June 13, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Miles outside of motor city in South Bend, Indiana, one of America’s most iconic classic car companies battled for survival against the ever increasing tides against it. Automotive historian Patrick Foster brings us the story of Studebaker.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and our next story comes
to us from our own Monte Montgomery and Patrick Foster,
an automotive historian, on the history of the classic car
company Studebaker.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
In eighteen fifty two, the Studebaker Corporation was founded by
five blacksmithing brothers in the city of South Bend, Indiana.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
It was a big corporation, you know, it was one
of the biggest corporations in America. And for you know,
a long time, it was a small business. But they
built horse drawn wagons and they grew to become at
one time the largest wagon maker in the country, and
their products were sold all around the world, and they,
you know, became very wealthy men and quite successful. What
(00:57):
happened with a lot of producers of horse drawn vehicle
when the horseless carriage came out, they were not quite
certain what to do with it. They began producing electric
cars in nineteen oh two, and when it finally became
obvious that gasoline cars were going to be pretty much
the standard mode of transportation, they contracted with another company
(01:21):
and started offering gas powered cars. Studebaker of Garford. They
kind of dipped their toe into the automobile business until oh,
I think it was about nineteen fifteen. They started producing
their own gasoline cars, you know, from a Studebaker design,
and because of their fame, you know, they became successful.
They did all right until the Great Depression, and then
(01:45):
they went bankrupt for a while. And I get criticized
by Studebaker people who say they were not actually bankrupt,
but they were bankrupt. But luckily they a couple of
managers came along and were able to get the company
out of bankruptcy and rebuilt it. It was a new
company that came out of the ashes of the old one.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
And the largest change for Studebaker was finally attempting to
compete with the larger automakers by producing something a bit
more affordable to the average American.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
And they eventually got into the lower price ranges in
nineteen thirty nine with a car called the Champion that
was very successful.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
It's big, it's new, it's the big news in the
low price field, the big news Studebaker.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Look at it.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
The Champion was a really remarkable car. It came out
for nineteen thirty nine. Studebaker put a lot of effort
into it. You see, part of the problem the biggest
problem that the independent American automakers had is trying to
compete with the big three with Ford and Chevy and Plymouth.
They've got volume that gives them low prices and gives
(02:57):
them more than low prices low organization. And that means
taking a case of Ford, if you're building a half
a million cars a year, or a million cars a year,
or two million cars a year, and you have to
buy a page of advertising, well, you can spread that
cost over two million cars. If your student baker that
(03:17):
page of advertising costs you the same amount of money,
but you can only spread it over maybe one two
hundred thousand cars. So your cost per vehicle tends to
be higher, not because the parts are more are higher,
but your overhead is higher. So the Champion was an
attempt to break out of that by coming up with
a really high volume car, and to do that they
(03:39):
had to be smart with their costs, and they work.
They built the car to be a little bit smaller
than the big three cars, just a little bit, but
in a design that retained almost the same interior space.
The car was lighter so it would cost less to
produce because automotive costs at those times we're figured by
the town. It allowed them to come out with a
(04:01):
car that was good looking, roamy, competitive, price wise, very competitive,
performance wise, very competitive, and he had got better fuel economy,
so they had an advantage over the others. They could
match them with roaminess and ride and handling and performance
and price. Studebaker did extremely well with it, you know.
(04:24):
It helped rebuild them in the post war era, and
by the fifties they were really competitive with the Big three.
They were the largest volume of the American independent car
companies by far.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But trouble was on the horizon for Studebaker and the
other independent car manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Nineteen fifty four was the most competitive year in car sales,
probably in the history of the auto industry. Henry Ford
the second had recently taken over his grandfather's firm, and
he was itching to take on Chevrolet, and he announced
that Billieve it was nineteen fifty three, that he was
going to outsell Chevrolet in fifty four or kill the
(05:08):
company trying. And what he did in late fifty three
into fifty four is he ordered up more production from
his factories and ordered that those cars be shipped to dealers.
