’t a huckster. He had style—like the cars he built and the words he wrote.

Working his way through college as a newspaper reporter, Jordan discovered his talent for words. Two people provided his sales and advertising know-how: his mother and John Henry Patterson.

Kate Jordan taught Ned about people—”vital,” he wrote, “to all good advertising. She never used the word ‘psychology.’ But she did say that ‘Tilly Hart wound up at the Devil Creek place because she valued silk stockings above her immortal soul.’ And: ‘Mrs. Webster’s Fred has been raised to $5 a day, so she is trying to learn to like olives and read a book.’”

J.H. Patterson was President of the Google of its day: National Cash Register (NCR). It commanded 97% of the business machine market. John Henry hired Ned Jordan out of college, advising him: “Do at least one thing, however simple it may be, a little better than anybody else. Then go out and make your prospective buyer feel as you do about your product. Just remember, a man is only half-sold until his wife is sold.”

“How’d you get fired?”

Ned married one of the Jeffery girls from Kenosha, which put him into the car business. In 1907 he arrived at Jeffery, freshly fired by Patterson: “Any man fired by John H. is worth from $10,000 a year on up to any business. ‘How’d you get fired?’ was the lodge greeting among old NCR men.”

Jeffery hired Jordan as advertising manager, and he was general sales manager before he was 30. “Confidentially,” he said, “I was the one who encouraged Jeffery to sell to Nash, because they knew I was then planning to organize the Jordan Company. By now, Ned had seen the light:

Cars are too dull and drab. People dress smartly, so why should they drive prosaic looking automobiles? I think people are growing sick and tired of ordinary cars. Great careening arks of bulk and extravagance. The world is too full of the commonplace.

Do you know why Henry Ford is the greatest man in the automobile industry? All the other early manufacturers built cars in which they like to ride themselves. He was the first to build a car for the other fellow.

Jordan told dealers he’d emphasize “appearance, style, comfort and convenience, power in reserve, durable service and quality…. Thousands of Dodge and Buick owners aspire to own a better car. If you can sell 25 Jordans, you stand a good chance of making 45% on your investment.”

“We were a bunch of bright kids,” he reflected. “I was 33, the rest 28, when we started. We did make a lot of money, awfully fast. The Idea was almost too gol-darned good.”

“The girl who loves to swim and paddle and shoot”

In Detroit, chief engineer Russell Begg developed a body to wrap around a six-cylinder Continental engine. They had no factory, so Ned paid $50,000 for a five-acre site in Cleveland. By mid-1915, Jordans were coming off the line.

Jordan recognized the closed car market and added a sedan and coupe in 1917. By 1918 he was building 5000 cars a year—impressive for a small independent. Plant space was expanded, bonuses paid. In April 1919 came the first Jordan Playboy. Hardly anyone noticed—but Ned was just getting started. His next inspiration was named Eleanor:

Dancing one night at the Mayfield Country Club, Cleveland, with a real outdoor girl, Eleanor Borton. “Why don’t you build a swanky roadster for the girl who loves to swim and paddle and shoot, and for the boy who loves the roar of the cutout?” asked Eleanor. “Girl, you’ve given me an idea worth a million dollars! Thanks for the best dance I’ve ever had. I’m leaving for New York.”

Next day…a custom body designer permitted a private peek at a roadster designed for Billie Burke as a present from her fiancé, Florenz Ziegfeld. Burglary ensues! The design, very simple, sketched out on an envelope in an inside pocket. Result: the Playboy (a name adapted from Sygne’s Playboy of the Western World ) became a part of the American language. A dashing, debonaire Something in Copenhagen blue.

We built one just for the fun of doing it. Stepped on it, and the dogs barked and the chickens ran. It’s a shame to call it a roadster, so full is this brawny, graceful thing with the vigor of boyhood and morning.

“The Port of Missing Men”

There was a certain risqué character to Jordan ads. Though Ned specialized in wheedling women buyers, he also had a crack at the male market. After all, what better customers for a car called the Playboy?

So in 1920, well before “Somewhere West of Laramie,” he tempted the propriety watchdogs of a century ago, just as anxious to stifle “offensive” prose as the self-appointed nannies of today’s social media. Let Ned himself tell the story:

The trick was to get the copy to the [Saturday Evening Post] in time to beat the deadline. And [not] to bring the Society for the Suppression of Vice down on our necks. They were squeamish then….

I grabbed a piece of stationery, sketched a lonely roadside inn, marked the building “midnight blue”…big, walloping moon…a couple of stars…one pale red spot of color behind the curtain of one window. Playboy two-passenger roadster parked in front…line for illustration: “The Port of Missing Men.”

A letter from vice headquarters. And the reply: “We regret exceedingly that our recent advertisement has offended your high moral sense. It is evident that we must exercise closer supervision over our art department. Perhaps if the artist had placed the lights in two or more windows…. I assure you that this advertisement will not appear in the Post again.

That was Ned Jordan, the man who put sex appeal on wheels.

Wooing Eve

By 1918, women were buying more cars than ever—a development not lost on the canny Jordan. So his ads began appealing directly to them. Flattering and beguiling, they conjured up wanderlust and adventure, appealing to a woman’s taste and style:

Eve walks into the showroom because she’s read an advertisement that is “down her alley.” No injector manifolds or gear reduction talk. No engineering details. That’s all fine and dandy if you’re selling locknuts.

She looks. The color is Burgundy Old Wine, Egyptian Bronze, Ocean Sand grey, Copenhagen blue. The color of the sun, the sky, the grass, her gown. She feels the upholstery material always. It’s Laidlaw—eight dollars per yard. She steps in, grasps the wheel, relaxes on Marshall cushion springs: A position of poise she sees reflected in the mirror in the salesroom. Pictures herself in the darkest window as she drives down the avenue. Her good taste approves. What price Tiffany? she wonders to herself.

The debonaire salesman would say, “Well, madam, you can see this car has so many things that only custom cars have. And we built so few and for a quite limited group of buyers. Let’s see now.… Silvertown Cord tires with two extras, wire wheels, Crane Simplex finish, Waltham clock, Vogue vanity cases. Of course you want this car for your personal use…. We wouldn’t want to deprive your husband of the old car….

“The price is $3475, including the Cordovan leather boot and saddle bag in the tonneau for your personal things. You’ll want that, won’t you?” Oh! the joy of watching a real salesman prove that he’s not just a price-conscious order taker.

Laramie, July 1923

Ned Jordan spent July 4th, 1923 at his Rhode Island summer home, watching his daughter Jane perform tricks on a salty pony. “That child could ride—well enough to win prizes at rodeos….”

Three days later, on the Overland Limited, bound for San Francisco. A chat, at about dusk, with Mr. Austin, a New York lawyer, in the forward end of the lounge car. We passed some station in Wyoming, too late to catch the sign. Just then a husky Somebody whirled up on a rarin’ cayoose…he, acting as if he’d never seen a Union Pacific train. She reminded me of Jane.

“Where are we now?” I inquired, to make conversation.

“Oh, somewhere west of Laramie,” yawned my companion.

I took an envelope from my pocket, wrote down the phrase, and added, as I looked from the window, “there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is—the Jordan Playboy was built for her….”

Artist Fred Cole provided the perfect artwork of the girl on her horse racing a Jordan Playboy. The job was done.

“My wings are spread…I’ll fly to you”

Imagine how that broadside hit the war-weary public—women especially. Car ads then were filled with paragraphs of specifications. Not Jordan’s. “That was no mundane vehicle of a solid sphere,” Ned recalled. “That car was an ethereal chariot, imbued with the spirit of young romance and old boxing gloves….

The letters poured in. A girl in Ohio wrote: “I don’t want a position with your Company. I just want to meet the man who wrote that advertisement. I am 23, blonde, weight 130. My wings are spread. Just say the word and I’ll fly to you.”

I think the best things are written like that. You write as you feel…or, you compose with an effort, hoping to make others feel. Stephen Foster asked his brother to name a southern river to use in his song…rejected “Peedee” for the name “Suwanee.” Brother knew his geography. Stephen knew rhythm. With the right copy you can get a smile out of the Sphinx.

The best Jordans began with the 1925 Line Eight: 125.5 inches of wheelbase, rakishly low, 74 horsepower, an unprecedented turn of speed, only $1695. Jordan’s best year was 1926: over 11,000 cars, led by the Line Eight Playboy and the  senior Great Line Eights.

“When the last dull guest has gone…”

Ned predicted a good year in 1927, “but no repeat of ’26.” Then he made a mistake, one often made in the car business. He launched a small car before its time.

The Little Custom expressed Jordan’s traditional goal of lightness, balance, precision and economy. It had chiseled lines, crowned fenders, aluminum radiator, luxurious upholstery, a wicker dash with polished walnut instrument panel. It flopped.

The company ran into the red. “The big volume manufacturers began selling on time payments, financing their distributors,” Jordan complained. “The shadow of 1929 was clearly on the wall. We started to liquidate in 1928, finished in 1931.”

Jordan’s health failed along with his marriage after 1927. His interest waned, though his firm toward the end built its best cars ever. The company went out in style, fielding the ultimate Jordan, the aptly named Model Z. The factory built only 14 (one survives). The 1930-31 models saw no changes, and Jordan had vanished by 1932. Estimates vary, but total production was probably about  70,000.

“Heigh-ho!…for the open road…”

Were Jordans really any good? “If you want to find out, ask one of the owners,” Ned would say. “There are a few on the road yet. I know one that has gone 400,000 miles. The owner got a lump in his throat when I told him my name. He loves that car—and it’s four times as old as my daughter Kate.”

Ned Jordan never reentered the car business. He remarried in 1940 and joined MacArthur Advertising, where he spun prose for three-dimensional signs in railroad terminals. In the Fifties he enjoyed a comeback. writing a popular column, “Ned Jordan Speaks,” for Automotive News. “I won’t charge you a nickel for my pontifical advice,” he wrote a friend of mine. “It’s always free.”

Jordan died in New York in 1958, the original romancer of the automobile. His “Golden Girl from Somewhere” never aged. Through Ned’s words, she’s still there in our collective memory:

When the Spring is on the mountain and the day is at the door…leave the hot pavements of the town. Then heigh-ho!…for the open road. Five roads to the right, five roads to the left…and you’ll greet the rising sun in El Dorado.

***

Letters from readers

This article was originally published in four parts in 2011. So as not to lose them, I reprise comments received at that time… RML

Michael Robertson: Thank you, Mr. Jordan, for that wonderful advertisement. I wonder what happened to the 130 pound blonde. I experienced a Freudian Slip when I read “My wings are spread.” RML: Tut-tut, Mr. Robertson. Somewhere West of Laramie, there’s a silver-haired woman who knows what you’re talking about…

Tim Lyman: Was there an association between Jordan and Cole automobiles? In what old magazines should I look for Jordan ads? RML: I don’t think there was one. Cole was in Indianapolis, Jordan in Cleveland. Fred Cole was the artist of the famous “Somewhere West of Laramie” ad, but I don’t think he had a connection to Cole automobiles. Look for ’20s copies of The Literary Digest, Vogue and Saturday Evening Post, among others. Search the web and eBay for Jordan car ads.

Ike: Fascinating story! Thank you! RML: Labor of love, Ike.

Steve Salmi’s Indie Auto is an interesting opinion website for car nuts, focusing on auto history, mostly American. It’s worth a visit for freewheeling thoughts and second-guessing triumphs and tragedies. Recently Steve reviewed a book I’d forgotten, The Complete History of General Motors 1908-1986 (with Jan P. Norbye; Skokie, Illinois: Publications International, 1987.) “Langworth and Norbye,” says the review, “made excuses for General Motors’ big-car fixation”:

The authors were presumably responding to Brock Yates’ (1983, 2018) contention that Detroit failed  adequately to respond to a rising tide of foreign small cars because its top executives were “Grosse Pointe myopians” who lived such insular lives that they did not comprehend the cultural shifts taking place in the likes of California.

It’s nice to be remembered, even critically, for something we wrote nearly 40 years ago. (As I recall, we refused to write beyond 1975 or so, given the sorry state management had reduced GM to by then; the editors brought it up to date.) But I was left perplexed by the accusation of “diatribes” and “making excuses” for Detroit’s postwar fetish with big cars. I assured Indie Auto that my late friend Jan and I were not responding to something Brock Yates said. (If Brock actually wrote that car sizes were dictated by “Grosse Pointe myopians,” he was just stirring the pot—something at which he was a master.)

Age of the Dinosaurs

I remember a 1973 remark of our brilliant Automobile Quarterly editor Don Vorderman, to the great Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. “Americans,” said Don, “generally buy the biggest car they can afford. Europeans buy the best car they can afford.” Giugiaro, Don recalled, “just sadly shook his head. Perhaps we should, too.”

Of course, that was a long time ago, and we know more about cars now. But it’s always good to look back and benefit from past foolishness.

Indie Auto stated: “U.S. automakers ignored the growth of imports until they introduced decontented compacts in 1970.” While Detroit’s Big Three did ignore imports when they were a small slice of the market, they brought out smaller cars in 1960, after Rambler sales soared and the Lark temporarily saved Studebaker. Caught napping, they rushed out the Corvair, Falcon and Valiant, the first so-called “compacts.” Almost immediately, market forces dictated the arrival of larger “intermediates.” Thus the Chevy Corvair was soon accompanied by the Chevy II, and then the yet larger Chevelle, which handily outsold both.

“The compact Rambler sold well enough that it singlehandedly saved Nash,” states Indie Auto, “while the sales of its big cars slowed to a trickle.” Norbye and I “failed to acknowledge that American Motors Corporation sales fell off when the company began pushing big cars again.”

Both statements are true. The Rambler surge was almost wholly due to public demand for more economical cars during the late Fifties and early Sixties. Demand increased during the 1958 Recession, the death knell for medium-priced big cars like the newly-introduced Edsel. Long-established makes like DeSoto, Nash and Hudson disappeared.

