Checker promotional materials were usually low-budget, no-nonsense affairs. This 1964 brochure of non-taxi Checkers, with its high-quality, colorful illustrations, struck a different tone. No black-and-white car photos cut out and placed over a dreary background here – this six-page brochure presented the brand in a cheery light, perhaps hoping to bring customers into the Checker fold who ordinarily would have overlooked the brand.
Of course, Checker was easy to overlook. In 1964, the Kalamazoo, Michigan company built only about 6,000 cars – 85 percent of which were taxicabs. The remaining 15 percent represented more “civilian” vehicles – sedans, wagons and even limousines. Purchasing a heavy-duty car that looked out of date and was widely associated with yellow taxis wasn’t for everyone, and not surprisingly, Checker buyers were often typecast as nonconformists or thrifty skinflints. Our featured brochure was published at a time when it seemed that Checker might break out of that mold. Whether the brochure’s collection of mainstream characters and colorful illustrations was meant to change the brand’s image… or whether it was just a new tack taken by Checker’s advertising agency isn’t clear. Whatever the motivation, this brochure is a delight to look through.
A brief history of Checker Motors and its founder, Morris Markin, will set the stage for browsing this brochure – for it’s hard to imagine a car company having a more fascinating history. Russian-born Markin immigrated to the United States as a teen in 1913, started work at a relative’s Chicago tailor shop, and achieved rapid business success. After a few years, he purchased the shop. Eventually, Markin began lending money to other entrepreneurs. In 1920, he loaned money to a fellow Russian immigrant who owned an auto body shop that made taxicab components. It was a poor investment, as both the body shop and its main customer went belly-up shortly afterwards. Markin, however, responded by purchasing the (seemingly worthless) remnants of both companies and formed his own taxi-manufacturing firm in 1921, called Checker Cab Manufacturing Company. Up to that point, he had no experience with either cars or the taxi business.
The 1920s was a rough time to be in Chicago’s taxi industry. Competing companies used mafia-type tactics against each other, with the resulting mess known as the Taxi Wars. Drivers were roughed up, allegations of wrongdoing flew in all directions, and Markin’s home was firebombed. Despite all that, Checker prospered, gaining a nationwide reputation for building durable taxis. Markin soon moved his manufacturing facilities 150 mi. northwest to Kalamazoo, Michigan. Presumably this got the company away from Chicago crime, but was still close enough so that Markin could look after his remaining business interests there.
Checker became the nation’s leading cab producer, and dominated the important New York taxi market. The firm achieved a virtual monopoly there by the 1950s because New York City imposed rigid requirements for taxi dimensions, which fit Checker perfectly.
In the mid 1950s, New York City began allowing cabs smaller than Checker’s “jumbo-sized” model, prompting the company to respond with the A-8. This new car was designed to be similar in size to the Big 3’s standard sedans, with one notable exception… it was a bit taller, which made ingress and egress easier. By the late 1950s, Detroit’s cars became longer, lower and wider – but Checkers remained the same. It turned out that shorter, taller and narrower made for a better big-city cab, and once again Checker regained its prominence in New York. Checker then stood alone as the ideal cab, and the company entered its golden age.
Though this new model was originally offered just as a cab, in 1959 Markin announced Checker would make passenger cars as well. Figuring that Checker’s reputation for durability would strike a chord with some buyers, he initially expected 16,000 sales per year. That was quite optimistic; total Checker production never reached half that amount. Checker’s initial “civilian” model was called the Superba – the Marathon joined the lineup in late 1960, and soon replaced the Superba altogether.
Ads from Checker dealers and the company itself illustrate how the car was marketed to utilitarian customers who valued durability and practicality, and who longed to exit the rat race of annual model changes. Not enough of such people jumped forward to fulfill Mr. Markin’s sales goals, but there were some noteworthy customers, particularly among New York’s elite.