Whether the dealers had ordered them or not. So if
you were a Ford dealer in South Bend, Indiana, and
you ordered twenty new Fords for the month, you might
get forty of them along with the bill, and you
(05:31):
could either pay the bill or give up your franchise.
You know, there was no message with Henry Ford the second,
So you know, most dealers said, Okay, well we're going
to pay for the cars and we're going to sell
the heck out of them. And they started cutting prices
like crazy, advertising like crazy, and the result was Ford
sales skyrocketed. Well, Chevrolet wasn't going to take that sitting down,
(05:53):
so they did the same thing. Even Plymouth got in
on it. So you've got the big the three biggest
automakers in the world fighting it out tooth and nail
for every sale. And I mean they did dirty things
that are actually illegal. They did this practice called bootlegging,
where they would take brand new cars and run them
(06:13):
through an auction as used cars just to get rid
of them, just to get a little bit money back
and be able to stay in the game against that Studebaker,
Nash Hudson Packard, they just couldn't compete and sales just
dropped like a stone. So the little automakers, the independent
American Automakers started bleeding money. Nash ended up purchasing Hudson
(06:37):
Motor Company and they formed American Motors and Student Baker
and Packer merged with each other. They did it so
quickly they didn't do due diligence. When you're doing a merger,
you have to do what's called due diligence, where A
looks at the books at B to see what sort
of profits and losses they're making and what their overhead is,
(06:58):
and B looks at the book of A for the
same reason. This way you're going into this marriage with
both eyes open. Well, Studebaker and Packard were so desperate
to merge with each other, and also I think both
of them were afraid of what the other one would
think of their you know, their their ledgers that they
didn't do due diligence. They just said, you tell us
(07:21):
how much you know what your overhead is and how
much your profit losses for the last year, and we'll
do the same for you, and we're not going to
check each other's books. And both sides lied like rugs.
So the upshot was about three months after they merged together,
they discovered they were losing money by the bucket load.
They were bleeding. I mean, it was it was unbelievable
(07:43):
how much money they were losing. And the head of
Studebaker Packer, James Nance, sent one of his financial people
over to South Bend and said, you know, find out,
you know what the problem is down there. And he
found out that Studebaker had understated their break even point
buy something on the order of eighty or one hundred
(08:04):
thousand cars, and there was just no way they were
going to turn a profit. For a while once they merged,
there was no one merging them. It's really hard onto
a merger. So they were stuck together and it was
a rocky road for the next five years. What should
have happened, and the whole plan behind it, which was
(08:25):
a good plan, was they were merged together, they would
sell each other's products and instantly they did. The engineering
team would get together and design one car body that
could be used by both brands. This is what Nash
and Hudson did. It's what Chevrolet had been doing for years.
It's what Ford had been doing for years. You know,
(08:48):
a Pontiac is basically as Chevrolet would more trim, so
the student Baker and packer. The plan was they would
eventually share the same body and that would cut their
over head tremendously. They would be able to spread their
costs over so many more vehicles and they would be profitable.
And it would have worked too, but they just didn't
(09:09):
have enough capital to last long enough.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And you're listening to Patrick Foster, automotive historian, telling the
story of the Studebaker Corporation and in his own way,
telling the story of American history and American business, commerce
and entrepreneurial activity. When we come back more of the
Studebaker Corporation story here on our American stories. And we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories and the Studebaker story. When
we last left off, Studebaker was once again on the ropes,
but they were about to have a major stroke of luck.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
They should have gone out of business in fifty eight.
It's a miracle that they didn't. But they managed to
pull the fat from the fire. They brought out the
lark in fifty nine, and that saved them, you know,
for as long as they lasted. Actually, it saved the corporation.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Hi there, I'm Rex May and this is the sixty
one Lark. Well, sure it's beautiful, but more important, the
Lark's got something new, a new kind of performance, a
new kind of excitement, unmatched in any US compact made today.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And the Lark was truly a miracle of a car
for Studebaker, built using existing parts from the Studebaker Starlight,
a car which consumers didn't like.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
They had that nineteen fifty three car that they had
been peddling through fifty eight, and basically because the company
had no money and could not afford a new body,
they took that nineteen fifty three sedan body and they
saw it off both ends. They shortened a wheelbase and
came up with very simple styling that stood out that
(11:23):
was alark. Really, there was nothing new about the body
other than the front end cap and the were styling.
