I was born in South Bend a few years after Studebaker shuttered its plant, so a post-Studebaker South Bend is all I’ve ever known. But I will always love the quirky cars from my hometown. I’ve visited the Studebaker National Museum many times over the past 30 years, ever since it first claimed a few small rooms in South Bend’s downtown civic center, the Century Center, all the way through the building of its current home west of downtown. I visited again this summer, camera in hand.
The museum is cram packed with vehicles across Studebaker’s history, including this 1940 President club sedan. It’s all too much to fit into one post, so today I’ll share the Studebakers from before World War II, tomorrow the Studebakers from after World War II, and on Sunday some oddities and rarities in the museum’s collection.
The museum even includes some early Studebaker wagons, including this 1857 Phaeton. It is the oldest surviving Studebaker vehicle.
In its early automobile-making years, Studebaker flirted with electric cars. They were green a century before it was cool. This electric coupe topped out at 21 miles per hour and could run for 70 miles on a charge.
Studebaker’s entry-level line from 1909 to 1912 was called Flanders. This 1912 Flanders 20 was powered by an inline four.
This oddly styled 1924 Light Six has a custom aluminum body built by a Chinese coachbuilder. I’m sure it has quite a story, but it’s not talking.
Studebakers were positioned as hardy in the early days. This 1925 Big Six Duplex Phaeton racked up nearly a half-million miles in its time, its 353-cube inline six generating all of 75 hp.
The company also wanted to position its cars as speedy. This 1928 Commander Roadster was one of three to establish new speed and endurance records in an event in Atlantic City, where it averaged more than 65 miles per hour over a continuous 25,000-mile run.
Studebaker tried its hand at small cars in the late 1920s and branded them Erskine after company president Albert Erskine. The Erskine name still appears here and there around South Bend’s south side today. I grew up on Erskine Blvd., in Erskine Park.
Because Studebaker’s 1950s and 1960s cars are relatively plentiful, and those cars came from continually lean years where the company barely had two dimes to rub together, it can be surprising to come upon one of the company’s luxurious prewar cars. The President sat atop the Studebaker hierarchy in the 1930s and was a well-appointed automobile.
This 1935 President convertible sedan was produced in Studebaker’s Walkerville, Ontario plant and has a custom aluminum body.
This 1937 Coupe Express is a fairly rare car because these didn’t sell well. It packed an 218-cubic-inch inline six that generated 90 hp.
This is my favorite of the prewar Studebakers on display: a cheerful 1940 Champion coupe in red. I’m a sucker for prewar coupes anyway, but that it’s a Studebaker just makes my heart swell with hometown pride.
Tomorrow: The postwar Studebakers.
Great stuff. Actually, Studebaker was getting into tough shape already in the 30s as well, and the 1939 Champion is widely considered to be the car that saved Studebaker (the first time). It was a thoroughly modern car for 1939, and extremely economical. This was the debut of the little 169.5 cid flathead 6 that powered Studebaker Champions and Larks until they did the ohv conversion to it in 1961 or so. Barney Roos designed the engine, and he was one of the better engineers of his era.
Albert Erskine is best known for his practice early in the depression of maintaining high dividends to shareholders even though sales were going into the toilet. IIRC, the company went into receivership around 1932 or 33 and Erskine committed suicide.
I love those Presidents. I also always marveled that the model under the President was the Dictator. What an awful name for a car in the U.S. The Commander name goes way back as well, and may be the best model name Studebaker ever had. Also, Studebaker seemed a good solid mid-market name that never made much of a dent in the upper middle priced market. The Nash Ambassador and Hudson Commodore seemed to do so much better in those higher price classes.
I look forward to the next installments. I am amazed that I have not been there in 20 years, living in the same state and all. I have to do something about that.
Didn’t Studebaker drop the Dictator name somewhere around 1937 or 1938 due to Hitler becoming more prominent on the world stage?
I looked it up – The Dictator was the low end model from 1927-37. Apparently, Mussolini did not taint the Dictator name, but Hitler did. Higher models were Commander and President.
I am not old enough, but I have a hard time understanding that the term “Dictator” in a democratic country like the U.S. was fine and dandy until Hitler came along and ruined the name for everybody. Wiki says that some countries did have a problem with the name, and the car was renamed Director in those markets. Seems like Director would have been a better idea here, too.
In its favor, though, Studebaker Dictators served the head of state in Estonia, at least according to Wiki.