Nelson Rockefeller bought one, which his wife drove. Urban Planner Robert Moses owned a Checker, as did well-known New York Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. In 1964 or 1965, Checker delivered a car to the Vatican, and one to the royal family of Tonga. The company’s highest-profile special deliveries, however, went to the US State Department.
US Ambassador to Moscow Llewelyn Thompson had complained to State Department officials that his Cadillac was “not suitable for the cobblestones and rough roads encountered in the Soviet Union.” Being friends with the Rockefellers, Thompson had ridden in their Checker and requested that the State Department consider buying Checkers for foreign missions. In late 1961, the State Department bought two Checker Marathons – equipped with manual transmissions and air conditioning, and outfitted by the Government with glass partitions and fancier-than-stock upholstery. The government sent one to Moscow for Ambassador Thompson and the other to San Salvador – two places with extreme (and very different) road and climate conditions.
The two forerunners must have proven successful, for the State Department ordered many others worldwide. Among those was a Checker used in the most prestigious of all US diplomatic posts. The American Ambassador to Britain, David K.E. Bruce, chose a Checker for his personal transport over the customary Cadillac. Having a Checker represent the United States at the Court of St. James’s was certainly a coup for Kalamazoo.
That brings us to 1964, about the time our featured brochure was published (precise model years weren’t terribly important to Checker buyers). As a niche automaker, Checker certainly had its victories, but sales of its civilian models plodded along sluggishly. Checker’s sales pitch was very pragmatic, sometimes with a dose of self-effacing humor. As an example of pragmatism, the company promoted its policy of “Planned Permanence” (the opposite of planned obsolescence)… making functional, rather than cosmetic, annual changes aimed at improving the car’s longevity. Most Checker promotional materials were to-the-point, but hardly visually alluring.
Maybe someone at Checker realized that even pragmatism needs some pizzaz, or the company’s ad agency recommended a new approach. Regardless of how this brochure came to be, it stands out as unique among Checker literature.
The brochure’s cover features a white Marathon sedan on a background style common in Americana-inspired advertising of the day. A couple and their young son are coming out of a mid-century style house in a scene replete with middle-class aspirations… and far removed from Checker’s mainstays of big cities, cabs and nonconformist consumers. That was very much the point of this brochure: To appeal beyond the company’s existing base.
On the inside cover is an illustration of a lady sitting in a tan-and-brown Marathon seat. Again, a fashionable lady with a toy dog wearing a sparkly collar doesn’t exactly declare “Checker Customer!”… yet she and Fluffy are greeting readers as they read about the brand. A black-and-white photograph of this woman and dog appeared in other Checker literature a few years earlier. It’s a good testament to frugality; why create a new picture when you already have one in the image library?
This lady’s image was more meaningful than being just a pretty face. Checker’s customers consisted mostly of men over age 45… and the company knew that marketplace success would be much more likely if their car was more attractive to women. However, selling the proudly unhip Marathon to women proved challenging. David Markin (Morris’s son and the company’s vice president) said that a woman is “a Checker salesman’s chief adversary.” This lady and her dog tried to blunt that image.
The text here promotes Checker’s uniqueness – how it’s different in both shape and inspiration than mass-produced cars. Checker is “for those who appreciate a different kind of car.”
Here we have Checker’s mainstay, the Marathon sedan. Not quite a fixture of the country club set, and as far as I know golf courses don’t like people driving on their grass, but still the illustration is another example of aspirational imagery. Verbiage here emphasizes Checker’s attributes of durability, maneuverability and excellent packaging for the car’s size. At the bottom, we’re shown an image of Checker’s optional fold-out auxiliary seats, which transformed a roomy six-passenger sedan into an eight-seater.
Our brochure sails along from the golf course to the coast for the station wagon page, featuring a couple who look like they stepped out of the cover of a romance novel. The illustration’s aubergine-colored landscape contrasts somewhat solemnly with the green wagon and the blue water. Some previous Checker brochures featured a sailing background as well, though this illustration appears original. The text extols the wagon’s durability and versatile interior layout, while proclaiming “No high fashion flash or dash here – just solid, blue chip soundness and quiet dignity.”