It was designed on a shoe string, and they used
a lot of parts that they had been using for years.
And this is the interesting thing. They sold the lot
for more than they had been selling the fifty eight
big car, and they were able to get away with
(11:44):
it because it was a new concept. This was not
some stripped down big car that you would be ashamed
to be seen in this was a compact car, and
compact cars were just come becoming the rage, and in
nineteen fifty nine the damn broke on the compact car market,
and Studebaker was you know, part of it was luck,
(12:04):
but part of it was good product planning, And in
nineteen fifty nine they turned in the best year in
their history profit wise. The car sold like Nickel Hamberger's.
It was amazing and it was a good car. It
was roomy for a compact and they nailed as far
as ride and handling, gas mileage was very good. It
was underpowered, but with a lock he could get a
(12:26):
V eight engine, and Studebaker had a really excellent V
eight and a lot of people wanted a small car,
but they wanted power, So sales of V eight powered
compacts hit Studebaker at least were very good, so they did.
All in all, they did very well with that car.
In nineteen sixty Studebaker car sales fell because the Big
(12:50):
three got into the compact market. Sixty one, there was
a recession in the American auto industry that hit Studebaker hard.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But despite the company's struggling, Studi Baker was about to
release their magnum Opus the Avante.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
You know, it's not unusual in the history of automotive
companies to bring out a glamour car when you're struggling.
The idea behind it is that this is going to
be a halo car. It's going to spread a halo
over all your products. It's going to be a draw
people are going to and this was the case of
the Avante. People are going to want to come into
(13:29):
the Studebaker showroom to see this fantastically styled new car,
and they'll end up buying a Lark. So that was
the plan behind it, and they also thought that they
could build enough of them and price it high enough
to where they could you know, they could do the
Avante profitably. They did it with a fiberglass body for
two reasons, One because the Corvette had a fiberglass body,
(13:51):
and two because Studi Baker didn't have enough money to
pay for the hard tooling to stamp it out, and
steal tooling for fiberglass bodies is cheap. And I think
it was one of the best looking cars that's ever
been made in America. I remember coming out of high school.
I was a senior and I was skipping class in
the morning to go downtown for breakfast. I'll they'd met
(14:13):
that here. And this gold Avanti pulled up to a
traffic light at the intersection where I was waiting to cross,
and I had never seen one before, and my jaw
hit the ground. I had never seen anything so dramatic.
I mean, in a sea of ford Fair lanes and
Dodge darts, here is this a Fanti? And I didn't
(14:36):
know what it was. You know, I was with a
couple of guys and I said, what is that And
a guy said, oh, that's a Studebaker Ravanti, and I
was dumbfound. I said, that's a Studi Baker because I had,
you know, a friend of mine had a Studebaker Lark,
and the YVANTI didn't look anything like any any Studebaker
I had ever seen. It was dramatic and it was
(14:58):
supposed to be, and it was a beautiful car. They
were well finished, They were very very fast, and the
shame is that they had so many production problems with
them that they never really got it sorted out. I
think it took from about two years to finally get
it sorted out. And by then, you know, Studebaker was
in such bad shape that nobody wanted to buy anything
with a Studebaker name on it.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And one of the biggest problems for Studebaker was its
own union.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
The problem was the union. They fought tooth and nail
for every concession. They struck at the most inopportune times.
If you're an automobile union and you really want to
cripple a company, you say, Okay, we're going to wait
till announcement time for the new models, and then we're
going to go on strike, and then dealers are going
to have nothing to sell, and by the time we
(15:46):
win our concessions and go back to work, you know,
the market's going to be gone. And they did that.
They did that in sixty two, and it just devastated
the company. They were having a party down there in
South Bend. They had college that were on the payroll
who were not actually working. There was one guy who
is typing his college species in the bathroom. There were
(16:07):
stuff that a good management doesn't allow to happen. After
the strike in sixty two, the company never really recovered.