I love the ’39 Champ too. The first “mid-size” car, with very little (if any) loss of interior room. And I love how that little six purrs. There was a guy in Santa Monica that had a nice old original one he’s bought off a farmer in the Valley. Rode with him one or twice; really wanted that car.
That and a ’51 Champ coupe; my MM Studebaker collection.And……..
I love the fact that a car company had the balls to name a model “Dictator”. Oh, to return to those pre-politically correct years when you could actually say what you wanted . . . . .
It is a statement unto itself, though, that the Dicatator was the bottom of the line model.
Thanks for a great feature Jim,I’m starting to enjoy seeing pre war cars even though they wern’t my cup of tea.I love the 2 tone President and the red 40 coupe and look forward to part 2
Jim, thank you. Museums are terrific places to find iron you simply will not find anywhere else. I have been to the A-C-D Museum two or three times, but never here. It’s now on my bucket list.
By all rights, Studebaker should have been the last surviving independent American automaker. Up through 1931 it was one of the top-five best-selling brands, and despite its subsequent collapse Studebaker did exceptionally well in the early post-WWII years.
Folks tend to blame Studebaker’s post-war decline primarily on management being too labor friendly. That smacks of Detroit groupthink to me. Perhaps the company would have benefited by investing more heavily in updated production facilities, but the key factor in Studebaker’s demise was the failure of its 1953 redesign. The Loewy coupe may have been a timeless classic, but from a financial standpoint it simply didn’t pencil out.
Seductive car designs can be cruel mistresses.
I’d argue that Studebaker’s financial health wasn’t all that rosy in the early years of the Great Depression.
Albert Russel Erskine declared dividends that were disastrous to the company’s long-term viability, most likely to prop up the stock price. In addition, he failed to order production cuts during this same time – so while Studebaker may have been a top-selling brand in 1930 and 1931, those vehicles were sold at a loss.
After the 1933 receivership and reorganization, I’m not sure that the company’s capital position was ever quite the same, which may have something to do with a lack of investment in production facilities. After WWII, it’s almost as though every new Studebaker model was a “Hail Mary pass,” designed specifically to dig the company out of its latest round of financial doldrums. That’s obviously a simplification, but not far from the truth.
I think that for most of the independents during this period, outdated factories and equipment were ultimately a bigger issue than the relative success of any specific model. Studebaker in particular really suffered because their labor hours per car were significantly higher than the Big Three’s, which meant that even if Studebaker had paid significantly less per hour (which they rightly realized they couldn’t afford to do), they were going to have thinner margins. If the independents had been able to churn out cars as efficiently as GM, they would have done much better even with the designs they had.
The trick is that plant modernization or replacement is a huge investment (throughout this period, even Ford dragged its feet more than it probably should because there was so much money at stake). If you have thinner margins to start with, there’s less money available to put into updating your factories and equipment, which can turn into a nasty downward spiral.
Having a brilliant, popular design can help, but that alone isn’t enough. Look at what happened to BMC and British Leyland with the Mini: They made so little money per car that even when it was selling very well, they could barely afford to de-bug it, much less keep it up to date or modernize its production facilities, and the only reason they didn’t cancel it was that at several points in the ’70s that would have crippled a lot of their dealers.
The other big problem for Studebaker is that it seems like something odd was going on with their accounting. After the Studebaker-Packard merger, Packard audited Studebaker’s books and concluded that Studebaker’s costs were dramatically higher than had been stated on the proxy statement and its break-even was almost twice as much as had been reported. If that was true, it meant that Studebaker hadn’t done nearly as well in the postwar years as they apparently thought they had. As I recall, based on Packard’s estimates, there would have been only one year in which Studebaker had actually exceeded its break-even point.
BuzzDog, my focus was on sales. It’s true that CEO Erskine essentially overspent Studebaker into receivership in 1933, but up through 1931 the company reported a steady profit.
I wouldn’t consider the “which-way-is-it-going” Studebakers a hail Mary pass; they sold FAR better than any other independent in the late-40s and early-50s. Historian Richard Langworth has argued that Studebaker made pretty good money during the post-war seller’s market but didn’t invest enough of it in plant modernization.
Ate, I don’t think it is an either/or dynamic (product vs. plant). For example, AMC was better able to at least partially upgrade its facilities in the 1960s due to the remarkable success of its Rambler. My point was that Studebaker’s 1953 redesign was not just a routine mistake — it was so big that it proved fatal (kind of like the Matador coupe and Pacer were the final nails in the coffin for AMC).
