Is it a coincidence that 1951 was Frazer’s last year?
This reminds me that I never got around to my Kaiser-Frazer History Part 2. Must do…
Vintage Ad: 1951 Frazer Mortuary Car – Death With Dignity
– Posted on October 1, 2022
-
-
Curbside Classics Archives
This has to have been one of the most successful heavy facelifts of an old body of all time. The 1947-50 Kaiser and Frazer were modern when they came out, but also became one of the most forgettable cars of all time. The 1951 re-boot, which was nothing more than a clever way to clear the warehouses of unused bodies after the new Kaiser came out, was an extremely attractive sedan for its time.
Ideally, Kaiser should have done in the first place what he ended up doing in the last place. Should have bought Willys in ’47 instead of trying to make his own car. Just add capital and production and aluminum.
A rustproof 4wd sedan and wagon and convertible would have been revolutionary.
AMC ended up doing it in 1980 with the Eagle, but the company was already dying.
K-F was funded as a startup car company. Willys was a failure as a car company, and limped along with military contracts and a tenuous niche of civilian sales.
The 1980 Eagle was a road to nowhere. AMC and Renault correctly put their money on the 1984 Cherokee. The Cherokee’s design expressed its utility instead of concealing that utility with conventional passenger car style. The market craved such designs in 1984; the postwar Jeep Station Wagon was an answer to a question few people were asking in 1947.
I love the expressions on the passengers. The driver seems to be thinking “I’m sad, but this car is REALLY nice.” Four of the six passengers are looking at the illustrator and seem to be thinking “why are you sketching us at this sensitive, vulnerable time?”
I guess they’re leaving a mortuary.
I think that someone in that car had egg salad with onions and now everyone is paying the price. Should have just had soup.
Both the 1951 Kaiser and Frazer were indeed attractive cars, highly styled, roomy and with excellent visibility. However, the old Continental six and lack of an automatic transmission would soon doom it to oblivion. The big three were not asleep, developing high compression V-8’s, several automatic transmissions and other technological advancements that K-F couldn’t internally match. A cheaper priced Olds had all of these, with an extensive dealer network to boot. K-F just didn’t have the economies of scale to keep delivering a competitive product, updated every few years, to match similar Big three offerings.
Interestingly, the way to go may have been to nix the Kaiser and Frazer to concentrate on the Henry J. Instead of competing with the Big three building conventional full-size cars, the Henry J was a unique product that had no competition. If the J had taken the route of Rambler a few years later to be a high quality small car with some luxury touches, instead of the cheap penalty box it was, it may have been a hit. After all, Henry J. Kaiser’s original inclination was to build a small car. This true industrial genius and American business icon’s initial instinct’s were usually correct. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if he had followed them.
Both the 1951 Kaiser and Frazer offered the Hydramatic automatic transmission. In fact, thousands were equiped so. The Henry J had a decent first year production, but then sales died off. Consider that Buick was number 3 in sales during the early fifties, people had little interest then in fuel economy or smaller cars.
–And that was the crux of K-F’s dilemma. They had the money to buy either an automatic transmission or a V-8 from another supplier, but could not afford both. A poor situation to be in, but I imagine V8 power with only a manual gearbox would have cost even more sales.
I had a ’53 Kaiser, and the acceleration with that 226 Continental was shall we say…leisurely.
There was no capital investment in buying Hydramatics from GM; they just passed the cost (plus profit) to the buyer. But it was the decision to develop and build the Henry J that made the investment in a V8 impossible. And that turned out to be a deadly mistake. A new high-power V8 with the new lower Kaiser car might have made a very potent combination.
It’s similar to the situation that existed for Hudson, which Instead of developing a V8, invested in developing the compact Hudson Jet.
One circumstance that prevented that, was KF had to have a big loan from the RFC to keep going, the government wanted KF to produce a low cost economy car, (Henry J), as a requirement for the loan. So they had no choice. Some developement work was done on a V-8, but they had no funds to produce it.