George Romney: right place at the right time

George Romney, president of American Motors in 1954-62, had a car buyers wanted, and Rambler sales took off. When his successor, Roy Abernethy, opted to turn AMC from a niche manufacturer into a full-line company, he ran into the Big Three’s dominant products, and AMC’s market share collapsed.

Of course Romney also brought in enlightened management that helped build a more efficient company. But I always thought he happened to be where he was at the right time. The first Nash Ramblers (1950) were little more successful than other “econo-cars” of the era: the Henry J, Aero-Willys or Hudson Jet. It took a shift in public taste to interest buyers alternatives to what Romney called “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.”  The Rambler became a game-saver virtually by accident, when a small but growing segment of the U.S. buyer market began thinking economy. It was there to salvage AMC, which would otherwise have been stuck with middle-priced losers during the 1958 recession.

Rebuttals and “plucked chickens”

Steve and Indie Auto gamely replied, asking two questions: (1) Where is the evidence that the public wanted ever larger Chevrolets, say between 1954 and 1969?  Answer: The same place as evidence that they wanted larger Cadillacs. (The Vorderman-Giugiaro dialogue.) For most of the 1960s, those big Chevys, powered by ever more potent V-8s, sold like hotcakes.

(2) If the 1962-63 downsized Dodge and Plymouth were such disasters, how come they outsold their full-size counterparts? Because the full-size models were more costly and naturally produced in lower volume.

Designer Virgil Exner called those smaller cars the “plucked chickens.” They were the result of a basic miscalculation: Management had thought GM intended to bring out downsized Chevys in 1962. Realizing too late that this wasn’t the case, they rushed out the full-size Dodge Custom 880 to give Dodge dealers a big car to sell. (Plymouth dealers already had one, since they were dualled with Chrysler, whose Newport sold for only $250 more than the previous year’s Fury. The Custom 880 was simply a Dodge-badged Newport.)

Of course the “dinosaurs” carried a higher price and did not outsell the “plucked chickens.” The 880 was also a stopgap to capture the market vacated by dropping DeSoto. (Ironically, before its demise, there were clay models of the proposed 1962 DeSoto with styling similar to Ex’s “plucked chicken” Plymouths and Dodges. Fortunately, that mistake was avoided.)

Indie Auto was, however, right to emphasize the factor of imports, although Detroit paid little attention to them until their market share rose above 10%. Volkswagen was a unique threat because unlike its rivals, the company insisted on exclusive dealerships with adequate parts stocks and mechanic training. In addition, VWs offered high quality and the ability to be driven flat-out all day. This gave the Bug a leg up that Renault, Fiat and Austin didn’t have. VWs were selling well before the ’58 recession.

Who demanded land-yachts?

Jan Norbye’s and my point was that the public determined what Detroit built, not the other way round. When Detroit guessed wrong we got the Hudson Jet and the Edsel. When they guessed right—the 1965 Ford Mustang, for example—they were in fat city.

Indie Auto said we were “disingenuous” to state that the public kept demanding larger cars than the original compacts. Yet their own graph shows Dodge-Plymouth sales bottoming  after introducing the “plucked chickens.” And they admit that the 1961-63 Buick-Olds-Pontiac Y-Body compacts “did not sell nearly as well as their mid-sized successors introduced in 1964.”

Their take, Indie Auto says, is “more subtle.”  As the American economy improved in the early 1960s, “a growing proportion of car buyers gravitated to larger and fancier cars.” Which is nothing more than we not-so-subtly wrote in our book. No argument!

In the heyday of Detroit, companies spent millions trying to understand what buyers wanted—and acted accordingly. It wasn’t a case of “Grosse Pointe myopians” dictating their preferences. Almost every notable failure—from the Henry J to the Edsel to the longer-wider-faster American Motors mid-60s models—was an example of product planners misreading market forces. And every notable success, from the early Rambler to the ponycar to the SUV, was an example of getting it right—or stumbling into reality.

For whatever they built (and they built some pretty bad cars), as we said in our book: Don’t blame Detroit. Blame us.

*****

“For those who love speed coupled with utility features of general motoring, Packard builds its Speedsters. Perhaps it is the inherent flow of speed joined to the swift grace of smooth design that suggests these interesting body treatments. But Speedsters they all are, from test car to Runabout. For those who thrill to the maximum speed of an open car on an open road.”¹

Speedster origins

The term “Speedster” may have originated “when someone knocked the tonneau body off a car and installed something racier,” wrote Packard connoisseur Bob Turnquist. “Most often, Speedsters were sporty, relatively light cars with a large gas tank. To many, such styles were just high fashion. To others, they were like an Indy racer primed for street use. Indianapolis was a direct inspiration.”²

Many consider Packard’s 1929-30 Speedster an anomaly from a company known for luxurious transportation and understated elegance. Packard “catered to the ballroom and country club set,” wrote Ronald Sieber. “Although enterprising racers would use its engines in specials that won events on both road and river, and would perform daring aerial maneuvers in Packard-powered aircraft both in war and in peacetime, Packard itself shunned racing and performance-oriented events.”³

Enter the Colonel

But Packard was not totally uninterested in high performance. In 1916, for example, the company built two impressive racing cars for the racing driver Ralph DePalma: the “299 Special,” featuring its new, 424 cubic inch Twin-Six car engine; and the “905 Special,” powered by a Packard Liberty aircraft engine.⁴ Packard Liberties also powered racing boats, including Gar Wood’s “Miss America 2,” winner of the 1921 Harmsworth Trophy. Earlier, the Liberty had distinguished itself in wartime aircraft. By 1930, when Packard created a Diesel radial aircraft engine, it proclaimed itself “Supreme on Air, Land and Water.”

The visionary behind much of this innovation was Colonel Jesse Gurney Vincent, head of engineering from 1912 to 1946, father of the Packard Speedster. By 1927 Vincent had completed Packard’s million-dollar Proving Grounds at Utica, Michigan, a 2 1/2-mile banked oval similar in size to Indianapolis.

“The Colonel relished speed,” wrote Morgan Yost, but “the roads of Michigan [were] crowded, twisted—and patrolled. With Utica…Jesse Vincent could move as fast as he wanted.” At a 1928 dealer  convention, he circled the Proving Grounds in a Rollston-bodied sedan at 85 mph. “That was incentive enough for a faster Packard, to satisfy the Colonel, to use the track for publicity purposes and to take advantage of the advertising value of speed.”⁵

“Les camions les plus rapides”

In late 1925, Vincent admired a custom speedster phaeton designed by Raymond H. Dietrich of LeBaron, the Manhattan coachbuilders. Six inches lower, four inches narrower than standard, riding 21-inch wheels, with a stretched hood and raked-back windshield, it looked like an antelope next to the standard production horses.⁶ LeBaron built two and sold them for $10,500 each—$180,000 in modern dollars. These striking phaetons astonished the public and the company. On Mahogany Row in Detroit, Packard’s conservative managers liked it. Perceiving that they had an itch, the Colonel yearned to scratch it.

Vincent was further impressed by a fast ride in a sporty Bugatti during the 1926 Paris Auto Show.⁷ His driver was Ettore Bugatti himself. The eccentric Frenchman was said to have remarked that W.O. Bentley built “les camions les plus rapides” [the fastest trucks]. It is not on record what Le Patron thought of Packard Speedsters, which were not as athletic as Bugattis.

My dear friend the late Bob Valpey readily admitted this. When I asked him if he intended to run his 734 Speedster roadster on the Lime Rock, Connecticut road course, this veteran vintage racing driver quipped: “I’d be quicker in a dump truck.” At the Proving Grounds banked oval, of course, Col. Vincent could go as fast as the machinery allowed.

During 1927, Vincent went to work. He built four Speedster prototypes, three of which were “test mules.” One was supercharged, but Packard’s conservative management balked at radical modifications, and three were disposed of by December. One was bought by young Briggs Cunningham, after driving it around the Proving Grounds at over 100 mph, Cunningham used it as a daily driver and project car while studying engineering at Yale. It may be seen today at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida.⁸

The Vincent Speedster, 1928

Faced with the need to use stock Packard components, Vincent selected his second prototype for further development. He built it the way every hot-rodder would decades later, stuffing the biggest engine into the smallest chassis. The latter was from a Packard 443, riding a 126.5-inch wheelbase. (Some say it was a 626, but its crankhole position and eight-lug wheels suggest 443.) The engine was the nine-main-bearing 385 cid Super Eight with 106 bhp in stock form.

Designed for speed, Vincent’s special had an aluminum body and lacked road equipment—no lights, windshield, fenders or bumpers. Its twin bucket seats were staggered, the passenger’s mounted slightly farther back to give the driver more elbow room when wheeling this brute around the Proving Grounds. And wheel it did, according to Charles A. Lindbergh.

In 1928 the famous aviator visited the Proving Grounds to see the new Packard Diesel aircraft engine, and Vincent offered him a few laps with his toy. “I drove the car several times around the track, at a little over 100 miles an hour, if my memory is correct,” Lindbergh wrote. “I believe the average was 109 mph, and that the car had averaged about 128 mph with its regular driver; but I am vague on these figures.”⁹

Reborn and Recreated

Jesse Vincent’s Speedster remained at the Proving Grounds for many years and then disappeared. Its body shell was found in the 1970s by Packard collectors Dale and Don Lyons. Along with A.J. “Jim” Balfour, they rebuilt the car with “donor” Packard parts. By the 1990s, it was seen at Packard Club events. It is now displayed at America’s Packard Museum in Dayton, Ohio.  Jim Balfour wrote about it in The Packard Cormorant #52 (Autumn 1988).

Then in 2016, Jerry Miscevich of Burbank, California, built a perfect reproduction. “I saw its pictures in the 1978 Automobile Quarterly Packard book,” Jerry told Jay Leno, “and I just said ‘wow—I can’t believe they made something like that’….It just wouldn’t leave me alone.”¹⁰

Working only from photos, Miscevich formed the body (steel not aluminum in this case) over a wood frame, the engine bored out and tuned to deliver 120-125 bhp. Every component matched the original, including the Bijur lubrication system, Detroit Lubricator updraft carburetor, three-speed gearbox, 16-inch mechanical brakes and staggered seating. This exacting recreation can be enjoyed in a video with Jay and Jerry on “Jay Leno’s Garage” via YouTube.¹¹

Sixth Series 626: first production Speedster, 1929

With Packard riding high on seemingly-limitless 1920s prosperity, a production variant of the Vincent Speedster was conceivable. Packard chief body designer Vincent D. Kaptur was entrusted with the first production model. He was assisted by a bright new designer named Werner Gubitz, of whom more anon.

The cars were introduced on the 1929 626 chassis in August 1928, most with roadster or phaeton bodies. A few sedans were also built. Racing driver Tommy Milton drove a sedan from Miami to Los Angeles averaging 50 mph, which was pretty impressive given the roads of those days.

The specification followed Vincent’s practice of a big engine in a small chassis. Power was from the 385 cid  Eight, with high-lift camshaft and high compression head, which raised horsepower to 130. Unique to the Speedster was a vacuum booster pump. The rear axle ratios were 4.00 or 3.31 instead of the standard 4.38 and 4.07. High gearing was uncommon when few roads allowed rapid motoring. When they did, though, the Speedster owner could “open her up,” press a floor pedal, and enjoy what Ned Jordan called “the roar of the cut-out.”

At a glance, the 626 Speedster looked like an ordinary Packard, with a longer hood and shorter deck, crafted in the company’s new custom body shop. The roadster lost 14 inches behind the front seat to fit the 126.5-inch chassis; the phaeton was more conventional. The price for either was $5000 ($86,000 in today’s money), a hefty sum in 1929.

The little-known 626

That this Speedster even existed was uncommon knowledge, because Packard did no specific advertising. As a result, production was trifling. Estimates run from fewer than 50 to a high of 70 for all body styles; one source says only 24. Alas only three 626 Speedsters are known to exist, and for many years the Henry Ford Museum’s roadster was thought to be the only survivor.

The Museum’s car, the gift of Montgomery Young, represents one of the most enduringly attractive, finely finished and luxurious Packards of the 1920s. The original owner, Emil Fikar, Jr. of Berwin, Illinois, insisted it be capable of 100 mph. After personally satisfying himself that it was, he paid Chicago’s Bruesce Motor Sales $5260 in October 1928. The invoice listed only two options: chrome plated wire wheels ($250), and goddess of speed mascot ($10). Packard declined to supply fripperies like sidemounts or windwings: “As minimum head resistance is essential for maximum speed, no specifications are accepted for Deluxe equipment for these special cars.”¹²

 Designing the ultimate Speedster

Despite thin sales of the 626, Packard decided to expand the line for 1930, producing the grandest Speedsters yet. A significant departure, the 734 was longer and more powerful, with long-legged gearing mated to a four-speed gearbox. The engine was the 385, specially cast for Speedsters with angled ports allowing hemispherical combustion chambers. Significantly modified for freer breathing, the 385 carried separate intake and exhaust manifolds, the latter finned. There was a special two-throat carburetor, vacuum pump and pedal-controlled exhaust cut-out. It developed 125 bhp, but an optional 6:1 compression head produced 145 and a whopping 290 lbs-ft of torque at only 1600 rpm.

Though Packard recommended the lower-compression head and 4.00:1 gear ratio, most open models were ordered with high-compression and 3.33:1 gearing. This ensured that your Speedster would top 100 mph—and people spending Speedster money were inclined to want that. There was also a 4.67:1 ratio for jack-rabbit starts or hilly conditions, but few of these were specified.

Designwise, the 626s were considered too short for so exalted a model. To many they seemed stubby, hard to distinguish from other roadsters. “They lacked the fleet lines that made cars look fast, the Cord, Auburn, Kisssel and [Stutz] Blackhawk, for instance,” wrote Morgan Yost. “Furthermore, the 1930 Packards had new bodies with the refined Dietrich influence and did not lend themselves to alterations. And, the short body space—only 79 7/8 inches—was just not enough to be comfortable, especially for a sedan.”¹³

A LeBaron heritage

Accordingly the 734 Speedster used the 733 Eight’s 134.5-inch wheelbase chassis, its frame rails modified to accommodate the larger engine. Finned, 16-inch brake drums, unique to this model, slowed the car as effectively as the big eight propelled it. But what really made the 734 impressive was its styling, the work of a talented triumvirate.