For some reason. I don't know if the buying public
just gave up on them, but car sales just all
of a sudden went off the cliff, and the company
was still building cars. Good management tells you you don't
(16:29):
build a car without an order. That's been you know,
like a watchword in the industry from day one. But
they wanted to keep the assembly lines going, so they
were building cars that they had no orders for. And
then at the end of the month or at the
end of two months, they'd have this huge stock pilot
of cars all over the place, all around South Bend,
(16:50):
in fields with weeds growing up to the doors, all
getting sun baked, and they would have to call their
dealers up and say, yeah, we got a special deal
on you know, take ten cars and we're going to
knock so much more. The off of that, the company
was losing money. That was it. They ran out of money.
They had to close down, and they announced it just
before Christmas nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Well, the company would continue to build cars in Hamilton,
Ontario until March of nineteen sixty seven. The closure of
the plant in Self Bend had a devastating impact on
the community.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
There was actually a book written on the effect of
the closure of Self Bend and there was you know,
there was increased suicides, alcoholism, depression, family breakups because you know,
thousands of people lost their jobs and the biggest employer
in South Bend was gone, so it was very tough
for the human element, you know, the public, but the
(17:44):
town itself got together businessmen and they worked hard to
help people find jobs, to lure new industries in, to
do everything they could to help the workers that were
displaced by this loss. And I think South Bend is
probably a better place now than it was, you know,
(18:06):
back when Studebaker was there. It's been a few years
since I've been there, but I think overall they've done better.
One thing I do really appreciate is that the city
itself has embraced its automotive heritage. They have an outstanding museum,
the Studebaker National Museum, and you know, they have gatherings
(18:29):
of Studebaker enthusiasts every year and it's really you know,
they don't try to bury the past. They celebrate it,
and that's the way it should be. This is American
industrial history, and you know, good or bad, we should
recognize it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
And that's what we do here at our American Stories
every day. We don't try and bury the past. We
celebrate it. And that's the good. The bad, and everything
in between. You've been listening to Patrick Foster, automotive historian.
Great job is always to Montema Montgomery, the studentmaker's story.
Here on our American Story.
This is our American stories, and our next story comes
to us from our own Monte Montgomery and Patrick Foster,
an automotive historian, on the history of the classic car
company Studebaker.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
In eighteen fifty two, the Studebaker Corporation was founded by
five blacksmithing brothers in the city of South Bend, Indiana.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
It was a big corporation, you know, it was one
of the biggest corporations in America. And for you know,
a long time, it was a small business. But they
built horse drawn wagons and they grew to become at
one time the largest wagon maker in the country, and
their products were sold all around the world, and they,
you know, became very wealthy men and quite successful. What
(00:57):
happened with a lot of producers of horse drawn vehicle
when the horseless carriage came out, they were not quite
certain what to do with it. They began producing electric
cars in nineteen oh two, and when it finally became
obvious that gasoline cars were going to be pretty much
the standard mode of transportation, they contracted with another company
(01:21):
and started offering gas powered cars. Studebaker of Garford. They
kind of dipped their toe into the automobile business until oh,
I think it was about nineteen fifteen. They started producing
their own gasoline cars, you know, from a Studebaker design,
and because of their fame, you know, they became successful.
They did all right until the Great Depression, and then
(01:45):
they went bankrupt for a while. And I get criticized
by Studebaker people who say they were not actually bankrupt,
but they were bankrupt. But luckily they a couple of
managers came along and were able to get the company
out of bankruptcy and rebuilt it. It was a new
company that came out of the ashes of the old one.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
And the largest change for Studebaker was finally attempting to
compete with the larger automakers by producing something a bit
more affordable to the average American.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
And they eventually got into the lower price ranges in
nineteen thirty nine with a car called the Champion that
was very successful.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
It's big, it's new, it's the big news in the
low price field, the big news Studebaker.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Look at it.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
The Champion was a really remarkable car. It came out
for nineteen thirty nine. Studebaker put a lot of effort
into it. You see, part of the problem the biggest
problem that the independent American automakers had is trying to
compete with the big three with Ford and Chevy and Plymouth.