David Markin praised the Marathon sedan as combining “limousine luxury and Checker stamina,” though Checker sold an actual limousine too. Offering an extra 9” of wheelbase over the standard Marathon, these cars boasted a cavernous passenger compartment. The image here depicts a chauffeur-driven Checker Custom Limousine transporting a white-gloved gentleman to a gated estate. Seeing a rich man depicted in a frugal limo conjures up images of the 1980s commercial for cheap wine where the wealthy man asks “Have you ever wondered how I got so rich?” (Spoiler: By being cheap) It’s hard, though, to envision this product appealing to many people.
Checker’s copywriters shifted into grandiose mode here, describing the Custom Limousine as “built for those who take pleasure in the uncommon… for those who appreciate the cordiality of interior spaciousness, the excellence of fine custom appointments, and the master craftsmen’s ingenuity…”
Our brochure ends with a specifications page sharing space with Checker’s Aerobus. The Aerobus stands out here because it wasn’t a “civilian” car, but rather a 9-12 passenger transport vehicle intended for airports, hotels and tour companies. Or, perhaps, for extremely large families… and it’s a shame that this brochure didn’t illustrate an Aerobus with a dozen kids crawling around it!
No discussion of the Aerobus could be complete with just one photo, so let’s enjoy another image of what was then the world’s longest car. This particular picture was taken in London, where Checker’s UK representative was having his Aerobus transported to the 1965 London Auto Show, with a few photo opportunities along the way.
Back to our brochure, underneath the Aerobus image is a small feature showing Checker’s available engines. This is notable because the GM-sourced V-8 was new for 1964 (a $110 option, made available during the model year). While previous Checkers came with 6-cylinder engines that were fine for cab duty, the Markins thought that the lack of a V-8 put the brand at a disadvantage in the non-taxi market. Morris Markin hoped that the V-8 “will create new interest in the heavy-duty trailer-towing market, with sportsmen, and police departments.”
Overall, this brochure was an interesting departure for Checker’s typically staid promotional materials. The colorful artwork, however, had little effect on the company’s sales. Non-taxi Checker sales never reached Markin’s early goals, and the Marathon remained very much a niche vehicle until production ceased in 1982. This brochure, however, presents an interesting artist’s rendition of what might have been – a Checker lineup with mass-market appeal. An unlikely scenario, but one that’s illustrated very well.
Thank you. EXCELLENT article. I have always liked the Checker, and have considered finding a good used one for my daily. Likely a lifetime car. Your article has boosted my wanting one.
Wow! What great artwork, it reminds me of the Advertising for Pontiac done by Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman. I have never seen this artwork before and it makes we wonder how it was distributed. I read most of the auto mags in the ’60’s and never saw these ads in them, not to mentions magazines like Newsweek, Time, Life, etc. Kind of a head scratcher here as I would have thought there would be a market for these vehicles apart from taxi service.
Definitely reminds me of Fitzpatrick and Kaufman as well.
As far as Checker advertising, it seems to me that when Checker advertised in national magazines, their ads were usually quarter-page ads, and always very low-budget affairs. Below is an example of an ad that ran in Time in 1963 – just using the magazine’s left-column.
Full-page Checker ads tended to be in more regional publications and were often paid for by dealers themselves instead of Checker Motors directly.
I saw the AF/VK resemblance too, but there’s so much less detail in the drawings too, almost a minimalist vibe with just a car and a house, the family walking out with no other people around, and everything else just abstract orange.
These must have been a tough sell. They probably hadn’t yet become iconic by the early ’60s, but they did look like a decade-old used car.
Checker was ahead of its times and behind its times simultaneously. It can still out SUV most of today’s SUVs.
Great, now I have to buy a Checker brochure. 🙂
Nice ;
Sad they couldn’t still make a profit as a niche manufacturer .