Raymond B. Birge, former general manager of LeBaron, had joined Packard in 1927 to set up its new custom body department. Birge himself was not a designer, so for the 734 project he brought in his former boss, Ray Dietrich, as a consultant. Most of the lines were established by Werner Gubitz, who had drawn for Dietrich before joining Packard. “It must have been like LeBaron Old Home Week when Dietrich arrived,” Turnquist wrote, “and it certainly indicated that the original LeBaron Speedster would be a strong influence….¹⁴

Gubitz’s high style

Werner Hans August Gubitz was born in Hamburg in 1899 and emigrated with his parents to New Jersey in 1905. His father, who worked at the American Lead Pencil Company, encouraged his aptitude for drawing with an endless supply of Venus colored pencils. By his early 20s Werner was a designer, making the rounds of car builders and coachbuilders, including Dietrich Inc. in Detroit.

“The Speedster was largely Werner’s,” Ray Dietrich told this writer. “He knew precisely how to execute a line on a surface. The famous ‘continuity of line’ which Packard maintained from the mid-1920s to the 1940s was also largely owed to him.”¹⁵

In 1927, cannily sizing up his prospects, Gubitz signed with Packard, where he remained for twenty years. “Whether it’s a coat-of-arms on a Deluxe heater or a cloissoiné emblem on the side of a hood,” wrote John Macarthur, you can bet Werner Gubitz had a lot to do with it.”¹⁶ W. Everett Miller, who worked alongside him in 1929-33, echoed that praise: “Werner was an unpretentious man with a soft-spoken Bronx accent, his German heritage being strongly evident. He was always rather shy, though eminently self-possessed…. There is no mention of him in The Inner Circle, Packard’s in-house publication, and he never received public recognition for his efforts during his lifetime. But his work, as Packard would say, was ‘of a distinguished family.’”¹⁷

The production 734 Speedster

The result of this collaboration was a line of Speedsters three inches narrower and considerably lower than standard Packards, in five body styles. Most were phaetons and boat-tail runabouts (the latter with and without staggered seats). There were perhaps six each of the close-coupled victoria coupe and sedan. A fifth style, the four-seat rumble-seat roadster, was added in early 1930, according to Terry Shea: “…when a few customers inquired about such a version to accommodate more than just a driver and passenger, Packard responded with a very limited production model; just seven were sold. The roadster did away with the runabout’s sexy boat-tail, but suffers nothing in the looks department.”¹⁸ Overall production was thought to be 85 in 1981, but more 734s turned up, and today the production estimate is 117. All too few.

Packard charged $5200 for the open Speedsters, $6000 for the closed, with the customer’s choice of color and upholstery, since each car was individually crafted. Some bare chassis were also sold, and two customs were well publicized. The Packard Magazine featured them in 1930. One J. Brooks Nichols owned a Kirchoff-bodied runabout “that insures even less wind resistance [than the catalogued body]. Special treatment of [vee’d] radiator, front fenders and windshields front and rear, gives full sweep to the impression of swift grace which characterizes the car.” Also noted was Lt. J.R. Glasscock’s runabout by E.J, Thompson Coachworks, “which symbolizes in every line the graceful speed of its Packard foundation.”¹⁹ Fitted with Woodlites and cycle fenders, Glasscock’s car was spectacular—and may still exist. Back in 1981, a contemporary photo surfaced in Cars & Parts magazine. It would be nice to know if this exotic custom survives.

End of the beginning

Despite its belated attempt to build a customer base with the 734, Packard discontinued the Speedster in 1930, before the Seventh Series had wound up. The Depression was a factor, of course; but beyond that was the reluctance of higher management to use waning resources on what was admittedly a niche product. In those days, most people with $5000 to spend on an automobile sought smoothness, refinement, and above all, low-end torque. This made for a minimum of gear shifting and more comfortable rides on the rough roads of the time. Some enthusiasts express surprise that so wonderful a car could be discontinued. But to Packard at the time, there was nothing remarkable about it.

The Speedster idea was not altogether dead, however. In the hope that the Depression had bottomed, a new Speedster runabout was produced in August 1933. Mounted on the 135-inch wheelbase 1106 chassis, it was custom-bodied by LeBaron (by then run by Briggs). It sold for a then-staggering $7796, accompanied by a LeBaron sport phaeton. Edward Macaulay, son of Packard President Alvan, evolved a series of custom Speedsters beginning with his personal 745 runabout. None of these made it to production, and today fewer than a dozen 11th Series Speedsters are known.

Greatest of them all

The Speedster thus remained a fabled Packard, available only to a privileged few. It did not take long to be recognized as such. People were collecting them by the 1940s, long before there was an old car hobby, when most cars their age were regarded as obsolete derelicts. Those who knew what they had were rewarded by pride of possession, the joys of high performance and value for investment. Few blue chip stocks have produced better returns over the years.

They rank among the immortals. Driving behind Bob Valpey’s 734 roadster (in a 1936 One Twenty convertible that seemed to tower over it), I was struck by its spidery, ground-hugging stance, combined with the sheer presence of the car. Bob laughed off racing it, but it certainly looked like its name. With due deference to many fine models before and after, many will always think of the Speedster as the greatest Packard of them all.

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to the Packard enthusiasts and organizations who have added so much over the years to my knowledge of the Speedster: Stuart Blond of The Packard Cormorant, Conceptcarz.com, Raymond H. Dietrich, Jay Leno, John F. MacArthur, W. Everett Miller, Jerry Miscevich, the Packard Club, the Revs Institute, Terry Shea, Ronald Sieber, Dick Teague, Bob Turnquist, Bob Valpey and L. Morgan Yost.

Endnotes

1. “Speedsters All,” in The Packard Magazine, Detroit, Spring 1930, 9.
2. Robert E. Turnquist, “Utter Glory: Packard’s Immortal Speedster,” in The Packard Cormorant #23, Summer 1981, 9.
3. Ronald Sieber, “Classic Speedsters,” accessed 30 July 2022.
4. For details on these cars see “1916 Packard Twin Six Racer,” Conceptcarz.com, accessed 5 August 2021.
5. L. Morgan Yost, Chapter XIV, Packard: A History of the Motorcar and the Company (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Publishing, 1978), 303.
6. “1925 Packard Model 236 Speedster Phaeton,” Conceptcarz.com, accessed 8 August 2022.
7. “About the 1927 Packard Prototype Speedster,” Revs Institute, Naples, Fla., accessed 5 August 2022.
8. Ibid.
9. Charles A. Lindbergh to Robert H. Rand, 1 March 1958, in Turnquist, “Utter Glory,” 10.
10. Jerry Miscevich to Jay Leno, 22 August 2016, accessed 5 August 2022.
11. “Jay Leno’s Garage.”
12. Richard M. Langworth, “The Packard Collection at the Henry Ford Museum,” in The Packard Cormorant #17, Winter 1979-80, 17-19. Yost, Packard, 304.
13. Yost, Packard, 304-05.
14. Turnquist, “Utter Glory,” 10.
15. Raymond H. Dietrich to the author, Albuquerque, N.M., August 1974.
16. John F. MacArthur, “Gubitz,” in The Packard Cormorant #90, Spring 1988, 17.
17. W. Everett Miller, “The Brilliant Art of Werner Gubitz,” in Car Classics, April 1976. 38-41.
18. Terry Shea, “Factory Force–1930 Packard Speedster Roadster,” in Hemmings Classic Car, July 2013.
19. “Speedsters All,” 9.

More Packard

“Queen Mary: We Love Our 1950 Packard Eight Club Sedan,” 2022.

“Why Packard Failed, Part 1: Patrician and Its Relatives, 1951-53,” 2022.

“Why Packard Failed, Part 2: The End of the Road, 1954-1956,” 2022.

“The Packard: Ne Plus Ultra of Automotive House Organs,” Part 1 and Part 2, 2021.

Searcj also on this website for Dutch Darrin, Brooks Stevens and Don Peterson.

Early encounter

Over ten years ago on a Packard  Club tour, we hitched a ride in a friend’s 1950 Packard Eight club sedan. Flipping a seatback, we “clambered” aboard. There are no assist grips in this bottom-line coupe, so you sort of walk in. It’s not hard to do because of the huge door opening.

We were bowled over by the ride—smooth and silent, enthroned on plush cushions which had recently been recovered with lookalike striped broadcloth out of a Chevy Master. I never forgot that ride. There wasn’t a sound out of the little 288 cubic-inch straight eight. The body was as solid as a bank vault—not a squeak nor a rattle anywhere.

Back in the day, my Dad always said coupes were tighter—if more impractical—than sedans. Riding in this big bathtub, I realized what he’d meant. It helped, of course, that the car was an original—showing about 50,000 miles. Our friend had tended its needs since 1984.

Searching for a ride

Back then we were enjoying a pretty 1936 One Twenty convertible, but after eight years, we’d had enough. The product of an age when most roads were still dirt, the One Twenty is happiest at 40 mph, running hard at 50, and straining at 60. Weather protection is rudimentary, especially if you don’t duct-tape the header where top meets windshield. After a drive through a thunderstorm on a narrow interstate with no wipers, 18-wheelers snorting past and water dripping on my knee, I decided that for long-haul touring, we needed something more modern.

For awhile we substituted a ’53 Studebaker Commander Starliner, designed for Loewy by my old friend Bob Bourke. But a Studebaker is not a Packard. For all its svelte looks, the Starliner was still a cheap car, and drove like one. (Bob told me that if GM had built it, it would have been cheaper yet.) We also missed the genial camaraderie of Packard folk. So we sold the Stude and shopped around for another Packard—one that could handle modern highways and—mainly—keep the rain off my knee.

The Eight coupe: a perfect tour car

I’ve always loved the early postwar Packard Custom Super Clipper—the ideal combination of traditional styling hallmarks, the Clipper body, and the mighty, fabled 356 straight eight. Don Vorderman of Automobile Quarterly, the best editor I ever had, often said: “The Custom coupe is my idea of the perfect Packard. Wonderfully smooth big-ass straight eight and that graceful, swoopy shape. Doesn’t matter what color—they’re all gorgeous.”

There were two problems with this “new Packard concept,” as a pal quaintly put it. There are plenty of four-door Custom Clippers, but club sedans are rare. What’s more, they cost a fortune. I looked for awhile at sedans, but their lines while good are not quite as svelte as the coupes. Also, they rattled, and I hate rattles. That was when I remembered the 1950 Eight club sedan and the swift, silent ride we’d had in it.

I phoned the owner, got him at the right time. He was willing for us to see and drive it. Looking at it as a potential buyer, I realized that the coupe looks good even on a wheelbase seven inches shorter than the Custom’s. The flowing fastback lines help interdict the chubby body sides, and the mid-level chrome strip and pod-like taillights make the 1949-50 Twenty-third Series cars look more streamlined than their immediate predecessors. The driving was exactly as I remembered from our ride in it a decade ago. In a week or so, it was in our garage.

First impressions

There were a few minor surprises, but none we couldn’t handle. This is an original car, unrestored except for the upholstery. The old black lacquer paint shows areas of crazing, especially along the rear body sides. It’s a “20-footer”: from 20 feet away, it looks fabulous.

I’m told an expert could relacquer those rough spots, but I have yet to find anyone who would guarantee a perfect match. And as you know, there are a hundred shades of black. Then too, the patina of originality is something to be desired. How many 70+-year-old Packards do you see with their original paint?

I’d also forgotten—or maybe never realized—that this car had Ultramatic transmission. That’s your original, basic, down-home, Mark I Ultramatic, with all its faults and virtues. Its virtues are almost silent shifting and direct-drive in High. Unlike most early automatics, you get engine braking on a downgrade, just like a manual transmission. Its main fault is that it takes awhile to lurch into forward motion.

Waiting at a light in High, you need to issue the car an invitation. As the light is about to turn green you nudge the accelerator. The transmission likes to sigh and whine and get up some gumption before the off. You get used to this, but at first it’s disconcerting.

Back in the day, owners in a hurry would start in Low and shift to High once rolling. But as many found out, that causes an uncomfortable lurch and doesn’t lead to long-lived Ultramatics. (In 1954, Gear-Start Ultramatic fixed this with a Drive range between Low and High. It used the Low ratio and torque convertor to start off, switching to High and ultimately to direct drive as the car accelerated.)

Silky smooth, dead silent

Her owner called the big Eight “Proud Mary,” but we call her the “Queen Mary” for her bashful acceleration, roly-poly cornering and muscle-testing manual steering. There are five and a half turns lock to lock, and you really need to haul on that wheel. If it would not cause excommunication from Packard-dom, I’d retrofit power steering. Navigating this ship into port (that is, a parking space) is a test of muscle, patience and endurance.

Overall, of course, this only matters about 3% of the time. The great thing about the Packard Eight is the manner of its going: silky smooth and dead silent. As Tom McCahill said, it makes you think you’re riding in a bed of marshmallows. In a way, the ’50 Eight was the lineal successor to the old One Twenty, but a quantum leap forward in convenience and performance.

On the road

Performance may be described as “comfortable.” Zero to 60 must take 20 seconds, but we’ve never floored the old girl to find out. Nor have we pushed her over 70. Yet at 60, when our ’36 was panting, the ’50 Eight is just cruising. Gas mileage averages about 15 mpg, and the best I’ve done was 18. But hey, remember, this is 1950, and gas is only 15 cents a gallon. (A fun feature at filling stations: Packard’s “whistling gas tank” stops whistling when you’re nearing full, captivating bystanders. Nothing like that on an Audi A6.)