They've got volume that gives them low prices and gives
(02:57):
them more than low prices low organization. And that means
taking a case of Ford, if you're building a half
a million cars a year, or a million cars a year,
or two million cars a year, and you have to
buy a page of advertising, well, you can spread that
cost over two million cars. If your student baker that
(03:17):
page of advertising costs you the same amount of money,
but you can only spread it over maybe one two
hundred thousand cars. So your cost per vehicle tends to
be higher, not because the parts are more are higher,
but your overhead is higher. So the Champion was an
attempt to break out of that by coming up with
a really high volume car, and to do that they
(03:39):
had to be smart with their costs, and they work.
They built the car to be a little bit smaller
than the big three cars, just a little bit, but
in a design that retained almost the same interior space.
The car was lighter so it would cost less to
produce because automotive costs at those times we're figured by
the town. It allowed them to come out with a
(04:01):
car that was good looking, roamy, competitive, price wise, very competitive,
performance wise, very competitive, and he had got better fuel economy,
so they had an advantage over the others. They could
match them with roaminess and ride and handling and performance
and price. Studebaker did extremely well with it, you know.
(04:24):
It helped rebuild them in the post war era, and
by the fifties they were really competitive with the Big three.
They were the largest volume of the American independent car
companies by far.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But trouble was on the horizon for Studebaker and the
other independent car manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Nineteen fifty four was the most competitive year in car sales,
probably in the history of the auto industry. Henry Ford
the second had recently taken over his grandfather's firm, and
he was itching to take on Chevrolet, and he announced
that Billieve it was nineteen fifty three, that he was
going to outsell Chevrolet in fifty four or kill the
(05:08):
company trying. And what he did in late fifty three
into fifty four is he ordered up more production from
his factories and ordered that those cars be shipped to dealers.
Whether the dealers had ordered them or not. So if
you were a Ford dealer in South Bend, Indiana, and
you ordered twenty new Fords for the month, you might
get forty of them along with the bill, and you
(05:31):
could either pay the bill or give up your franchise.
You know, there was no message with Henry Ford the second,
So you know, most dealers said, Okay, well we're going
to pay for the cars and we're going to sell
the heck out of them. And they started cutting prices
like crazy, advertising like crazy, and the result was Ford
sales skyrocketed. Well, Chevrolet wasn't going to take that sitting down,
(05:53):
so they did the same thing. Even Plymouth got in
on it. So you've got the big the three biggest
automakers in the world fighting it out tooth and nail
for every sale. And I mean they did dirty things
that are actually illegal. They did this practice called bootlegging,
where they would take brand new cars and run them
(06:13):
through an auction as used cars just to get rid
of them, just to get a little bit money back
and be able to stay in the game against that Studebaker,
Nash Hudson Packard, they just couldn't compete and sales just
dropped like a stone. So the little automakers, the independent
American Automakers started bleeding money. Nash ended up purchasing Hudson
(06:37):
Motor Company and they formed American Motors and Student Baker
and Packer merged with each other. They did it so
quickly they didn't do due diligence. When you're doing a merger,
you have to do what's called due diligence, where A
looks at the books at B to see what sort
of profits and losses they're making and what their overhead is,
(06:58):
and B looks at the book of A for the
same reason. This way you're going into this marriage with
both eyes open. Well, Studebaker and Packard were so desperate
to merge with each other, and also I think both
of them were afraid of what the other one would
think of their you know, their their ledgers that they
didn't do due diligence. They just said, you tell us
(07:21):
how much you know what your overhead is and how
much your profit losses for the last year, and we'll
do the same for you, and we're not going to
check each other's books. And both sides lied like rugs.
So the upshot was about three months after they merged together,
they discovered they were losing money by the bucket load.