-Nate
Another example of Russian immigrants helping each other out:
https://sikorskyarchives.com/igor-sikorsky-sergei-rachmaninoff/
Excellent post, Eric! I’ve long been fascinated with Checkers, but never knew that they had such great brochures. The artwork here is astounding. Particularly the lede photo/cover.
I’m impressed by the amount of text, and more than simply numbers and performance-oriented stuff, in the brochure. There seems to be some real creative thought that went into coordinating the “narrative” (which is an odd word to use about a brochure, but it’s what comes to mind) with the graphic design. Again, pretty sophisticated and more than one might expect.
That artwork with the woman sitting behind the wheel next to the dog. That’s quite something. Whiffs of something sinister along with something kind of oddly erotic. Another example perhaps of Checker trying something decidedly different.
The illustration of the woman and her dog really stands out here – it just seems so un-Checker. There’s got to be an interesting story behind it. As I mentioned in the text, a photo of the woman appeared in some earlier Checker literature as well: Below is a comparison of the original photo and the illustration:
The dog seems strangely two-dimensional.
I think she might be the chassis engineer as well, pic from PN’s article linked below
Pic wouldn’t load, for some reason I can’t post pics from CC in a comment, even though they are under 1200 pixels.
Could very well be. I had thought they were the same person when I was writing this article, and I asked my wife and daughter for their opinion (they have much better face-recognition skills than I have), and they thought the pictures were of different women. But, I think it’s very much open for debate.
The “Chassis Engineer” woman from Paul’s article appeared in numerous Checker photos in the early 60s. Below is one from an earlier brochure where her pose is similar to that of the dog photo. To me, they look the same… but again, I’m not great at that.
Truly fascinating stuff that would have been entirely lost to history if you hadn’t written this article!
I think she shows up several places in the photos in Paul’s article. She’s the one sitting on the taxi Checker jumpseat, she IS the chassis engineer (I think), and she’s probably the representative customer sitting on the cowl on the production line. She’s also likely the wife/sister/co-worker of the photographer Checker was using at the time.
Unfortunately, the scary little dog seems to have made only one appearance. Although now I’m going to have to do a deep dive on Checker literature just to prove myself wrong/right.
I tried hard to find her identity, but I couldn’t – I agree that she’s likely related or affiliated with someone in Checker management or their ad team. For now, I guess, her identity will remain a mystery!
Close to 20 years ago I owned a 1972 Checker, unfortunately I totaled it in the rain, but despite massive damage neither my wife and I were injured. Can’t speak highly enough of how well it drove, and how easy it was to work on.
The Checker was a delightful anomaly in the American Car scene at the time. The image of Checkers was actually a bit different than we might assume today for a car primarily designed and used as a taxi. Back in the day, taxis were generally quite nice cars, as they were typically used by higher income customers; those with lesser means rode the bus, trolley or subway. They were comparable to the “black cars” of more recent decades, and not the grimy cabs that became a stereotype in the ’70s.
This is why folks like Rockefeller and those ambassadors and others were quite happy to ride in them. In black and nicely polished, they were more the equivalent of a British big Daimler or such. And they certainly would have looked right at home in Moscow, next the somewhat similar-looking Chaikas and such.
Our next door neighbor in Towson had a Marathon sedan. He was seriously obese, so it made a lot of sense for him as ingress and egress was so much better than the low cars of the time. But he did replace it with a new ’71 or ’72 Big Buick sedan, and it was painful to watch him struggle getting in and out.