The Eight handles better than you would expect for a car of this vintage. There’s body roll, but once into high speed curves, she tracks sweetly and doesn’t toss you about. It helps that we have added a Packard Deluxe feature: center armrests. Obtained from CupHoldersPlus.com, they house two large drinks and a covered storage locker. It’s fun to hear people yet unborn when this car was new say: “I didn’t know they had cup holders back then.”

The dash isn’t as glitzy as its Custom cousin, but the woodgraining is beautiful. A forward step for the Twenty-third Series was illuminated switches, so you don’t have to fumble for them at night. Ordinarily it’s an upright driving position, but there is so much sheer room in that wide front seat that you can move around and find several comfortable positions. Visibility is good except to the rear quarters, where the fastback styling creates blind spots. The back windows, like most coupes of the day, don’t crank all the way down.

From Standard to Deluxe

The first thing I did was remove and sell the aftermarket bumper guards. I found they were so popular that I could have sold five pair. To me they just clutter her up—and there was a bonus: Having been covered since new, the chrome bumper guards underneath were pristine and unmarked.

Never able to leave good enough alone, I’ve been upgrading from Eight to Deluxe Eight equipment. The difference in price in 1950 was $134 ($1450 in today’s money). It bought a lot of nice extras.

The standard Eight came with rubber front floor mats. A rustic elf carefully removed them, so they can always be put back. He installed Deluxe-style full carpeting (Mercedes-Benz material) front and rear. It really improves the ambience. While at it, I had him line the scruffy trunk compartment with form-fitted grey marine carpeting. Again, the original mat was carefully preserved. He had enough carpet left to make a spare tire cover, too. The headliner and door panels, recently replaced, needed nothing.

Several Packard friends said that a deluxe chrome-trimmed ivory steering wheel was a dealer option. I didn’t inquire into this too closely. For a cool $1600, a steering wheel specialist cast one from a core supplied by a friend. Looks like a million bucks! I sold the original steering wheel and took my friend to lunch. Kanter Auto Products supplied a set of Deluxe Eight wheel trim rings, to help glorify the tires—which are wide-white radials, by the way. They make a huge difference in handling compared to bias-plys.

Deluxe Eight parts wanted

Given time and patience, I found a set of Deluxe Eight chrome-trimmed window reveal moldings, and genuine, stalky Twenty-third Series rearview mirrors. (This car lasted 68 years without outside mirrors, but our first ride on an Interstate made me slap on a temporary one.) Original mirrors, unique to this series, rare and expensive.

A Packard Club member supplied a rough set of interior window moldings. A talented woodgrainer in Florida made them look like new, while a plating expert in Connecticut restored the bright work. The improvement is palpable and beautiful. The only Deluxe fittings I haven’t yet found are the assist-grips which install on the “B” pillar for backseat passengers.

 Back to the Fifties

I mentioned that this Eight is an original, low mileage car—it has just turned 55,000. And that is a real plus. Yes, there are flaws in the paint—but the bonus is: everything works! I mean, everything. Even the clock, which keeps perfect time—the former owner wisely installed a quartz movement.

Items that often pose problems for early postwar Packard owners behave like new. The knurled heater/defroster knobs turn easily and the vent knobs deliver blasts of fresh air, like God and Packard intended. (No old-fashioned cowl vents after 1948.) The heater is toasty warm, and the defroster spews enough warm air to defog the windshield. Most remarkable of all, the vacuum wipers continue to wipe, even under load. Driving the Eight in a downpour is therefore a pleasure—except for a pesky water leak under the center of the windshield. But much less water gets in than it did on my ’36.

The radio works, too—and the remote control aerial that neatly stores on the windshield divider. But it’s AM-only, and reception is dicey. Reluctantly—because there’s nothing like the rich, fat sound of old tube radios—we gave up on it. With Spotify and a Bluetooth sound box, we have fabulous audio of our choosing. Now Ella and Satchmo, Bing and Frank, Nat and Judy, echo the tunes that once reverberated over the Packard Eight’s speakers.

And that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Driving such a car takes you back, to a simpler, quieter, more placid, more innocent time. All too soon you’re jerked back to the ever more disconcerting present. But behind that big ivory wheel, cruising to Vaughan Monroe’s mellow baritone, it’s 1950 all over again.

Miscellany

1950 Packard Eight 23rd Series Model 2395-5 Club Sedan

Original paint, 55,000 miles. Production: 5200. Wheelbase 120.” Weight 3800 lbs.

Straight eight, 4.7 liters, 288 cu. in., 135 bhp. Top speed: 90 mph. Mileage: 14-18 mpg.

List rice: $2409 including Ultramatic Drive ($28,000 in today’s money)

Packard’s first postwar redesign (1948) was based on the 1941-47 Packard Clipper, designed by Dutch Darrin and Werner Gubitz. Following the contemporary styling school, it was bullet-shaped and rounded, heavier looking than the Clipper.

In 1949 a mild facelift applied a body-length chrome strip and larger, more visible oval taillights. This standard Eight was the bottom of the 1950 line, which ranged up to the $4500 Custom Eight convertible. Its closest competition was the Oldsmobile 98.

Ultramatic Drive is a hydraulic automatic with “Direct Drive” torque converter lockup, designed by Forest MacFarland. The only automatic designed exclusively by an independent manufacturer, it delivers the same gas mileage and engine braking characteristics as a standard transmission.

Readers in search of top-quality woodgraining, carpeting or chrome plating even pitted pot metal parts may contact me for the excellent craftsmen I found.

My Dad always said the worst thing about getting old is the loss of friends. Now I know what he meant. Don, Dave and Randy, each in his own way, had a lot to do with my own story. Their friends are left only with memories. Here are mine. (The quotation is from pioneer auto writer Ken Purdy, father of us all.)

Dave Brownell 1941 – 15 November 2021

Few of us had been able to talk to Dave for years. Felled by a stroke 15 years ago, he was confined to a nursing home. Understandably, his wife Marian asked his friends not to try to communicate.

David W. Brownell was crucial—indeed decisive—in the course of my life. In 1970, Automobile Quarterly was looking for an associate editor for a new line of auto history books. I was brooding in a dead-end job in Pennsylvania when I sent them, out of the blue, an article about Kaiser-Frazer. To my astonishment, they not only accepted it; they asked me to interview for a job. I took it, moved back to New York, and the rest is history.

Only later did Dave tell me that the position had only remained open because he’d turned it down. He knew more than I about one of the principals—I have met only two knaves in my life. Nonetheless, it was a priceless opportunity. You couldn’t buy that education in a university. It forged my career—thanks to Dave. (See “AQ: The Memories.”)

(D)WB and DSJ

For thirty years we collaborated, published articles, and had fun. We’d communicate in the style of Denis Jenkinson’s auto racing reports to Bill Boddy for MotorSport, which Jenks always began with “My dear WB” and ended with, “Yours, DSJ.”

So to Dave I’d write, “My dear (D)WB” and he would reply, “My dear DSJ” (“Distinguished Sunbeam Jockey”). Our memories were of Hershey and New York, Le Chanteclair and Austie Clark and the Mount Equinox Hillclimb and his Bentley. Golden years.

Leaving Old Cars in 1977, Dave spent a year editing Cars & Parts, then joined world-famous Hemmings Motor News in Bennington, Vermont. Besides editing Hemmings he ran Special-Interest Autos, a bi-monthly featuring collectable cars of all eras. Dave also created and produced 14 annual editions of the Vintage Auto Almanac, a guide to the old car industry.

A friend of us all was Tom Warth, longtime publisher of Classic Motorbooks, founder of  the magnificent charity Books For Africa. Tom was one of the few able to see Dave recently. His last visit was a sad occasion, Tom said. Poor Dave could not recall if he had had breakfast or not. Both his first and second wives passed away in 2016, leaving Dave with his nursing staff and, one hopes, his memories. RIP, my old friend.

Randy Mason 12 July 1941 – 19 March 2022

Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, England, an upstairs solicitor’s office, June 1977…. I was making an offer for a Cotswold bungalow, Well Cottage, in a magical village called Bourton-on-the-Water. Accompanying me was Randy Mason, Curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village. Co-founders of the Vintage Triumph Register, we were bound for the first Standard-Triumph International Rallye.

The solicitor was in a reflective mood. “You know,” he said, “I once sold a Cotswold cottage to America.” (He didn’t say “to an American,” but “to America.”)

In the 1930s, a client had asked him to discourage a pesky estate agent trying to buy his property, then worth about £500: “I named an extravagant price, thinking it would drive the buyer away. The reply came by return post: ‘Sold.’ At the closing, the agent revealed he was representing Henry Ford, who had fallen for this particular old building. It was dismantled stone by stone and shipped to America. I often wonder where it went.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” I told the solicitor. “But Mr. Mason here knows exactly where it went.” Randy laughed: “I pass it every day on my way to work!” The reassembled cottage stands today in splendor at Greenfield Village.

Despite Randy’s urgings we didn’t buy Well Cottage, then priced at £12,000. Beautifully appointed, the 16th century house is now a popular rental property, worth about £1 million. That was one of many droll adventures with Randy who, like Dave Brownell, had a lot to do with my writing career.

Cars, outboards, Fiestaware and an Edsel

Randy grew up in Dearborn, near Ford World Headquarters, which helped stoke his passion for cars. He was running a Ziebart rustproofing business when he ran into his predecessor, Les Henry, who quickly recognized Randy’s depth of knowledge and qualities. About to retire in 1971, Les asked Randy to succeed him, and Randy served as Transport Curator for 20 years.

Together with a couple of pals, Randy and I organized the Vintage Triumph Register—in an Edsel. Yes! Doug’s Body Shop was a Detroit bistro, its tables artfully placed inside hollowed out Fifties cars. VTR has since grown to one of the most successful English car clubs in America. Let it not be said that the Edsel was a total failure.

Randy founded the Detroit Region of the Lambda Car Club International. He co-founded the Ypsilanti Orphan Car Show for brands no longer in production, and contributed color commentary as the vintage orphans paraded. For the Henry Ford Heritage Association, he helped acquire the historic Piquette Avenue plant that built the first Model T, saving it from destruction. His personal collections were broad and imaginative: Fiesta tableware, antique lighting, vintage outboard motors, cars and automobilia. On my last visit to “The Shack,” his Dearborn pad—more museum than living quarters—he proudly showed us his perfectly restored 1941 Buick.

We collaborated on dozens of Triumph events including the 1978 International Rallye at Bridgehampton race track. There, on the straightaway, a TR5’s poorly attached bonnet flew off at speed, narrowly missing “Buttercup,” Randy’s TR3A. “Only God knows how close we came to incarceration,” Randy quipped. In England we dined with Jaguar historian the late Andrew Whyte, whose mother wrote More Than a Legend, arguing that the Loch Ness Monster is real. Dutifully Andrew explained that plesiosaurs still lived in Scotland! “Andrew Whyte is a cool guy,” quoth Mason. It takes one to know one. It is so hard to believe Randy’s gone.

Don Peterson 1 April 1929 – 16 September 2021

Like Dave, Randy and Don were vital in my life. In 1975 I left Automobile Quarterly, without a lot of prospects. Randy Mason offered me editorship of The Vintage Triumph for a salary of $1 per member per year, a welcome break. Then came Don Peterson, editor of Car Collector, with the offer of a monthly column and feature articles.

Don’s love was big American cars (mostly Packards), especially driving them. He began small with a 1929 Model A Ford coupe, driving 8000 miles in a few months from his Maynard, Minnesota home as far afield as Key West. Don participated in eighty Classic Car Club of America tours—the most on record. At thirty-five, he won one of CCCA’s first two Citations for Distinguished Service. His son West continues:

Outside of CCCA, Dad enjoyed driving on Veteran Motor Car Club tours, five AACA Glidden Tours (having joined AACA in 1958), the 1979 London-to-Brighton Run in England, and the 1983 World F.I.V.A. Rallye. He also enjoyed driving his one- and two-cylinder cars in the yearly New London-to-New Brighton Antique Car Runs in Minnesota, finishing the 123-mile trek all but two times during a period of more than 30 years.

Perhaps his favorite accomplishment took place in 1995, when he drove his 1930 Packard 734 Speedster Eight on a one-month tour throughout the U.S. (most of the way without a support vehicle and with no fellow compatriots), putting rubber to pavement in 48 states and adding about 10,000 miles to the car’s odometer. The Speedster was restored shortly thereafter, but that surely didn’t stop the odometer from continuing to reel off the miles.

Packards to Pitcairn

I wonder how many miles Dave, Randy and Don logged in cars long past their trade-in dates? By himself, Don Peterson clocked three million, in over 100 old car tours in 140 countries, and owned 100 vintage vehicles.

Don was the only old friend who phoned me every year on my birthday, July 7th. We shared frustration at being unable to contact Dave Brownell, incommunicado at his Vermont nursing home. Don was also anxious to get our mutual friend Tom Warth on The Queen’s Honours List for his work with Books for Africa. I knew some people, and told Don I’d write, but warned him I was a long way down the totem pole.

Pushing 90, he called to say he and Eedie were headed for Pitcairn Island, fabled hideout of Fletcher Christian and mutineers of the Bounty. I collected Pitcairn stamps and enjoyed a long correspondence with the island postmaster. I’d always wanted to visit the place. Likewise Don—but he just did it. “We didn’t get to land,” he said with regret. “But we met the locals and wouldn’t have missed it.”

He thought often of others and was as loyal a friend as anyone you’ve ever met. To the last he loved the hand life had dealt him, and enjoyed it to the fullest. West Peterson speaks for many of us when he writes: “There are many things I already miss about Dad, but I think not being able to pick up the phone for that quick and easy answer is what I miss most.” I know what he means.

“Ride on in majesty”

Don always liked the story of Parry Thomas, the great Welsh racing driver, who also had motor oil in his veins, albeit in a different age. Thomas died at half Don’s age in 1927, pursuing the Land Speed Record in a racing car named “Babs,” powered by a 27-liter Packard Liberty engine. He crashed on Pendine Sands in Wales, then the main venue for LSR attempts. This was a place I did manage to visit, having arranged for the semi-restored “Babs” to run again on the 50th anniversary.