Studebaker’s high costs were partly a product of a go-it-alone attitude. The company was unusually quick to invest in an automatic transmission and a V8 engine but didn’t try to amortize their high costs by selling them to others. That proved to be a bad move both for Studebaker and other independents that desperately needed those features to remain competitive.
I get that about sales, and completely agree, but as Aaron (ateupwithmotor) points out with the Mini, high sales at a loss per unit equals…high losses.
As a finance person, I cringe at the notIon that “Studebaker didn’t deserve to fail.” Perhaps not, but more than once it was hampered by bad executive decisions…and some of these bad moves wouldn’t have required a crystal ball to avoid.
A good bit of Studebaker’s production facility (which was quite large) dated back to the mid 1920s, and would have been only 20-25 years old by the end of the war. However, state of the art for a production facility in the 20s was a far cry from state of the art by, say, 1950.
It is interesting to consider that Kaiser-Frazer probably had the most modern plant in the industry in the Willow Run facility that Ford had built to make aircraft. It was the prototypical modern industrial factory, built out in the middle of nowhere on a single level. This is the way nearly all modern vehicle plants have been built since then. However, in fairness, Chrysler built a lot of cars at old Dodge Main in Hamtramck, that was just as old as the Stude plant, if not older.
Studebaker management was always a little insular and provincial. It is not hard to see management taking the attidude of “these plants are just fine, they are not really that old and we have never had any problem with them. New plants would just be a waste of money.” Interesting to consider what would have happened if they would have built a new modern facility on some farm field outside of South Bend during the fat years of the war.
Here is an aerial photo of the Stude campus at its peak. I did a short piece on the facility a couple of years ago here. https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/studebaker-in-south-bend-going-going/
Good points JP. If I could run with the ball for a moment –
AMC was still churning out product from an ancient plant after stude died. More telling perhaps, Oldsmobile, here in my fair city, was also churning out very popular and profitable product from a plant which at least partially dated to the very early 1900s. This was decades after Stude’s demise. In fact the Olds plant was so antiquated that bodies were trucked from one plant to another for final assembly.
The ’53 redesign was aesthetically brilliant and ergonomically awful. I sat in a ’53 coupe once, or tried to. The steering wheel was so low to the top of the seat cushion that I couldn’t get my thighs under the steering wheel. It was remedied in later years (I assume), but hell, you can’t do that sort of thing and expect the market to take you seriously.
As an aside, I didn’t know we could send pics from a museum. I think a trip to the R E Olds museum is in order.
The one that captured my attention was the Coupe Express. Those were very good-looking trucks; more like an Australian-style ute than a regular ol’ pickup truck. I’m also a bit curious about those Washington plates!
These cars came from all over. Some of them were on permanent loan by their owners. That might explain that WA plate!
Needless to say I caught the white on blue 1937 Washington truck plate too. Unlike Oregon, where trucks up through 3/4 ton run passenger plates, any truck in Washington gets a truck plate even if it’s a Datsun pickup.
Chinese assembly of Studebakers was the subject of an article in Hemmings Classic Car in 2007 or 2008. It described production of Studebakers using CKD kits for the chassis and drivetrain but locally made coachbuilt bodies that were unique to China. I do not have the issue any more, so I cannot confirm the details, but I recall the featured car being blue with an unusual upright roof and windows, so it may have been the same car in the museum.
Great article. I didn’t realize the prewar Studebakers were so attractive.
Interesting point about them being marketed as hardy. They were marketed like that in Australia too. Attached archive photo shows a 1924 model, annotated with the following comment.
“Studebaker roadster back from an endurance run, Brisbane to Burketown and return, 1924 Studebaker Big Six Speedster at the completion of an endurance run from Brisbane to Burketown, covering the 3000 mile (5000km) journey on mostly dirt roads in 110 hours. Some of the modifications for the run include fitment of a bonnet retaining strap, extra spare wheels and recovery gear on the running boards. The headlamps have also been removed, though it is not clear whether this was deliberate or because of damage sustained during the trip. The Big Six Speedster was fully imported from the USA and was powered by a 354 cid. inline six developing a maximum of 65 bhp at only 2000 rpm. The photograph was taken outside the Brisbane branch of Canada Cycle and Motor Agency, who were Queensland agents for Studebaker and Gray cars at the time.”
Sweet! Thanks for sharing that photo and story.
That is a pretty impressive run – mostly dirt roads means unformed roads not gravel. Even today there aren’t sealed roads all the way, with roughly 70 miles of gravel. Burketown is on the edge of the Gulf of Carpenteria over 300 miles from Mount Isa which is the nearest large city at population <25,000 – Burketown is more like 250.