Kaiser-Frazer had no real choice about building the Henry J, because they had ended up allowing it to become a condition of their previous round of federal loan guarantees (including the wildly unrealistic list price target they struggled and ultimately failed to meet despite it rendering the Henry J a depressing product). They could have made different choices in how they approached the project, but they’d committed to building a low-cost compact people’s car, and there would have been serious consequences to not do so.
Also, Henry Kaiser had wanted to do something like that in the first place, but Joe Frazer had insisted that they should lead with something more conventional and middle-of-the-road. In retrospect, that was not a realistic aspiration. Even if they hadn’t committed to the compact and had gone forward with the V-8 engine (which K-F engineers had been working on), there was no way they could have competed with Oldsmobile and Buick for long.
That’s so true. What KF needed was a niche market, which they eventually got by purchasing Willys Overland, and ended up with Jeep, of which Jeeps are still manufactured today! Of course going through several different owners.
Another part of the story is that Kaiser was engaged in talks to purchase the Olds V-8. Oldsmobile installed the engine in a Kaiser and discovered a much better performing and handling car than their own Oldsmobile, so they raised to price so high that it wasn’t feasable for KF to buy those engines.
It is an interesting historical what if. Instead of being an alternative source for a conventional car, what if they had decided to be an alternative source for an alternative car? The market in the early 50’s was different from the market in the late 50’s when AMC found success with that formula, but there is a chance they could have created a sustainable niche.
Essentially, they did: Once they merged with Willys, Kaiser got Jeep — and got rid of the Willow Run plant, whose overhead Jeep production volume in the fifties and sixties couldn’t have come close to supporting. Jeep was a niche product for a long time, but a sustainable one that eventually came into its own, and something it took a very long time for the other automakers to even bother trying to match.
I don’t see it working, with just the Henry J. The market for compacts in the early ’50s was way too small. AMC struggled with its compacts and almost went bankrupt until 1956-1957, when the interest (and volume) in compacts grew, but with its larger 108″ wb 4-door cars and wagons.
There’s no way K-F could have made it on the HJ alone. They had a huge factory and massive overhead.
The simple reality is that they were doomed, once the post-war seller’s market was over. AMC survived by the skin of its teeth, and they did it because Romney was very thrifty. The Kaisers were anything but that.
The main problem with this attempt to enter the funeral market was the lack of buyers for such a sedan. Major players in the hearse market advertised constantly in trade publications like Sunnyside and Casket, that vehicle continuity was an important image the funeral home needed to project to it’s clients.
To the vast majority of funeral homes, buying a Hearse built on a Cadillac, Packard, or other luxury make chassis, meant having 5 and 7-passenger sedans in “matching livery”. As far as I know, no coachbuilder ever made a hearse or 7-passenger sedan on a Kaiser or Frazer chassis.
That said, I am surprised no Kaiser Traveler or Frazer Vagabond were modified into ambulances by local body shops or coachbuilders specializing in ambulance conversions. Ambulance services were mostly concerned with the bottom line cost of vehicles, and not worried about the “image” a certain make might have. That said, perhaps it was the fact the cars made at Willow Run were not the fastest vehicles!
I really know nothing about these particular cars, but I’m pleased to have now learned about the existence of “The Sunnyside” magazine. (and have now fallen down a rabbit hole around an article from the early 20th century about how to make your own embalming fluid…)
This is 100% what I would choose as the name of a trade journal catering to the funeral business.
A week ago you proposed the Willys Aero as the least recognized postwar American car, but I think this one may rank ahead of it. My mental image of a ’51 Frazier comes up completely blank; I only vaguely can remember what it looks like. I somewhat remember how the earlier ones looked, especially the sort-of convertible with the small window between the front and rear doors, but the ’51s with the grille that looked a bit like the Henry J.’s never really registered.
So how was the “mortuary car” different than a standard Frazer? It doesn’t look like a hearse.
Funeral homes would have (and often still do, I think) cars to accompany the hearse to the cemetery for the family to ride in. They could be sedans (in an appropriate color) or limos. Classic form for the funeral limo would be with three doors on each side and two forward-facing benches in back, rather than the regular style limo with 2 doors and backward facing seats in the stretch section.
la673,
The difference between the Frazer in the ad and a standard black Frazer sedan was,
Um . . . Nothing!