I began this essay with the words of Ken Purdy, so perhaps it’s appropriate to end likewise:

Parry Thomas was buried in the graveyard of Byfleet, near Brooklands, the great oval racetrack where he built his fame. His marker reads:  “Life is eternal and love is immortal, and death, which is only the horizon, is nothing save the limit of our sight.” A wreath of violets, anonymously sent, carried the legend, “Ride On, Ride On, in Majesty.”

Ride On, Don, Dave and Randy.

***

More Automotive Greats

Brooks Stevens: The Seer Who Made Milwaukee Famous, 2022

Automobile Quarterly: The Memories, 2021

Packard Tales and Memories of Bud Juneau, 2021

Graham Robson: “He was Always, Triumphantly, in Touch,” 2021

The Whimsy and Fun of Dick O’Kane, 2020

Don Vorderman: Best Editor I Ever Had, 2018

Beverly Rae Kimes: Correrai Ancor Piu Veloce, 2009

To browse more automotive articles, click here.

Awhile back Hemmings Motor News reposted my article on Brooks Stevens, with a gratuitous opinion: “Perhaps Langworth’s tendency toward purple prose in this profile of Brooks Stevens in Special Interest Autos #71, October 1982, is appropriate, given the picture he paints of the legendary designer.” Nice to be remembered, but, er, Hemmings paid only for first rights and is therefore in copyright violation.

An old editor at SIA wrote: “Nothing purple—it reads like an essay in The New Yorker.” (Ah, if only Hemmings paid New Yorker rates!)  Another colleague wrote: “Not purple, maybe faint mauve.” A third: “Ugh, I can’t read it. The prose is too purple for me. They really think the Excalibur J can run with a Jaguar XK120?” But Tony Stevens wrote: “As the current owner of the first Excalibur J, I can attest that it can run competitively with an XK120. Right, Tony! The XK120 was a great car—but the youngsters have swallowed too much purple prose about it.

Herewith I republish my purple-mauve piece on my late friend Brooks Stevens. Readers may judge for themselves.

“The judgment of the historian”

“You’ll have to resolve the conflict between Dutch Darrin and Kip Stevens,” I was told after being assigned my first automotive article assignment, on Kaiser-Frazer, in 1970. The origins of the landmark 1951 Kaiser were at the time still unclear. Both Darrin and Stevens claimed it. (See “Kaiser Capers.”) Neither was complimentary in describing the efforts of the other. “It might be best not to press the matter,” a friend warned. The publisher disagreed: “Hear both sides and make the judgment of the historian.”

I didn’t know I was a historian! But I wrote to Stevens at his studio near Milwaukee and said in effect, “Tell me everything you remember about the 1951 Kaiser.”

By return mail came a large white folder with gilt lettering, containing a thick pile of photographs and a long, detailed letter documenting Brooks “Kip” Stevens’ role as a design consultant to Kaiser-Frazer. Within a year we’d met, and our friendship withstood the “judgment of the historian,” which appeared in Last Onslaught on Detroit in 1975. (For used copies search on bookfinder.com.)

The judgment did not satisfy Kip, and in turn produced another white and gilt folder with further documentation. On this subject it would be accurate to say that we had differences but not misunderstandings. Cordiality never suffered, for Stevens was a master of cordiality.

Stevens as I knew him

He was a tall, good looking man who belied his age, whose appearance and demeanor reflected what Cole Porter called High Society. For Stevens there was only one way to fly to Paris: Concorde. And one way to get to England: first class on the QE2. His personal tastes reflected similar standards, producing an aura of refined elegance. He took pains about everything. Meeting him, people were impressed but never overawed, because he was so natural, so full of courtesy and fun.

It was not hard to gain Kip’s acquaintance, whether you were a mechanic in overalls or the President of General Motors. Along with an inborn civility and an interest in others went an all-encompassing love for cars, an encyclopedic knowledge, and a streak of nihilism.

Stevens once invited my friend Bill Tilden to Wisconsin to drive his Henry J-based sports car, the Excalibur J, at Elkhart Lake. Brooks himself drove there in his personal Excalibur. This produced a helicopter-assisted roadblock of the rambunctious designer. It seemed he had violated most Wisconsin road ordinances plus several they hadn’t thought of yet.

Picture Brooks, trailing a silk scarf, driving a very loud open sports car with what the British call “assurance.” Picture next an army of gendarmerie, including aircraft. Failing to catch him in their cruisers, they block the road ahead. Now picture the nearest constable (seven feet tall as they all are). Jerking his thumb at the Excalibur’s sartorially splendid driver, he shouts: YOU—OUT! Kip paid his fine. It was substantial.

A truly lovely man

He had vast generosity, which did not always function in his favor. One press night at the New York Automobile Show, Kip arrived at René and Maurice Dreyfus’ famous automotive watering hole, “Le Chanteclair,” with a large retinue of admirers. The brothers Dreyfus were hardpressed to seat such a large assembly. They eventually did, at a long table with Brooks as centerpiece. Here he held forth for three hours to his impromptu court.

Le Chanteclair was never the place for a cheap meal. The bill came, for what I recall was uncomfortably close to a thousand 1974 dollars. Brooks quietly laid down his American Express card. Those who had no intention of socking him with that tab surreptitiously handed him cash, but a good half the company didn’t bother. There was no sign that our host was in the least disappointed: the measure of a man who spared no expense for the pleasure of an evening among friends, provided your description of “friends” is fairly elastic.

Stevens triumphs

I once stole a line from Schlitz and called Brooks, to his great delight, “The Seer Who Made Milwaukee Famous.” He was one of the ten charter Fellows of the Industrial Design Society of America. To the automotive trade he brought impeccable credentials. Ultimately he would contribute designs to over 40 makes of car. One of his earliest associations was with Willys-Overland, during and after World War II. He conceived of Willys’ most interesting products: the the first all-steel station wagon (1946); and the 1948-51 Jeepster, the world’s last production touring car.

A contributor to Kaiser-Frazer from almost the outset of that venture, Brooks proposed the first practical facelifts for the plug-ugly 1947-48 models, including wagons and hardtops, which they desperately needed but rejected.

Management didn’t take his advice, but assigned him a design competition for the new-generation 1951 Kaiser. It is the consensus today that the basic shape selected was Darrin’s, but the contest was not winner-take-all (see Kaiser photo above). Kip was simultaneously busy on a score of accounts in a half dozen countries, with corporations like Allis-Chalmers, Miller Beer, Briggs & Stratton, Evinrude, Lawn-Boy, 3M, Outboard Marine Aviation, Sears Roebuck, and Club Xanadu in Costa Rica. At the time of the Kaiser styling contest he was involved with Alfa Romeo on the 6C 2500. Darrin had only the Kaiser project on his plate. Had it been a one-on-one contest, things might have been different.

Kaiser and beyond

And many of his contributions were used on Kaiser products. After the Kaisers bought Willys in 1953, Stevens designed the Jeep Wagoneer, a shape that lasted 30 years. He always referred to this and his other styling projects in the plural: “we” did this or that. He simply wanted to make it clear that Brooks Stevens Associates was not a one-man company.

Kip also did his own thing on a Kaiser chassis. While Darrin was placing a pretty fiberglass body over a stock Henry J chassis to create the Kaiser-Darrin, Stevens moved in the opposite direction with the Excalibur J. This was a highly modified, dual purpose, road-and-track sports car. It could pace the vaunted Jaguar XK120, and often did in competition.

In the late Fifties, Stevens created the Excalibur-Valkyrie-Scimitar design exercise, which showed what could be done with aluminum. In the 1960s he reskinned the Aero-Willys for Willys-Overland do Brasil. This facelift persuaded Studebaker President Sherwood Egbert to let him modernize the aging “Loewy coupes.” The result was the sinfully beautiful Gran Tursimo Hawk of 1962-64.

Next Kip applied crisp, modern styling to the dowdy Studebaker Lark, giving it an extra lease on life. He produced the first sliding-roof station wagon in the Wagonaire, and his Studebaker prototypes for a new generation of cars were things of breathtaking beauty. (See “Why Studebaker Failed.”)

Faithful but unfortunate

Unhappily, most of his automotive efforts were for dead or dying companies. Had Kip worked for say, Chrysler, they would be more famous. Still, he managed to cap his career with an unequivocal success. This was the Excalibur line of “modern classics” based on a successive series of Mercedes-Benz commencing with the immortal SSK. Among “replicars” the Excalibur was the best selling, best engineered, and most carefully built.

Automobiles were but one facet of a half-century career, but they were his first love. He established the Brooks Stevens Automotive Museum, small and select, including some of the finest: the Packard Twin Six, Duesenberg Indy racer, Brescia Bugatti,  Mercedes-Benz 500K and 540K, Cord L29 and 812, Marmon V-12. Its frontispiece was a staggeringly beautiful 1939 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B, the world’s fastest prewar sports car. He added many of his own personal designs, like the Jeepster and Brazilian Willys, and the Alfa 6C 2500.

Clifford Brooks Stevens (1911-1995)

Kip did not come in for the universal plaudits he deserved. Too often, casual observers saw only him as hopeless exponent of chrome and tailfins. This is very shortsighted, for it fails to take the full measure of the man.

He was one of the supporting pillars of the automotive community: manufacturers and collectors. His whimsical, brilliant, imaginative, formal and radical designs were truly unique. His non-automotive work served America’s great corporations. Many of his designs, still around today, gained international renown.

He was as well a great companion, not at all self-centered (rare among designers). Always he drew out the best in his friends—car nuts, fellow stylists, lowly automotive writers. No one escaped his attraction. Everyone became proud and delighted to have their work encouraged by a man of such distinction.

There are many ways to measure wealth, but Kip Stevens banked his greatest treasure in the hearts of his friends. We cherish his memory.

Further reading

“The Greatness of Alex Tremulis,” Part 2: Tucker to Kaiser-Frazer,” 2020

“Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History,” first of two parts, 2019

“All the Luck: Howard A. ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” first of three parts, 2017

“Joe Frazer, Father of the Jeep,” first of three parts, 2011

For 30 years I’ve written the bimonthly Values Guide for Collectible Automobile, which for 40 years has consistently turned out quality articles and fine photography on collector cars. (To subscribe, click here.) I write this column without a byline, hoping to avoid being denounced by owners who think their car is worth a lot more than the market says it is.

My most amusing gaffe was when I badly underestimated values for the Monteverdi Hai, a 1970s Swiss exotic with a 7-liter Chrysler Hemi mounted right behind its twin bucket seats. The irate owner protested, saying he had it from his friend Jay Leno that his car was worth three times as much.

Now I happened to know a lifelong friend of Mr. Leno, who visited him frequently. “We’ll see if this guy really knows Jay Leno,” I told my editor. I phoned my friend and asked him to ask Jay.

That night the phone rang, and it was Jay Leno himself. Couldn’t have been nicer. “Yes,” he laughed, “I know the owner, and he’s right—you did low-ball the value of his car. But do you know what really upset him? It was when I phoned him offering to buy it for what you said it was worth!”

Values: clunkers and others

1980-84 Lincoln

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

1980: $4,000-7,500….$7,500-11,000….$11,000-15,000

1981-82: $3,000-6,000….$6,000-8,000….$8,000-13,000

1983-84: $2,000-5,000….$5,000-7,000….$7,000-11,000

None of these behemoths are worth a lot of money. In reality, only a thousand or so dollars separate the trim variations. Among 1980 (non-Mark) Continentals, the “Collector” trim is most desirable, followed by the “Town Car.” In 1981 the Continental name applied to coupes in Town or Signature trim, while the sedan became the “Town Car” or “Signature” trim. And so on. (If you’re confused by all this, you should be.) A handful are on the market (they were considered “downsized” from the monsters that had gone before). Does anyone want a 40-year-old Lincoln in the age of $7 gas (maybe $10 by the time this is in print)? Good question. Anyway, the gauges are down by your knees, where you won’t have to look at them.

1968-73 Datsun 510

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

2dr sedan $5,000-10,000….$10,000-15,000….$15,000-23,000

4dr sedan & wagon $4,000-7,500….$7,500-11,500….$11,500-15,000

The 510’s rally heritage marks it as a cut above average among cheap econoboxes, and good ones can command handsome prices. At the moment a sharp two-door painted Resale Red and showing under 25,000 miles is on offer by a Tennessee dealer for just under $23,000. That’s the top of our values range. If it’s as good mechanically as it looks physically, well, maybe. There’s a website specializing in 510s, which you should bookmark if you are in the market: www.510forsale.com. There you’ll find modified examples running upwards of $50,000. Which is a lot to pay for a Datsun.

1957-59 Chrysler 300

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

1957-58 300C/D convertible: $30,000-70,000….$70,000-100,000….$100,000-135,000

1957-58 300C/D hardtop: $20,000-40,000….$40,000-60,000….$60,000-75,000

1959 300E convertible: $25,000-60,000….$60,000-90,000….$90,000-120,000

1959 300E hardtop: $18,000-35,000….$35,000-55,000….$55,000-65,000

Long considered a blue-chip collectable, the 1957-59 letter series seems to have leveled off. Not according to the value guides: Collector Car Market Review still has convertibles around $150,000. The Old Cars Report Price Guide is even more optimistic, reaching $188,000 for the 300E. Hagerty is roughly in between. All three peg the best hardtops around $90,000.

We could not, however, find recent sales or auction prices anywhere near these values. For example, in 2019, a condition 1 hardtop sold for $22,000. At Scottsdale in 2017, a like-new restored convertible was all done at $104,500. Checking current for sale ads, the highest 300C ragtop we found was priced at $95,000, the highest 300E at $50,000. The top 300D does better ($125,000), but rarity is a factor since only 191 were built in that recession year. Clearly the value guides are not reflecting current market trends, which may be showing the effect of ever-increasing gas prices and/or, a diminishing number of collectors who remember these potent beasts when they were new. Our own values above reflect these considerations. Evidently it’s a buyer’s market for letter series Chryslers.