Thanks for the guided virtual tour!
That 1934 President is styling to die for. We easily forget that the Studebaker President was right up there with the big Buick’s and Chrysler’s in the market.
There’s something about the 1934 model year (in general – yes, I can’t forget the Airflow as a negative) that put it at height of pre-WWII styling. Probably an excellent combination of pre-Depression/depths-of-the-Depression classicism with enough aerodynamic touches to make them look even better.
By 1936, styling had moved towards a much more modern, change-it-every-year, yet less attractive (in general, once again – I haven’t forgotten the Auburn and Cord) mode. Actually, I’ve always felt that ’34/35 were the most attractive years for cars in automotive history.
Regarding the 1924 Light Six with a body made in China, I spoke too soon when I said that I did not have the article about this very car. I found it, and can describe the car’s history in detail.
The body was made by Shanghai Horse Bazaar & Motor Company, Ltd., a firm founded in 1851 (a year before Studebaker) as a stable and maintenance facility for horse drawn carriages. SHB served as Studebaker’s official distributor in China, and it produced complete cars for multiple auto companies from rolling chassis imported into China. (Studebaker shipped 500 cars to China in 1922-23, which was a substantial percentage of auto sales in China.) This car is the only known surviving SHB bodied car of any make.
The car was never used in China, though. The body was commissioned by Studebaker’s representative in China in 1923 for his personal use and shipped to the US, where it was mounted to the 1924 Light Six chassis in 1924. He drove it until 1937, and it sat outdoors until the mid-1970s, when his son began an on and off restoration that was not completed until the 1990s. The son died in 2003 and willed the car to the museum.
Aluminum body panels and one of the first pillarless hardtop coupe bodies make this car ahead of its time in many ways. (The bright metal “B-pillars” are nonstructural, folding tracks for the side windows that divide like a V and become aluminum trim pieces at the bottom of the window openings!) Whoever designed this car in China, whether its American owner or a Chinese employee, clearly had freedom to depart from existing industry convention and design and build what he wanted.
I can send the entire article to you if you are interested in reading further.
Very cool! This page just became the Internet’s premier resource on this unusual automobile.
Studebaker failed because…
You could write your doctoral dissertation on this. But let’s throw out a few ideas, some of which have been discussed more-or-less singularly above.
First, Erskine insisted on paying dividends long after the company could afford them. This forced Studebaker into receivership, but it’s worth noting that Studebaker was the only automaker of the period to survive that receivership.
Second, Studebaker had made a major effort to buy White Trucks. The deal wasn’t made, but the joint effort would have put Studebaker into another market and arguably have increased income. Studebaker did go on to build its own truck lines (including the lovely Coupe-Express), but most folks – even car people — are surprised to find out South Bend offered trucks up to and including semi tractors. Engines for most of the larger vehicles were outsourced — Hercules comes to mind — and included diesels.
Third (and this is from someone’s doctoral thesis), Studebaker had a corporate labor outlook best described as “paternalism.” The company management regarded itself as the benevolent parent to the work force. There was pride in taking are of the workers’ needs, and pride in the fact that the company had never had a strike… though the strikes did come eventually. The net result of this beneficence was a higher hourly labor rate, and lower productivity. And that pushes up the unit cost per car. A contemporary study projected that if Chevy were building the Studebaker, it would cost Chevy $200 less per unit than it cost Studebaker.
Forth, Ford and GM’s battle for market dominance c. 1957 dumped huge numbers of vehicles on dealer lots, resulting in deep price discounts to consumers. Studebaker and the other independents couldn’t match those cuts, and it cost them even more market share. Follow that with the depression of 1958, and no automaker could sell much of anything — with one intersting exception. Studebaker’s “Scotman” series was a surprise hit! This was the ultimate “stripper.” Painted bumpers; severely limited paint colors tending to the, when, homely”; fiberboard interior door panels (sans armrests); even the second sunvisor was sold as an option!
Fifth — the antiquated, awkward production facilities. The Engineering building — the last of the Studebaker buildings that South Bend would ultimately raze — was relatively new, dating from (IIRC) 1923 or ’28. Across the street were buildings 53 and 58, which dated from the days Studebaker built buggies and wagons. At one point, finished bodies were trucked by flatbed from body assembly to the body drop a block or two away… that was replaced finally by a conveyor system running overhead and across streets.