Jon and CC readers,
As someone who has collected and studied the history of the hearse, owned quite a few hearses over the last 50+ years, and has known multiple close friends in the funeral industry, I’ve put together a short history of the funeral industry over the last 110 years.
Prior to the mid-1910s, most deaths happened in the family home unless the person died from an industrial accident. Rather than in a commercial funeral home, many families simply held the service in their own home, if it was big enough. The funeral director was often in the furniture business and made caskets to order, even performing the rudimentary embalming at the family home.
After about 1915 several things began to change for the funeral industry. First, America began to have more and more deaths from things like World War 1 and the Spanish flu. Second, with modern medical advances, individual counties began to build local hospitals, and these 2 situations meant more & more people died outside the home.
In addition, the traditional funeral service, if not in the family home, was in a local church, with the burial often in the church cemetery. But with the Great War and the flu, along with families buying multiple plots in the churchyard, church cemeteries were filling up. This led to the creation of commercial cemeteries, typically a longer walk between the church or home, and the burial location. Prior to these new and larger cemeteries, most family members either walked the short distance behind the horse-drawn hearse, or rode in the funeral director’s carriage. [As seen in the recent funeral procession for the late Queen of England.]
With the advent of the longer home/church/burial ground travel distances, and the ability of more friends and family members to travel greater distances for a funeral, another change came to the funeral industry; the automobile. It quickly became obvious to the funeral industry of the need for motorized hearses and cars for the grieving family members, and a need to accommodate growing numbers of funeral visitors. These changes resulted in the modern funeral home with it’s own ‘in house’ motorized transportation system. This also led to the industry creating special funeral ‘packages’ that included the service and the vehicles.
Bill, have you written this up here at CC? Seems like a history of hearses would make a good article. There have been a lot of short articles on old curbside hearses. I did a short series on hearses a few years ago, but I’m not at all an expert on the subject.
Jon, thanks for the compliment. I had been in contact with Paul about creating some content, but for the past year I’ve been plagued with technical problems with my old computer that locked me out of CC content. With my new laptop I’m hoping this problem does not come back again. If I find I’m able to access CC content on a regular basis, I will indeed start working on new content.
Interesting. This seems to be a near perfect match for the Frazer’s abilities and purpose by this point in the game. I’ve always liked these cars in their final year. The tail lamp treatment was especially unique for the very early 1950’s. As a whole, they have a feel of being well appointed and solid without being ostentatious, and a bit special if only because they weren’t in everyone’s driveway.
Shoot, even the flathead six would totally be in its element- smooth, quiet, and always capable of maintaining a dignified pace in this role, while being reliable and economical.
My experience with K-F cars is limited, but having had a little time around a 1947 and a 1951 Kaiser, they do tick a lot of the right boxes. If ever I am rich and could afford a “fleet”, I could easily see myself in a love affair with a 1951 Frazer for relaxed cruising… which seems to be my M.O. more often as I get older.
In the 50’s and 60’s a cousin ran a body shop in the Midwest. He would often pick up – for very little money – a car that was totaled for insurance. He would then restore the car for personal use until a good sale offer came along. One car I remember was a black 1957 Dodge Royal Lancer sedan with the D-500 engine option and full power. It had been a funeral director’s car so had very few miles on the odometer. We speculated on why the director had ordered so much engine for such gentle use. Cool, fast, fun car. Unfortunately it was not around for long because once restored there were multiple offers and it was quickly sold. You think of cars in this service as being Cadillacs but apparently many other brands were used. Another good topic for a future article.
It’s always been strange to me that the best-looking cars from the independents in the 1950’s, save the Studebaker Starliner/Starlight/Hawk and possibly the 1955/56 Packards, were the Kaiser/Frazer offerings. They had nice interior designs with innovative fabrics as well. In comparison Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, Packard and to a lesser extent Willys were largely clueless. Nash got close with the Pininfarina models but insisted on the front-wheel fender skirts.
I can appreciate the attraction of the 1951 refresh leftover Kaisers-as-Frasier. Very ironic that it’s last year was it’s best year.