1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS convertible

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

All: $15,000-25,000….$25,000-40,000….$40,000-65,000

Engine options add: 15% (275hp 327; 295hp 350); 40% (325hp 396); 60% (375hp 396).

Indy Pace Car Replicas (about 350 built): Triple the above prices.

This is an easy car to shop for, so a-shopping we went. Starting us off at $38,900 was an RS/SS 350, fully restored but painted non-factory Harley Davidson Blush. At just short of $60,000 were two four-speeds: a sweet red RS/SS 350; and a metallic blue RS-only with under 28,000 original miles. $62,000 buys a mostly original automatic RS. $75,000 nets a striking red restoration with performance modifications. We found no RS convertibles under those prices, suggesting that quite a lot have already been restored or, if original, are not widely marketed. These strike us as pretty high prices for a late Sixties (non-Z/28) ponycar. But think of the thousands of collectors who pined for one as a kid! Fortunately we were grown up by then.

1953 Buick Skylark

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

Convertible: $40,000-70,000….$70,000-90,000….$90,000-130,000

Hardtop (prototype): …. ….$126,500*

Highest value guide price for a condition 1 Skylark is $180,000, but most guides settle around $130-140,000. Recent auction sales haven’t made that, but some came close. There’s always an exception, however. One sold for $73,700 just four years ago, and it certainly looked to be in fine condition. No fewer than six are offered in the current Hemmings Motor News, and five are bunched between $91,000 and $110,000. (The sixth is $139,000.) It seems safe to say a top quality Skylark will probably cost you under six figures, if you shop around.

*About that second entry: Buick built one Skylark hardtop—rather ungainly in our eyes—as a concept car in 1953, but it never entered production. After a full restoration in 2010, it won an Amelia Island Concours in the “Cars You Never Knew Existed” Class. It was auctioned by Barrett-Jackson at Scottsdale the following year, making $126,500.

1965 Mercury Comet Caliente convertible

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

Six: $5,000-10,000….$10,000-19,000….$19,000-27,500

V8, 200 hp: $6,000-11,000….$11,000-23,000….$23,000-30,000

V8, 271 hp: $10,000-20,000….$20,000-37,500….$37,500-50,000

The best one we could find (Resale Red, naturally) was a flawless C-code 289 V8 automatic with under 30,000 miles. It  looked factory new and should be at “$39,000 negotiable.” Yes, let’s negotiate. That’s a pile of loot for a glorified Falcon (and we thought Camaros were pricey). You might do better at auctions. A lookalike ’66 (also red with the 289) auctioned in 2017 for $20,900. If you don’t mind a white one and like to shift gears, there’s a beautiful four-speed for $19,800 in the current Hemmings. (We told you $39,000 was a bundle.) By the way, the Old Cars Report says not to pay over $25,000.

2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing: future collectible?

Wow, it’s sure not grandpa’s Eldorado—whoever thought there’d be Cadillacs like this? The Blackwing is only the grown-up, long-pants version of the much-admired CTS-V, but with new, swoopy styling and interior, aimed squarely at competition like the BMW M3 and Mercedes C63. Car and Driver says it “definitely lives up to the hype and roars to the top of this segment of hot four-doors, claiming a 10-Best title and an Editor’s Choice nod on its way up.” Okay, and low production will make it collectible in the future, if there are still gas pumps in 2072.

1970 Dodge D100 Adventurer pickup

Values: Restorable….Good….Excellent

All: $5,000-10,000….$10,000-17,500….$17,500-32,000

“Adventurer” was too good a name to die with DeSoto. So Dodge used it for a premium trim package with comfort and appearance upgrades in their light trucks. One collector writes: “The ‘D’ stood for duct tape, because that’s all you need to fix one when on the road. They were stiff and bouncy and the 4×4 had one of the worst turning radiuses around, but they still keep chugging along.” We found a ’68 “condition 2 1/2” at $16,000 in the classifieds. Restored D100 Adventurers bring handsome prices—up to $40,000. If you don’t want to be bothered with a fixer-upper, a Phoenix dealer has a sharp ’68 with a custom blue and silver paint job that they describe as “stout and stunning.” It should be, at $39,000.

1984-87 Audi 5000

Values: Good….Excellent (Restorable: don’t even think about it)

1984-87 sedan &wagon:  $3,000-5,000….$5,000-7,500

1986-87 Quattro sedan & wagon: $5,000-7,000 $7,000-11,500

Cheap wheels indeed: Audi 5000 values never quite recovered from the “unintended acceleration” fracas that bracketed these model years. Some lawsuits are still unsettled, though a good case has been made for driver error—stomping the wrong pedal. (Of course it’s Audi’s fault. Humans never make mistakes.) These cars are expensive to service and parts may be non-existent or priced in the stratosphere. So if a 5000 appeals to you, look for the lowest mileage, cleanest example you can find. Paying a top price for the best one around will save you money in the long run.

P.S.: Jay Leno, autoholic

I actually had two calls from Jay that night. He’s a charming gent, a dyed-in-the-wool autoholic. (Check out his podcasts.) In the first call he waxed eloquent about the joys of driving a Monteverdi with 426 cubic inches of Chrysler Hemi roaring behind your right ear. In the next he went on about his latest acquisition, a Stanley steam car. (One of these set the Land Speed Record of 127.66 mph in 1906.) Then he asked what I owned (a 1936 Packard at the time.) He bent my ear extolling Packard virtues I didn’t even know existed. By then it was 11:30 pm Eastern Time. I was fascinated, but also tired out.”If Jay calls again,” I told my wife, “tell him I’ve gone to bed.”

Concluded from Part 1. This article first appeared in Collectible Automobile, December 2021.

The product mix that had done fairly well in 1953 continued. Senior Packards had a flashy new dash, optional four-way power seats and air conditioning, and a special nylon matelassé interior for the Patrician. Henney continued to build long-wheelbase models, along with funeral coaches and flower cars on the commercial chassis. While no Derham formal sedan was catalogued, some Patricians were so converted at the Derham shops. Edging toward the status of a separate make, Clippers were distinguished by more distinctive styling and referred to mainly by the Clipper name.

The Patrician’s new 359 nine-main bearing, 212 hp eight also found its way to the Caribbean, convertible and hardtop (now the Pacific). That made them luxury cars by every measure except wheelbase. They were priced accordingly: around $4000 for the Pacific and convertible, $6100 for the Caribbean. The latter lost its rear wheel cutouts while gaining a curious two-toning strip along the rear fenders. (Cadillac’s Eldorado, more “prodified” in 1954 and reduced by $2000, outsold it five to one.) Late in ’54, new Gear-Start Ultramatic offered the choice of the traditional leisurely torque converter acceleration or starting in low and automatically shifting to high.

Ford’s blitz, Studebaker’s curse

Unfortunately, just as the ‘54s were announced, car sales fell badly. On top of that came the infamous Ford-GM sales war, when Henry Ford II vowed to outproduce GM or sink trying. GM replied in kind. That meant shipping cars to dealers in greater quantity than they ordered. What it did was seriously to cripple Chrysler and the independents. Their dealers could not compete with giveaway prices offered by Ford and GM dealers crowded with inventory. Packard’s 1953 sales rally stopped cold as production fell to under 28,000 for the year.

The lack of a V-8 was part of this, and nervous dealers were complaining. Only Pontiac and Packard still offered in-line eights in 1954. An urgent V-8 program was underway. “We have no choice,” Nance groused. “Making one is the only road to a modern car. Everything follows the product.” He meant that every one followed the product. And a V-8 was the essential product for high-priced cars now.

On 1 October 1954, Packard purchased Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana. One week later, in an irony Jim Nance would ponder in later years, George Mason died. His successor, George Romney, had his own vision for American Motors. It did not include partners. So here was Nance, pursuing Mason’s dream of merging the independents, which had died with him. Buying Studebaker was decision at last, taken at the worst possible time. Packard’s chief financial officer, Walter Grant, studied Studebaker’s accounts and returned to Detroit “ashen-faced.” Instead of the 165,000-unit breakeven point quoted in sale negotiations, Studebaker needed 282,000 cars a year to be profitable. The closest it had come was 268,000 in 1950. “It was a kick in the gut,” Nance said later. “Their labor costs were substantially out of line.”

1955: One last try

The 1955 senior Packards, a deep facelift of the aging Reinhart body, were nicely improved. Onto that old shell, stylist Dick Teague grafted “cathedral” tail lights, peaked front fenders, an ornate grille and wraparound windshield. Henney had expired and long-wheelbase models were gone. So were the Derham formals, though Nance had tried to develop one. The underwhelming, middle-priced Cavalier was gone, and not missed. What remained, however, were a dramatic Caribbean and Patrician, and the new Four Hundred—at last a senior hardtop on the 127-inch wheelbase.

Attractive in the over-decorated mid-Fifties sense, they were blessed with power. Packard’s long-awaited V-8, a short-stroker of 352 cubic inches, delivered up to 275 hp in the Caribbean. For faster starts, Twin Ultramatic, an evolution of Gear-Start, offered the traditional torque convertor start or starting in low, shifting to 1:1 and then to direct drive. Special torque convertor vanes enhanced performance on Caribbeans and Four Hundreds. It was good transmission, though not up to the torque of the new V-8. Poorly serviced, or abused in stop-light grands prix, it often proved troublesome.

“Different from any other car”

The real marvel for 1955 was “Torsion-Level” suspension, designed by a brilliant engineer named Bill Allison. Long torsion bars longitudinally connected the front and rear wheels. A complex electrical leveling system adjusted for load. (We kids liked to pile into a Packard, riding up and down as the suspension compensated). Effectively interlinking all four wheels, Torsion-Level offered extraordinary ride and handling, standard on the seniors and upper-priced Clippers. Road testers loved it. Floyd Clymer proclaimed the Patrician “different from any other car…You can drive into a corner at high speed with this car and the body remains almost level.”

Such praise seemed to vindicate James Nance’s efforts to revive Packard’s luxury tradition. But in one respect, as the ’55s started production, he’d made a cardinal error. Since 1940 Packard bodies had been built by Briggs. In 1954 Briggs was bought by Chrysler, forcing Packard to build its own bodies. Badly advised, Nance settled for a cramped body plant on Conner Avenue, Detroit. Resultant production slowdowns and quality-control problems bedeviled the ’55s and enraged dealers. Chief complainant was Nance himself: “One Patrician was so bad I couldn’t begin to itemize…. It was literally necessary to use a crowbar to get one of the rear doors open.”

A “conditioning line” was set up to correct defects, but the shortage of flawless cars found dealers receiving too many dull green or blue jobs, instead of what they really wanted: fire opal, tourmaline or rose quartz. Glitzy styling, V-8 power and Torsion-Level could not compensate for such lapses. Packard and Clipper did produce 55,000 ’55 models, 30% of them luxury senior models. But anything would have been better than ’54. Nance had hoped for double that, and worse news was ahead.

1956: End of the luxury Packards

Conner’s problems were eventually surmounted and ironically the ’56s were much better built, with a sharp facelift, vivid paint jobs and a new Caribbean hardtop. Their bored-out 374 V-8 packed an industry-high 310 bhp in the Caribbean, which featured unique seat covers that could be removed and reversed from fabric to leather. Still, between Studebaker’s well-known struggles and Packard’s past quality problems, customers were deserting in droves. Scarcely 10,000 seniors were built for 1956—last of the “true” Packards.

Nance made strenuous efforts to finance a line of all-new cars with luxury Packards truly distinctive from the rest, but lenders had grown cautious. The Detroit plant closed, and Packard ended life as a glorified Studebaker, built in South Bend in 1957-58. Nance hung around long enough to place his top colleagues, which was greatly to his credit. Of course he was blamed for the debacle; the man at the top always is.

Why Packard failed

In reality, Packard’s crucial mistakes occurred years before. After the war, when a company could sell anything on wheels, Packard could have reverted to type, rebuilding its reputation as a luxury automaker. Instead it pursued the lower-priced markets that had saved it in the Depression. One can understand the reasoning—but there was no Depression now, and fierce competition soon engulfed those markets. In retrospect, if middle-priced cars were essential, there had been a better way: an entirely separate make not bearing the Packard name. But no one in 1945 could visualize that in the face of an American market clamoring for cars.

Stemming from this marketing mistake was a series of product decisions that flew in the face of Packard’s proud heritage. Instead of building on the timeless styling of the 1942 Clipper, still fresh after the war, management decreed a facelift that looked fine in 1948 but didn’t age well. Advertising was schizophrenic. Packard frequently changed agencies, some extolling luxury but most devoted to 200s or Clippers.

“Love me, love my dog”

Product mistakes came thick and fast. While Cadillac was creating the iconic Coupe de Ville, Packard built a station wagon—a very fine one, but a wagon? Packard needed a luxury hardtop in 1948, not 1955. While Cadillac was corralling the limousine market with its Fleetwood 75, Packard was edging away from it. Soon after the war, Cadillac adopted a modern V-8 and hallmark styling. “Cad fins” were so popular they became accessories for other makes. Packard stayed too long with fast-aging designs and inline engines. It was really a case of “love me, love my dog.” The public, or at least some of it, had always loved Packard. But they didn’t love the dog.

Nance and his colleagues didn’t know it, but even before they bought Studebaker, the song had ended. The melody lingered on in 1956, with impressive power, snazzy styling. Torsion-Level was innovative, typical of the engineering that had built Packard’s reputation since the 1900s. But the end finally came for the cars Tom McCahill knew as a boy, and we would never see their like again. 