I had the pleasure to meet the original owners of the ’67 Checker wagon when I shot it over ten years ago. They bought it because they wanted a rugged long-life vehicle for their many trips to remote areas of the West as well as Mexico. It served them right to their end; last I saw it was parked in front of their assisted living facility. A testament to its ruggedness.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-1967-checker-marathon-the-ultimate-long-life-vehicle-still-being-driven-by-its-original-owners/
My family owned a taxi company from 1980 to 1998. I looked into using Checkers as our cabs, but the numbers just didn’t work. It was cheaper to pick up a clean Chevrolet Impala for $2000 and use it up until it was unfixable. If I recall correctly, a Checker was double the price of a new GM B body. It was specifically designed for the New York City taxi business and was not very successful outside of that market,
The eccentric utilitarian sounds on brand. My great uncle was an academic doing statistical research and drove a Brougham Checker (late 70s vintage with a vinyl roof and opera windows). Oddly one of his brothers drove a Mercedes 250, which was also heavily utilized as a taxi. On the academic theme another uncle was an English professor and drove a Dodge Dart, followed by an 80s Subaru.
I did ride in a Checker cab in NYC in the 80s, when theywere already being supplanted by Chevy Impalas
Not many cars outlast the customer, once you got one of these trimmed the way you want inside it would be hard to wear out in private use, as stop start dodgem cars style traffic they seem to hold up well, great cars.
Sounds like the Aerobus came with a Mopar 318? I didn’t know they used those! (And why not stick with the Chevy 283, which had slightly better HP ratings? Did the 318 have considerably more torque?)
Great article on one of the last Independents!
Yes, the Aerobus came with a Dodge truck engine 318 and a heavy duty 4 speed transmission (Torqueflite optional). A drivetrain suited for a 3/4 ton truck, which this essentially was.
I realize that major conversions take time to resolve follow-up issues…but, on behalf of the subset of readers forced to consume the updated CC in the attached display format for the large majority of posts…this is rapidly becoming a make-or-break issue.
PLEASE keep your readership posted on what the root cause of this display issue is…its root cause…and any action an individual user can take (if any) to mitigate this…
Weird… I’m not getting that at all, left 3/5 of display is postings, right 2/5 ad sidebar which works fine on my 15″d screen. For diags, does enlarging font (ctrl-+) or using a different browser do same thing?
The issue is different for mobile users than for desktop visitors.
I get it as well. Much less than the first ten days of the new “regime”. When I got it three days ago; closed the window, cleared the cache, reopened the window. So far, slower going but no getting the shrink, effect.
You talk about how Checkers were owned by iconoclasts. I’m aware that author John Irving once owned one and it had a personalized license plate that read, “GARP.” Maybe he still owns it. The late comedian Phyllis Diller owned a Marathon station wagon for many years, but I understand that at some point she traded it for a 1990s Chevrolet Caprice wagon.
I’ve always thought that the 1961-67 Humber Super Snipe and the ’64-’67 Humber Imperial looked like 8/10 scale versions of the Checker Marathon.
Thank you! I didn’t know that John Irving and Phyllis Diller were among the small crowd of celebrity Checker owners!
Also Jay Leno and Fran Lebowitz.
It was about 1978, when I was going from Houston to NYC to buy on the NYC Interior Design market and review clothing fashions. Sometimes I would travel alone, sometimes during market week there would be four of us. Moved around NYC in Checker yellow Cabs. Would sometimes wait to hail a cab until a Checker was spotted.
So Checker outsourced engines and transmissions? GM and Chrysler?
The only Checker I’ve ever seen for non-cab duty was one driven by a family in our neighborhood. That was in the 70’s.
It’s a shame they never tooled up for a smooth rear fender pressing. That fender bulge looked dated when this shell was new, and perhaps did more than anything else to show how old the design was.
It has been quite some time since the site upgrade…and yet, ths is what I continue to see. I understand it takes time to work out the bugs…I know I am not alone…but WHY?!?!?!
My wife is probably glad Checker was out of business before the mid 90s or I might have been very tempted when the kids were at home.
In the 60s and 70s a motel in Temple, TX had a Aerobus. The motel (Ponderosa Motor Inn) was located close to Scott & White clinic and hospital. Lots of people came to Temple for healthcare and the Aerobus was useful for carrying people to their appointments.
In my teens and twenties most of my driving was at the wheel of a Checker Marathon. Very practical and economical. So dorky that it was cool.