The Chippiwa Plant (AKA Plant 7) on South Bend’s South side was a modern plant buylt for truck production, but never fully put to use. It saw some Curtiss-Wright production for government projects during Eisenhower days, but it’s better known a Stude’s parts depot. I believe AM General later used a portion for Hummer/HMV production. A new plant built in Brunswick, NJ, never came on-line. And Just before Studebaker shut down South Bend production, it had received a modern engine boring line, soon sold for pennies on the dollar.
Sixth — engineering. Just as finances kept updated production facility updates at bay, there was no money to update car mechanicals. As noted, the 167 c.i. six introduced with the 1939 Champion (“Weight is the enemy.” — Raymond Loewy) continued as the basis of the six cylinder engine offered until the end of South Bend production. No updates to suspension, no real revisions to the body cowl introduced in ’46. (Re-skinning is an art form, indeed!)
Seventh — failed opportunities. Most notable is the ’53 “Loewy Coupe.” There were a couple problems here. First was the flexible frame, designed to absorb road bumps for a smoother ride. Because the frame flexed, when the production line tried to join the front fenders (stamped outside by Budd) with the already-mounted body, nothing fit. The kludge engineered to remedy the mis-match was bunch of body shims — stacks of both steel and tire sidewall blanks which had to be fitted to individual body/frame combinations, which slowed production greatly. A second problem was forecasting. Studebaker had assumed the bulk of sales would be sedans, rather than the two-door coupe. Well, they were wrong, as was the design of the sedan. The coupe was based on a 120-in wheelbase chassis, which gave the coupe its long-sleek, sexy profile. The sedan was on (again IIRC) an 108-in chassis, which meant it looked short and dumpy. Essentially, Studebaker was building two different cars, further increasing its per-unit costs.
The Avanti (love it or leave it — I love it) repeated some of the mistakes made with the ’53. The outside body vendor (Molded Fiberglass is Ashtabula, Ohio, also built the Corvette body) managed to delay production while tackling — not always successfully — quality control and fitting problems. Just as the delays in ’53 caused potential customers to take their business elsewhere, Studebaker lost Avanti buyers who grew tired or waiting.
Eighth — dealer network. Studebaker had tons and tons of dealers, Many were small, selling three, four, maybe a half-dozen cars per year. Car sales was a side-line, since many of these dealers were the corner gas station. They might have been handy, but they were only magnified the effects of price competition.
Ninth — The Studebaker Board of Directors wanted out of the car business. When Sherwood Egbert was hired to run Studebaker, his mandate was to diversify the company’s investments and kill the auto division. Instead, he found autos more exciting. And that, thank God! gave us the Avanti. Had his health not failed, would we still have Studebakers on the road? I doubt it — the company didn’t have the financial strength to update facilities, to engineer more modern suspension, or meaningfully re-design bodies. There were some interesting side projects to be sure — some diesel Larks, a four-cylinder engine prototype, a cooperative design venture with Porsche, but there were no giant-killers in the mix.
Any of these factors could have been severely damaging, perhaps lethal. But in combination, any light at the end of the tunnel was, indeed, an on-rushing train.
Some good discussion points. If you have not done so already, check out some of the Stude CCs from the index, where several of these points have been discussed in more detail.
It’s way too late now, but had Studebaker utilized the brilliant designs of Brooks Stevens’ cars developed for them in 1962 for the 1964 cars, they may well have survived. His designs were intended to make up some of the difference between production costs of the big-3, by greatly simplifying the body pressings (interchangeable doors being used on 4 door vehicles, left front to right rear and right front to left rear).
The other absolute necessity would have been to abandon most of the big ancient factory in South Bend proper for the modern Chippewa Avenue and Hamilton Ontario facilities, with Hamilton actually quietly providing some cars for the US East Coast. The Chippewa plant had built some Hawks in 1956; otherwise it’d been relegated to trucks. Instead, Studebaker should have hired International to sub-contract trucks (using their own V8 engines though) and used Chippewa for cars. Can you imagine a “Travelall” based full-sized Studebaker “Conestoga” station wagon with front torsion bar suspension or optional 4-wheel drive for 1965? I can.
Three of the Brooks Stevens prototypes are at the Studebaker Museum; a “1964” station wagon (the sliding roof of which was the only part adopted by Studebaker), a “1965” sedan 4 door and a “1966 Sceptre” (Hawk replacement).
I’ve also seen renderings of Brooks Stevens’ proposal for a final update of the Hawk for 1965, with a grille resembling that of his proposed 1965 “main” carline. After 1965 production of the Hawk and Avanti finishing at South Bend Main, it could have been closed.