Further reading

“The Packard—Ne Plus Ultra of Automotive House Organs” (in two parts), 2021

“Packard Tales and Memories of Bud Juneau,” 2021

“Why Studebaker Failed: In the End, It is Always Management,” 2020

“Dutch Darrin, Part 2: The Packard Adventures,” 2017

Spellbinder: The Life of James Nance, by Stuart Blond

The most comprehensive account of Nance’s tenure at Packard is in Stuart Blond’s new two-volume biography, which is strongly recommended for car enthusiasts old and new. Stuart, my successor as editor of The Packard Cormorant, has constructed a fastidious account of a Horatio Alger story, and how Nance ended up at Packard with the toughest challenge of his career.

Part 1, 1900-1954

Part 2, 1955-1985

“Patrician and Its Relatives” first appeared in Collectible Automobile, December 2021.

“Packard is back and cooking,” wrote Tom McCahill, irrepressible road tester wrote for Mechanix Illustrated. “These are good automobiles, big, fast and capable…they also have a touch of that old glamour that the big, open Eights had in the Twenties, when I was in college owning a fifty-dollar crate and dreaming that someday I’d have a Packard.”

It was a nice accolade, typical of “Uncle Tom’s” loquacious boosterism. He wasn’t alone in hoping Packard’s first all-new postwar redesign heralded a revival. Only two decades before, Packard had reigned as the car of choice for those who had “made it”—a very visible declaration of what their owners thought of themselves, and wanted the rest of us to think of them also. Why not again?

Yet even McCahill admitted only to “a touch” of the old allure, and a touch was not wholly satisfying. In reality, though no one knew it, the 1951 Packards began the long wake for America’s once-dominant luxury brand. Sporadically through 1956, Packard would lurch back toward past glory. But the damage was already done, and its efforts would prove too little, too late.

Early errors

In Packard: A History of the Motorcar and the Company, George Hamlin and Dwight Heinmuller defined the problem. By the late Thirties, they wrote, technology had revolutionized the industry: “The day when you could buy a Packard and be guaranteed to go farther, faster, quieter than anyone in a car costing half or even a third as much had simply vanished. This was of course true for Lincoln and Cadillac too. But the difference, insofar as the success of the product was concerned, would be measured in each company’s salesmanship.”

Blurring the distinctions between luxury models and what Packard called “juniors” was not good salesmanship, Hamlin and Heinmuller added. By 1937, the gap between top and bottom “did not approximate the traditional company pricing norm, and the gap had been closed principally by the higher-priced cars moving downward rather than the lower-priced ones moving up.” In 1946, for example, that gap had closed to $3000 ($32,000 in today’s money). In 1951 it was barely $1000.

1951: Thinning out “that goddam senior stuff”

There was nothing particularly wrong with chief designer Johnnie Reinhart’s “Contour Styled” ’51s, though he regretted their high beltline and had wanted more glass. Yet Reinhart brought the fenders up even with the hood and deck before most of the industry. Mechanically, Packard’s nine-main-bearing 327 straight eight was soundly engineered, and Ultramatic, its homegrown automatic, one of Detroit’s finest. The problem, for those who yearned for the Packards of their youth, was—well—everything else: It was no longer clear how the company viewed itself, or how the public viewed the company.

“Nothing happens until somebody sells something,” proclaimed Jim Nance, destined to be Packard’s president from mid-1952. But since the 1930s Depression, when Packard had moved sharply down-market with the One Twenty and Six, selling something had proven tricky. The 1935 One Twenty—a cheap Packard, but hardly a cheap car—had saved the firm from bankruptcy. The rather cheaper 1937 Six, priced to garner even more sales, was arguably a step too far from tradition. Since then, Packard had not built much of what one manager called “that goddam senior stuff,” and by 1951 that stuff had almost disappeared.

Incredibly for 1951, Packard offered only one true luxury car: the 127-inch wheelbase Patrician 400 (“400” was dropped later) at $3600. With a nine-main-bearing 327 cubic inch straight eight, it was trimmed with Wilton carpets, color-coordinated broadcloth and footrests for rear seat passengers. Smooth and solid on the road, if no jackrabbit with standard Ultramatic, it was available only as a four-door sedan, at once the most popular and least exciting of body styles.

Patrician versus Cadillac

And the Patrician was cheapened: the preceding Custom Eight’s velvety “Mosstred” carpets, Marshall coil springs, profuse woodgraining and glittery dash were all gone. So too in mid-year were cloisonné wheel cover medallions. Gone too was the legendary 356 straight eight, although there were sound reasons for this: the 327 had higher compression, comparable smoothness and a better power-to-weight ratio. Nevertheless, like the collapsing price gap between Packard models, there were now only 39 cubic inches between a plebeian 200 and the top of the line.

Against the Patrician, rival Cadillac arrayed its hot-selling Sixty-two sedan, convertible and two hardtops including the swank Coupe de Ville. Packard sold 9001 Patricians, Cadillac over 80,000 Sixty-twos, a third of which were hardtops or convertibles. Cadillac also built 16,000 long-wheelbase Sixty Special sedans. Packard had nothing comparable.

Another so-called senior Packard was the 300, an austere four-door with the five-main 327, supposed successor to the famous Super Eight. Its drab interior hardly proclaimed luxury. While Cadillac was abandoning its lowest-priced Sixty-one, the 300 soldiered on, by no stretch a luxury Packard. There were also a few 1951 commercial chassis, but only to 300 spec, with no long-wheelbase variants. Cadillac had that small but lucrative market almost to itself, building over 5000 long sedans and extra-long commercial chassis.

The ’51 line did offer a hardtop, the Mayfair, and a convertible, at $3200-3400. By Packard’s definition they were junior cars, riding a 122-inch wheelbase, albeit powered by a five-main 327. Their competitors were Oldsmobile and DeSoto. Cadillac’s sporty two-door models sold for $500 more, carried modern overhead valve V-8s and outsold the Packards five to one. The lack of an up-market hardtop would continue to hurt.

1952: Big Jim and the quest for relevance

James J. Nance had not been Packard’s first choice in its search for new, dynamic leadership. Still, Nance’s reputation augured well. He had turned General Electric’s Hotpoint into a best-selling appliance brand. His whose tenure at Packard was highly anticipated. GE bought 25,000 shares of Packard stock—“the kind of compliment that counts,” Fortune wrote.

Packard got Nance as part of a larger, behind-the-scenes deal. As he told George Hamlin and this writer in 1976: “I wouldn’t have gone into it just to take over Packard.” Nash’s George Mason, a visionary among his peers, was planning to merge Nash, Hudson, Packard and Studebaker. His role, Nance said, was “to bring in Studebaker,” while Mason acquired Hudson, “then fold all four into what George was already calling American Motors.” This explains how Nance saw Packard: a luxury division competing with Cadillac, leaving the goddam junior stuff to other makes.

Nance’s explanation has been challenged by subordinate AMC figures, but they weren’t present in plenary discussions. Hamlin and I had no reason to believe that Nance fabricated the story. It fits George Mason’s mindset.

Nance had his work cut out. The 1952 Packard line was no more luxurious than 1951, with the same array of mostly middle-priced models, the Patrician, 300, and a few commercial chassis. Sales were down by 14,000 units. Job one was sales, and that was Nance’s specialty.

Nance specialized in stem-winding speeches reminiscent of a country parson. Buyers over 40, he thundered, “still think of Packard as a quality car…. But to the younger person of say 35, Packard doesn’t stand for anything…. Ask what Cadillac stands for, and every kid on the curbstone can tell you. ‘That’s the best, mister.’” Packard was “getting a miserable 3.5%” of the luxury car business, Nance fumed: “I’ll be damned if I’m going to be in a horse race and get left at the quarter pole.”

1953: pursuit of luxury

The opulent Packards once mocked by 1930s management now seemed poised for a comeback. For 1953 Nance moved quickly to separate luxury from middle-priced models in the public mind. Gone was the 200-300-400 nomenclature. Juniors were now Packard Clippers, reviving a model name from 1947. The Mayfair and convertible, still neither fish nor fowl, at least benefitted from reflected glory in the new Packard Caribbean, a $5300 convertible inspired by the Pan American showcar.

Stylist Dick Teague developed the Caribbean’s special features: fully radiused rear wheel cutouts, senior taillights, a hood scoop, wire spoke wheels, a “continental” spare tire and minimal brightwork. Specifications were no different from the standard convertible, but as a prestige line-leader, it was a good job, built up from convertibles by Mitchell-Bentley in Ionia, Michigan. Sales were 750, double those of Cadillac’s $7700 prestige-leading Eldorado. Given Nance’s resources, it was a worthy assault on his rival. But it still rode the 122-inch wheelbase, and even Ultramatic was optional.

Deploring Packard’s loss of the high-price business, Nance decreed a comeback with three new luxury ’53s. They comprised a Derham-bodied formal sedan, and a brace of long-wheelbase models built by Henney. The eight-passenger “Corporation limousine” and “Executive sedan” sold for $2000 more than Cadillac’s 75 counterparts. The Derham, with its padded top and oval backlight, was Packard’s first custom body since 1942. The limo and Executive were the first long-wheelbase bodies catalogued since 1949.

“America’s New Choice in Fine Cars”

The slogan for 1953 was proclaimed with suitable fanfare and Nance-driven improvements. Four barrel carburetion boosted horsepower. Power steering (Packard’s own) joined 1952’s power brakes. Air conditioning, which Packard had pioneered before the war, was back on the option list. Nance himself came up with the “three-way radio” (manual, pushbutton and selector bar tuning). Fascinated by the idea, he’d contacted GM Delco, finding they had one ready to go. He made a supply deal, and had it in Packards five months before Cadillac: a nice jump on the opposition.

One couldn’t argue with success, and most stockholders didn’t. The new luxury models sold sparingly, but that they were there at all was testimonial to Nance’s determination. Advertising assumed a decided up-market look, and the results were agreeable. Calendar ’53 saw 81,000 cars, up by a third and the best since 1950. Packard’s share of the luxury market increased, and pre-tax profits at $10 million were the highest in history. It began to look like things were turning around.

Concluded in Part 2 (1954-56)

Further reading

“The Packard—Ne Plus Ultra of Automotive House Organs” (in two parts), 2021

“Packard Tales and Memories of Bud Juneau,” 2021

“Why Studebaker Failed: In the End, It is Always Management,” 2020

“Dutch Darrin, Part 2: The Packard Adventures,” 2017

Spellbinder: The Life of James Nance, by Stuart Blond

The most comprehensive account of Nance’s tenure at Packard is in Stuart Blond’s new two-volume biography, which is strongly recommended for car enthusiasts old and new. Stuart, my successor as editor of The Packard Cormorant, has constructed a fastidious account of a Horatio Alger story, and how Nance ended up at Packard with the toughest challenge of his career.

Part 1, 1900-1954

Part 2, 1955-1985

Memories of Bud

Bud Juneau gave me my first real job. I don’t mean “work,” the things we do for some entity which pays us. I mean what we do individually, hoping for pay and solely responsible for success or failure. For me, this began with Bud.

In 1975 I resigned as senior editor at Automobile Quarterly and set out to be an independent motoring writer. The word “independent” cannot be stressed too highly, because the responsibility for my fortunes—including all that dull stuff like office equipment and health insurance—was entirely mine.

Well, not entirely. My wife, a bacteriologist, kindly agreed to sustain us until I got going. To this day she says “he’s been out of work since 1975.” I always retort with Churchill’s line: “The fortunate people in the world—the only really fortunate people in the world, in my mind—are those whose work is also their pleasure.”

The market for car books was wide open, but I also needed jobs that paid more regularly than sporadic, often whimsical annual royalties. My idea was that car clubs, which were growing rapidly then, might welcome a paid editor. The first person I approached was Bud Juneau, the Packard Club’s Publications VP. Ultimately I was churning out three magazines in 16 issues per year, but Bud was the first to grasp this “unprecedented opportunity.”

Bringing back a classic magazine

What intrigued Bud was my idea to invigorate the club quarterly by recreating Packard’s former house organ, The Packard Magazine, last published in 1931. We proposed using the same wide margins, elegant typefaces, art deco layouts and golden picture frame cover. With his keen imagination, Bud was my leading advocate, even when challenged about the cost. (Actually it cost no more per member, because membership increased and print costs held, since we kept almost every issue to 40 pages.)

Flipping the bird

One aspect put Bud in the hot seat. My intention was total—including the title, which meant dispensing with previous title, The Cormorant. Packard’s famous bird is the heraldic pelican, symbol of devotion and loyalty, not the common cormorant or shag. (“Which lays its eggs in a paper bag.”)

Unfortunely, around 1930, an unknown wag in the ad department called it a cormorant for a few years, and somehow it stuck. To some it seemed snootier, so when they learned my plans they erupted. They even produced a Cormorant Preservation Newsletter, as if I were proposing to eradicate the entire species Phalacrocorax carbo, that waterlogged fish-stealer of the Maine coast.

At this point the kind and generous Bud Juneau knew he had to step in. Reviewing a set of proofs, he noticed that I had “greyed out” the word Cormorant in the title. He guessed correctly that I planned to grey it out more each issue until it disappeared entirely. I was flipping the bird to the cormorant partisans.

“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” Bud quipped. “I have to advise that for the sake of peace and quiet, this is not a hill we want to die on.” I love nothing more than tweaking fanatics—but Bud was wise, and right. The Packard Cormorant has a certain ring to it, and under Stuart Blond’s fastidious editorship it so remains—now fifty-plus years on.

I mention this because it was so typical of Bud—ever the diplomat, ever sensitive as well to the mood of the club and its members. He rarely overruled an idea, although he sometimes reacted with words of caution, when we ran a badly over-decorated Packard, or one in outlandish non-factory colors.

Master photographer

Bud labored especially hard as our chief photographer—in the days when sharp, large format color photos required a 4×5” view camera on a gigantic tripod, a relic nowadays.

I’ll never forget his struggling to film the greatest Packard convocation ever, the “Magnum Opus.” Over 1000 Packards gathered at the company’s birthplace in Warren, Ohio, on Packard’s centenary in 1999. That was the hottest weekend I can remember, and Bud was especially sensitive to sun. Yet he was everywhere, toting that humungous camera, and we all hoped he could get through without collapsing with sun-stroke. But he did it.