They were bleeding. I mean, it was it was unbelievable
(07:43):
how much money they were losing. And the head of
Studebaker Packer, James Nance, sent one of his financial people
over to South Bend and said, you know, find out,
you know what the problem is down there. And he
found out that Studebaker had understated their break even point
buy something on the order of eighty or one hundred
(08:04):
thousand cars, and there was just no way they were
going to turn a profit. For a while once they merged,
there was no one merging them. It's really hard onto
a merger. So they were stuck together and it was
a rocky road for the next five years. What should
have happened, and the whole plan behind it, which was
(08:25):
a good plan, was they were merged together, they would
sell each other's products and instantly they did. The engineering
team would get together and design one car body that
could be used by both brands. This is what Nash
and Hudson did. It's what Chevrolet had been doing for years.
It's what Ford had been doing for years. You know,
(08:48):
a Pontiac is basically as Chevrolet would more trim, so
the student Baker and packer. The plan was they would
eventually share the same body and that would cut their
over head tremendously. They would be able to spread their
costs over so many more vehicles and they would be profitable.
And it would have worked too, but they just didn't
(09:09):
have enough capital to last long enough.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And you're listening to Patrick Foster, automotive historian, telling the
story of the Studebaker Corporation and in his own way,
telling the story of American history and American business, commerce
and entrepreneurial activity. When we come back more of the
Studebaker Corporation story here on our American stories. And we
(10:09):
returned to our American stories and the Studebaker story. When
we last left off, Studebaker was once again on the ropes,
but they were about to have a major stroke of luck.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
They should have gone out of business in fifty eight.
It's a miracle that they didn't. But they managed to
pull the fat from the fire. They brought out the
lark in fifty nine, and that saved them, you know,
for as long as they lasted. Actually, it saved the corporation.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Hi there, I'm Rex May and this is the sixty
one Lark. Well, sure it's beautiful, but more important, the
Lark's got something new, a new kind of performance, a
new kind of excitement, unmatched in any US compact made today.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And the Lark was truly a miracle of a car
for Studebaker, built using existing parts from the Studebaker Starlight,
a car which consumers didn't like.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
They had that nineteen fifty three car that they had
been peddling through fifty eight, and basically because the company
had no money and could not afford a new body,
they took that nineteen fifty three sedan body and they
saw it off both ends. They shortened a wheelbase and
came up with very simple styling that stood out that
(11:23):
was alark. Really, there was nothing new about the body
other than the front end cap and the were styling.
It was designed on a shoe string, and they used
a lot of parts that they had been using for years.
And this is the interesting thing. They sold the lot
for more than they had been selling the fifty eight
big car, and they were able to get away with
(11:44):
it because it was a new concept. This was not
some stripped down big car that you would be ashamed
to be seen in this was a compact car, and
compact cars were just come becoming the rage, and in
nineteen fifty nine the damn broke on the compact car market,
and Studebaker was you know, part of it was luck,
(12:04):
but part of it was good product planning, And in
nineteen fifty nine they turned in the best year in
their history profit wise. The car sold like Nickel Hamberger's.
It was amazing and it was a good car. It
was roomy for a compact and they nailed as far
as ride and handling, gas mileage was very good. It
was underpowered, but with a lock he could get a
(12:26):
V eight engine, and Studebaker had a really excellent V
eight and a lot of people wanted a small car,
but they wanted power, So sales of V eight powered
compacts hit Studebaker at least were very good, so they did.
All in all, they did very well with that car.
In nineteen sixty Studebaker car sales fell because the Big
(12:50):
three got into the compact market. Sixty one, there was
a recession in the American auto industry that hit Studebaker hard.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
But despite the company's struggling, Studi Baker was about to
release their magnum Opus the Avante.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
You know, it's not unusual in the history of automotive
companies to bring out a glamour car when you're struggling.
The idea behind it is that this is going to
be a halo car. It's going to spread a halo
over all your products. It's going to be a draw
people are going to and this was the case of
the Avante. People are going to want to come into
(13:29):
the Studebaker showroom to see this fantastically styled new car,
and they'll end up buying a Lark. So that was
the plan behind it, and they also thought that they
could build enough of them and price it high enough
to where they could you know, they could do the
Avante profitably. They did it with a fiberglass body for
two reasons, One because the Corvette had a fiberglass body,
(13:51):
and two because Studi Baker didn't have enough money to
pay for the hard tooling to stamp it out, and
steal tooling for fiberglass bodies is cheap. And I think
it was one of the best looking cars that's ever
been made in America. I remember coming out of high school.