Perhaps by 1966, Studebaker could have been able to afford to have tooled up the proposed steel Avanti II compacts at Chippewa, and escewing the 4 door cars, might have been able to sell a Mustang competitor.
I have looked under the Brooks Stevens prototypes and the cars are “uniframe” in much the same way as the later Jeep Cherokees. This would have meant some up-front costs in changing the production lines at Chippewa and Hamilton, but it could have paid off in lower production costs. Alternately, the designs could have been built with perimeter frames (the floors were “step-down” like a unit-body car or perimeter frame car).
As for the planned 340 V8 engines, I played with my calculator and accidentally came up with the same dimensions as the 1965-1966 Buick 340 engine; 3.75″ bore (not difficult for the Studebaker V8 with 4.5″ bore centers) and 3.85″ stroke (1/4″ more than the 289). These were planned for 1966 presumably to allow higher power at lower cost than bolting an expensive supercharger on a 289 or 304 Stude V8. I calculate (from the R1 engine) that this engine would have put out 280hp with natural aspiration, high compression for premium fuel, 4 barrel carburetor, dual exhausts and Avanti low-restriction mufflers. A supercharged version could have easily attained 340hp, competitive with the big-blocks in other makes (but again, probably more expensive to buy at the dealer).
As for six cylinder engines, Studebaker probably would have been better off to have dropped the ancient inline six which really was too small for the marketplace and no longer competitive, and build a V6 engine, perhaps with 3.65″ bore (of the 304 V8) and 3.25″ stroke (of the 259 V8), offset the crank journals 30 degrees for even firing, and built the engine with the new production machinery just installed in the fall of 1963 (along with all the V8’s). This would have been a 204 cubic inch V6, netting approximately 138 horsepower with single-barrel carburetor on a single-plane manifold, a good 26 horsepower above the 170 inline six. It should be noted that S-P engineers had played with the idea of a 30 degree offset journal V12 engine based on the big-block Packard, in 1956 (for 1957 or 1958 production). So the concept was known and sound – decades before Buick adopted this engineering for their 3.8 V6.
By 1966 the Studebaker V6 could have been bored out to 215 cubes (3.75″ x 3.25″) and 145hp, the V8’s could have been brought out to 287 cubes (3.75″ x 3.25″) for 210hp (2 barrel carb. single exhaust) and 340 cubes (3.75″ x 3.85″) for 280hp or more. A Mustang competitor AND 116″ wheelbase “large compact” (by then referred to as “mid-sized”) Brooks Stevens designed cars would have at least given Studebaker a competitive chance for awhile longer, extending the jobs for many folks in South Bend and Hamilton.
It’s very interesting to note that contrary to the idea that Studebaker’s costs were too high, by 1963 things had turned around to the point where it became evident that GM’s prices for engines from the fall of 1964 were significantly higher than Studebaker’s costs of production. Yes; GM was taking advantage of a failing competitor (and Studebaker executives had to make several trips to GM begging for price reductions – but never got close to the cost of building their own engines).
Finally, better dealers would have been a necessity, but it’s like the chicken and the egg; which came first? The competitive Brooks Stevens “large compact” and planned Loewy “sporty compact” cars could have been the means to attract better dealers – as well as demanding that the Mercedes-Benz dealers also sign on to sell Studebakers in “open sales points”. (Studebaker USA distributed Mercedes cars up through 1965 from 1958).
Perhaps Sherwood Egbert should have had a “come to Jesus” talk with Walter Reuther of the UAW in 1962 during a disastrous 38 day strike during the final “up-sales” year for Studebaker. Handing the UAW Local 5 a 2.5% chunk of the Studebaker Corporation as well as a seat on the Board might have done wonders for cooperation by making the workforce real partners (and this would have caused apoplexy in Detroit executive suites…. oh well!)
Could Studebaker have survived had the executives followed the enthusiastic lead of Sherwood Egbert, had Egbert not gotten ill with cancer? We’ll never know.
I have what I believe is a 1922 Studebaker Drs Coupe. Engine #4559.3.22 The body has the # 1074287. Is there a way to verify if what I have is correct. Im going to restore this car and need to verify just what it is.
Contact the Studebaker National Museum. Their archives are fabulous and I am sure that someone there could help you with information. I know that they sell reproductions of production orders for cars, but perhaps not for those that old. The Studebaker Drivers Club is also a good resource.