Chapter 39
Studebaker Corp. went big for Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition in 1933–1934. The car company added to the tradition of supersized teapots, typewriters, stoves, seesaws, and other such gargantuan props at trade shows and world’s fairs by building the largest model of an automobile ever constructed. Its body displayed in the great hall of the Travel and Transport Building, the model of the Studebaker President Land Cruiser made of plaster and wood painted a dazzling canary yellow, the massive—if mock—motorcar measured 80 feet long and 39 feet high, with 12-foot-diameter wheels, and windshield wipers a yard long. Beneath its running board was the entrance to an 80-seat movie theater where guests watched films promoting the products Studebaker said were “built like battleships.”
Founded in 1852, when Henry and Clement Studebaker opened a blacksmith shop, Studebaker later manufactured horse-drawn wagons, which it furnished the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Glimpsing the future down the road, it debuted an electric car in 1902 and a gas-powered model in 1904, but hedged its bets by producing wagons until 1920.
A few years later, Studebaker hired University of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne (both the company and the school were located in South Bend, Indiana), the line played off its association with the legendary Rockne, whom the company paid to speak at auto conventions and dealership events. Shilling for the Studebaker at the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce at the Commodore Hotel in New York, Rockne led his audience, including tycoons Henry Ford, Sr., and Alfred Sloane Jr., of General Motors Company LLC, in a rousing rendition of the coach’s traditional “Go, Go, Go” cheer.
The cheering soon faded to mourning. Rockne died in a 1931 plane crash, a few days after signing on as the company’s sales manager. Two years after, its $10,000 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow—the company acquired the opulent automaker Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co. in 1928—rolled out at the New York Auto Show, but it failed to generate buyers in a landscape where roughly 25 percent of the civilian workforce was unemployed, and the roads were lined with Okies, Arkies, and Mizzous migrating in clouds of dust rather than top-hatted plutocrats speeding in ain’t-we-got-fun metal chariots. Studebaker’s fortunes hit the earth as hard as the Rockne’s plane. In an era marked by the depredations of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Studebaker produced, dropped, and then brought back a model called the Dictator. Deep in the throes of the Depression, the company’s sales nose-dived from more than 123,000 cars for 1930 to fewer than 26,000 for 1932, dropping the automaker from 4th to 11th place in the industry.
Bad before, sales were catastrophic in 1933, plunging to 12,500 units, and Studebaker finished in 14th place. After a Hail-Mary merger with White Motor Co. collapsed, the company went into receivership and company head Albert Russell Erskine, despondent and disgraced, resigned, then shot himself in the heart.
But even economic calamities aren’t always enough to drain the magic of a world’s fair. The yellow paint chosen to draw visitors’ eyes proved so canny a promotion, Studebaker later made the sun-bright hue available on its cars for an additional charge of $80. So realistic was the giant behemoth auto, visitors by the score would scratch their fingernails across its surface, sure that it had to be metal instead of mere plaster. The movie theater underneath the Land Cruiser’s running board was continually packed with audiences who learned that Studebaker had set in excess of 140 records for both speed and endurance.
Children came away with something more tangible. For a quarter each, they could carry home a 6.75-inch-long model of the Land Cruiser, or a 7-inch-long dual-wheeled stake-bed truck made by craftsmen from Chicago’s National Products Co., who made the toys from molten metal in front of visitors.
The world’s fair performed CPR on Studebaker’s fortunes, too. The company made a small profit in 1934, enough to secure a line of credit and wiggle itself out of receivership. In the late 1930s, the French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy, the man who designed everything from Air Force One’s blue-tone look to Lucky Strikes’ red-and-white packaging, went on to conceive the company’s bullet-nosed 1953 Starliner and Starlight coupes and the 1963 Avanti sports coupe. Their silky, sumptuous lines convinced drivers that everything in life was somewhere else, and they could get there in a Studebaker.