I was a senior and I was skipping class in
the morning to go downtown for breakfast. I'll they'd met
(14:13):
that here. And this gold Avanti pulled up to a
traffic light at the intersection where I was waiting to cross,
and I had never seen one before, and my jaw
hit the ground. I had never seen anything so dramatic.
I mean, in a sea of ford Fair lanes and
Dodge darts, here is this a Fanti? And I didn't
(14:36):
know what it was. You know, I was with a
couple of guys and I said, what is that And
a guy said, oh, that's a Studebaker Ravanti, and I
was dumbfound. I said, that's a Studi Baker because I had,
you know, a friend of mine had a Studebaker Lark,
and the YVANTI didn't look anything like any any Studebaker
I had ever seen. It was dramatic and it was
(14:58):
supposed to be, and it was a beautiful car. They
were well finished, They were very very fast, and the
shame is that they had so many production problems with
them that they never really got it sorted out. I
think it took from about two years to finally get
it sorted out. And by then, you know, Studebaker was
in such bad shape that nobody wanted to buy anything
with a Studebaker name on it.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And one of the biggest problems for Studebaker was its
own union.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
The problem was the union. They fought tooth and nail
for every concession. They struck at the most inopportune times.
If you're an automobile union and you really want to
cripple a company, you say, Okay, we're going to wait
till announcement time for the new models, and then we're
going to go on strike, and then dealers are going
to have nothing to sell, and by the time we
(15:46):
win our concessions and go back to work, you know,
the market's going to be gone. And they did that.
They did that in sixty two, and it just devastated
the company. They were having a party down there in
South Bend. They had college that were on the payroll
who were not actually working. There was one guy who
is typing his college species in the bathroom. There were
(16:07):
stuff that a good management doesn't allow to happen. After
the strike in sixty two, the company never really recovered.
For some reason. I don't know if the buying public
just gave up on them, but car sales just all
of a sudden went off the cliff, and the company
was still building cars. Good management tells you you don't
(16:29):
build a car without an order. That's been you know,
like a watchword in the industry from day one. But
they wanted to keep the assembly lines going, so they
were building cars that they had no orders for. And
then at the end of the month or at the
end of two months, they'd have this huge stock pilot
of cars all over the place, all around South Bend,
(16:50):
in fields with weeds growing up to the doors, all
getting sun baked, and they would have to call their
dealers up and say, yeah, we got a special deal
on you know, take ten cars and we're going to
knock so much more. The off of that, the company
was losing money. That was it. They ran out of money.
They had to close down, and they announced it just
before Christmas nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Well, the company would continue to build cars in Hamilton,
Ontario until March of nineteen sixty seven. The closure of
the plant in Self Bend had a devastating impact on
the community.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
There was actually a book written on the effect of
the closure of Self Bend and there was you know,
there was increased suicides, alcoholism, depression, family breakups because you know,
thousands of people lost their jobs and the biggest employer
in South Bend was gone, so it was very tough
for the human element, you know, the public, but the
(17:44):
town itself got together businessmen and they worked hard to
help people find jobs, to lure new industries in, to
do everything they could to help the workers that were
displaced by this loss. And I think South Bend is
probably a better place now than it was, you know,
(18:06):
back when Studebaker was there. It's been a few years
since I've been there, but I think overall they've done better.
One thing I do really appreciate is that the city
itself has embraced its automotive heritage. They have an outstanding museum,
the Studebaker National Museum, and you know, they have gatherings
(18:29):
of Studebaker enthusiasts every year and it's really you know,
they don't try to bury the past. They celebrate it,
and that's the way it should be. This is American
industrial history, and you know, good or bad, we should
recognize it.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
And that's what we do here at our American Stories
every day. We don't try and bury the past. We
celebrate it. And that's the good. The bad, and everything
in between. You've been listening to Patrick Foster, automotive historian.
Great job is always to Montema Montgomery, the studentmaker's story.
Here on our American Story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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