I remember his taste for fun, as when he and club president Alan Adams piled into my press car Jaguar and drove right over the Napa range to find a fabled winery during the Berkeley National Meet in 1974. Alan amused himself by seeing how many electric windows he could move simultaneously by pressing all the buttons. “Don’t do that,” Bud shouted. “This is a Jaguar, not a Packard—and that means Lucas electrics!” Alan subsided.

Bud often picked us up in his “modern Packard,” which I’m sorry to say was in those days a Cadillac Brougham. “This the best you’ve got?” I kidded him. No, he had better cars at home, including a beautiful 1937 Twelve named “Helen Twelve Cylinders.”

He was not GM-averse. (Nobody’s perfect!) He owned a yellow 1949 Buick Roadmaster Riviera and a red 1951 Oldsmobile 88, both pristine. The Olds was a show model with plexiglas hood sections, so customers could gaze at the mighty V8 below. Bud was thoughtful about history. Once, as we looked at that fine engine, he remarked: “If only Packard built something like this in 1951.”

Packard Motorcar Foundation

When Bud became involved with the Packard Motorcar Foundation, I followed his lead again, making donations, joining the board, and placing my entire automotive library in trust for the Foundation to keep or dispose of as they saw fit. “We’ll probably only keep the Packard stuff, you know,” Bud cautioned. “But we’ll be happy to cash in on the rest.” I said that was fine. The PMCF has done made incredible progress preserving the most historic parts of the old Packard Proving Grounds. Bud knew that, and was devoted to its work.

“There’s nothing to be said when a friend dies,” said my best editor ever, Don Vorderman. “There’s just a great big hole where someone you loved once was.” Everyone who knew Bud Juneau well loved him. And that’s one crowd I’m proud to be a member of.

Further reading

“The Packard: Ne Plus Ultra of House Organs,” 2021

“Automobile Quarterly: The Memories,” 2021

“Don Vorderman: Best Editor I Ever Had,” 2019

“The Packard Adventures of Howard ‘Dutch’ Darrin,” 2017

“Old Jags and Allards: The Whimsy of Dick O’Kane,” 2020

Sean Connery was a Scottish National Party separatist and a bit of an eccentric; and also, most everyone avers, a good guy. He lived in gated, ultra-posh Lyford Cay in New Providence, fifty miles from us on Eleuthera. He was intensely private—hard on visitors, who were always trying to see him. Appropriately, he chose to live where he filmed so many escapades—romancing lovelies while fighting sharks, frogmen, tarantulas, barracuda, octopi, gorgeous spies and implacable masterminds.

Nassau

He used to go to this little bistro outside of Lyford Cay. The restaurant belonged to the sister of a good friend. We would go there whenever we were in Nassau. One night my friend I and had just returned from a northern fishing trip. We brought back salmon, some of which was featured on the menu. Seated a couple of tables over were Sean Connery and his wife Micheline, feasting on our fish.

The waitress, my friend’s niece, gestured toward us, telling Sean we were the ones who had actually caught the salmon. As he was leaving he stopped at our table to thank us.

Another friend who was at the table, but not on the fishing trip, shook hands with Mr. Connery and said, “You’re welcome.” We of course gave our friend action for having taken credit for something he had no part of. He said he didn’t care what we thought—it was one of the highlights of his life. He tells the story of shaking Sean Connery’s hand quite often.

London threesome

Here is another snippet that would otherwise be lost to memory. My friend Garry Clark, our manager on a dozen Churchill tours, runs a fleet of limousines and private cars in London. In 1989 he drove for the cast of the third Indiana Jones movie. He drove Sean Connery, Harrison Ford and screenwriter George Lucas for a stag night on the town. Behind the wheel, Garry was in stitches the entire ride. “Each of them was taking turns, telling the other two how far past it they were.”

Bond girls? Sure, but what about Bond cars?

Every car nut growing up in that era was struck by the great cars in Ian Fleming‘s thrillers. Sean Connery drove them with verve and assurance. Each of us conjured up the sensation of being pressed against the seatback under the urge of the car’s terrific power.

Early on there was Bond’s supercharged 1930 Bentley 4 1/2-liter coupe. Arch-villain Sir Hugo Drax ambushed and totaled it on the Dover Road in Moonraker (1955). Drax himself drove a Mercedes-Benz 300S cabriolet. “Bond had once dabbled on the fringe of the racing world,” Ian Fleming writes. “Lost in memories, he heard again the harsh scream of Caracciola‘s great white beast of a car as it howled past the grandstands at Le Mans.” Or the huge silver grand prix Mercs of Lang, Seaman and von Brauchitsch, “drifting the fast sweeping bends of Tripoli at 190, or screaming along the tree-lined straight at Bern with the Auto Unions on their tails.”

“He disagreed with something that ate him”

Bond’s friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter, drove a Cadillac-powered Studillac in Diamonds are Forever (1955). Leiter let it out on the Taconic State Parkway, doing 80 in second. Then his “hook” slammed the column shift into high on the way to 100. (Leiter’s “hook” had replaced his right hand, eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, 1954, Fleming wrote: “He disagreed with something that ate him.”) The Studillac didn’t impress Bond. “This sort of hotrod job’s all right for kids who can’t afford a real car,” he told Leiter.

Most memorable of all was Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (DB3 in the original text of Goldfinger (1957). Hollywood immortalized it with trick machine guns, rotating number plates, ejection seat, water- and oil-sprayers, a bullet-proof deck shield, and knock-off hubs which extended to rip the guts out of opposition vehicles.

“The Locomotive” (Bentley S2)

Never seen in the films was Bond’s Bentley Continental S2, which he called “The Locomotive.” It appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961). Fleming called it “the most selfish car in England….. Some rich idiot had married [it] to a telegraph pole on the Great West Road. Bond bought the wreck, straightened the chassis and fitted a new engine.”

Next he had Mulliners fit a custom body: “A trim, rather square convertible with only two armed bucket seats in black leather. The rest was all knife-edged, rather ugly, trunk.” [Not “boot”?] The Bentley was battleship grey, “painted in rough, not gloss…. She went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together.”

Fleming’s readers….

…were struck by The Locomotive, envisioning this incongruous Bentley heading to “work.” That took place in the mysterious, unmarked building on Regent’s Park, “Universal Exports,” cover for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Ian Fleming continues:

The twin exhausts—Bond had demanded two-inch pipes—he hadn’t liked the old soft flutter of the marque—growled softly as the long grey nose, topped by a big octagonal silver bolt instead of the winged B, swerved out of the little Chelsea square and into King’s Road.

It was 9 o’clock, too early for the bad traffic, and Bond pushed the car fast up Sloan Street and into the park. It would also be too early for the traffic police, so he did some fancy driving that brought him to Marble Arch in three minutes flat. Then there came the slow round-the-houses into Baker Street and so into Regent’s Park. Within ten minutes of getting the Hurry call, he was going up in the lift of the big square building to the eighth and top floor….

The Locomotive Lives! (Update, 2021)

We recently heard from professional car designer and Bond fan Tony Hunter, who has brought Bond’s coachbuilt S2 Bentley back to life. The design, writes Tony

Naturally we asked, what about the big silver bolt radiator mascot? (In his drawings above, artist Tom Rivel interpreted this literally.) But Tony Hunter doubts this is what Fleming imagined:

Whatever you think was in Fleming’s mind, Tony’s recreation is truly magnificent. (I’m glad he painted it in gloss, not rough!) It’s authentic down even to the vintage telephone, Bond’s connection to “Universal Exports.”

Further reading

Exuma, Jewels in the Sea: Diving the Thunderball Grotto, 2013.

Alec Arthur Graham Robson 1936-2021

Graham was born in Skipton, Yorkshire, the only child of Clifford and Kathleen Robson. He was educated locally before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read Engineering. His first job was as a graduate trainee at Jaguar Cars in 1957. His subsequent career became a perfect training path for someone destined to become a leading author.

In 1961 Robson became a development engineer, then competition secretary at Standard-Triumph, then a writer for The Autocar. By 1969 he was at the Rootes Group as chief engineer, product proving. He became a full-time independent motoring writer, researcher and author in 1972.

That word “independent” cannot be stressed too highly, because whatever his links with the manufacturer of a car he was writing about, his research was always thorough and he never pulled his punches. He wrote nearly 170 books and countless articles—one of most prolific motoring writers ever. Many Robson books were about motorsport, for he had been a rally co-driver in the mid-Fifties. His passion for writing was triggered by his 1950s rally reports for Motoring News.

Quantity did not affect quality. Robson books were all meticulously researched and well written. On many subjects his books are now the “standard works.” Because of his wide knowledge, Robson was also a frequent master of ceremonies or commentator for national club events. He was president, vice-president or an honorary member of several Triumph clubs.

Graham married Pamela in 1962 and they had two sons. Hamish is now a senior design engineer with Toyota Motorsport in Germany. Jonathan is a landscape gardener in Dorset. In 1981 Robson moved from the Lake District to a picture-postcard village in Dorset, thereafter traveling widely on business and pleasure. Sadly, Pamela died in 2014 after a long illness.

Triumphant passage

I wrote Graham in 1974, after I wrote a brief history of Triumph for my employer, Automobile Quarterly magazine. He had recently published The Story of Triumph Sports Cars (1973). And so I wrote with trepidation, the acolyte at the foot of Olympus. He couldn’t have been kinder over my amateurish efforts. After I became a freelance, we met personally in London. There to my astonishment, he offered to co-author with me a complete history of our mutual passion, Triumph Cars, and to find us a publisher.

Appearing in 1977, the book has had a long run in three editions—the current, and by far the most elaborate, in 2018.  While I had equal billing, Graham sold the job to Veloce Publishing, and did literally all the work. I had, originally, written Triumph’s history through 1940, and a few postwar sections. That part of the story was told. But Graham had to update everything that had happened since the previous edition in 2004.

He tackled the job with his usual celerity, rounding up dozens of exciting new photographs. The fabled 1930s Dolomite Straight Eight was also Graham’s to update: he had test-driven the newly restored car it in the 2000s. He never complained and treated me as his full partner. As a result of his efforts, Triumph Cars is one of my two proudest automotive histories.

Sunbeam sublimities

Graham helped in innumerable other ways. Together we co-authored the long-running Complete Book of Collectible Cars. He enabled a mutual friend get his dream job with Motor Racing Publications. When I tackled my second-favorite English marque, Robson was there again. Here is what I wrote in Tiger Alpine Rapier: Sporting Cars from the Rootes Group (1982):

Graham Robson’s efforts on behalf of this book and myself could not be listed in 100 pages. He began by recording a long interview with the Tiger’s visionary, Lewis Garrad. Then he compiled the specifications for Sunbeam and Humber. Next he read and critiqued the manuscript, located the photo archives and got filthy helping me select images. Graham liaised with E.M. Lea-Major of Talbot UK’s PR department. He also wrote the appendix on Hillman Imp rallying. (My file on the Imp consisted only of Bob Fendell’s comment that he could keep his rally Imp going by stringing a wire over his shoulder to the carburetor when the linkage broke.) I cannot begin to express my thanks to Graham for saving me from myself, for helping make the book as accurate as possible, for being so tolerant of my faults, and for being, in short, such a good friend.

Halcyon days

Betimes Graham would come to the States, always with a book to write or an appearance to make. On several occasions I took him to Detroit, which fascinated him. I always tried to line up interesting “press cars.” I was astonished at his reaction to the 1979 Lincoln Continental Mark V Bill Blass Designer Edition. Two tons, over 20 feet long, extravagantly trimmed, with acres of sheetmetal, it was the biggest coupe Ford ever built. Surely a monument to Utter Excess? But Graham was enthralled. “Do you Americans realize what you have here? This much sheer motorcar? Do you understand that the same money in England will barely buy you a Mini?”

Five years later Robson tore up the Detroit motorways in a Ford Mustang SVO, which he loved. (He was a superb driver, practicing rally ace Paddy Hopkirk‘s technique: “Fill Up Their Mirrors.”) I thought we were going to gaol, but somehow the coppers missed us. On the same trip we borrowed a Chrysler Laser, only just announced. We parked it in front of the GM Tech Center, and laughed when every single window of that famous styling emporium was filled by someone peering out.

In England we were welcomed at his two homes, first Croft House in Cumberland, then Girt House in Dorset. (“Dorset has a helluva lot more sunshine.”) Here, accompanied by the sonorous tones of sleeping English bulldogs (“a family tradition”), we whiled away evenings with Famous Grouse, talking cars. For the automotive tours of England, which Barbara and I ran in 1977-90, Graham paved the way. His good offices allowed us access to places where ordinary tourists were usually barred: Vanden Plas Coachworks, Aston Martin Lagonda, the metal-benders in the Rolls-Royce radiator shop. The magic name of Robson was our Open Sesame.

Always pressing on

Graham’s world was motoring, and by the 1990s his friend and fellow car nut was turning increasingly toward Winston Churchill. He understood, of course, and was happy to fall in when Churchillian missions brought me to England. When I sold Churchill books, he turned over his garden shed for me to pack up my purchases to ship home. In 2019 we arrived in London after the Hillsdale College Cruise. Graham made it his business travel up from Dorset. (“One always says ‘up,’ never ‘down’ to the Great Wen,” he once warned me.)  We dined luxuriously at Horse Guards Hotel. He hadn’t changed a bit. Even if he had, how could Robson be forgotten after 170 books?

I quoted to him the words of Alistair Cooke—a maxim I know he shared. “I shall never retire, because I have observed that many of my friends who do immediately keel over.” Alistair lived to 95, and broadcast his final BBC Letter from America only months before he left us. Good, sound policy.

On to the end

Graham Robson shared and typified Alistair Cooke’s philosophy—and mine. “We shall go on to the end,” as Churchill said. And sure enough: Last April Graham wrote me about another book! It was his last message: