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Lamm had long lusted after a 1953 Studebaker Commander Starliner. He bought this one in 1977 from author and historian Fred Fox. Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012
I was a junior in high school when the ads first began to appear in national magazines. The ads preceded the car by three months, but seeing those pictures, I immediately fell in love with the 1953 Studebaker coupe – the so-called Loewy coupe.
And then, at long last, the Studebaker dealer in the next town, Harlingen, Texas, finally got one in. I drove over to Harlingen, walked into the showroom and just stared at that first coupe – a dazzling, excitingly beautiful vision, so low and clean, totally unlike any other automobile built in America. The Loewy coupe was more like a showcar than anything in production.
My mother was due for a new car that year. Her 1950 Hudson Pacemaker had served her well, but in those days, self-respecting motorists “traded up” every two to three seasons. I lobbied my mom with all my might, all the arguments and powers of persuasion I could muster, urging her to forgo yet another Hudson and move on to a much more luscious set of wheels. “All 1953 Hudsons still look like your old Pacemaker,” I said, “but the Studebaker coupe is truly new and absolutely gorgeous, and you’ll look so great driving it.”
My folks were a car dealer’s dream. They paid cash, they didn’t haggle, and they accepted whatever trade-in allowance the salesman cared to give them. Our Hudson dealer, Lloyd Lafond, was keenly aware what a goldmine he had in my parents, and he was already bringing new Hudsons around for my mother to sample. So I knew I was up against a formidable foe.
My mother made all sorts of excuses for not visiting the Studebaker dealership in Harlingen, eight miles distant. Her medical practice kept her too busy, she said. Besides, she liked Hudsons. She liked Lloyd Lafond. We’d always bought cars from Lloyd, so why change now? Too, it was better to keep the money in our town rather than let it end up in Harlingen.
Studebaker coupe production was still spotty, and dealers tended to sell what they got right off the carrier. So I kept pleading. I told my mom that I’d call the dealer and make sure he had a demonstrator in stock. A test drive would take just a few minutes, so she wouldn’t be away from the office all that long. And I’d handle everything. My persistence and nagging wore Mom down, and she finally said okay.
Well, here I was, a 17-year-old kid phoning the Studebaker dealer in Harlingen, trying to convince the salesman to have a coupe up and waiting. I think he might have suspected a prank at first, but he knew my parents by name, and I finally persuaded him to have the car ready to go at 10 o’clock on the following Tuesday morning.
My mother did indeed have a busy medical practice. When she wasn’t delivering babies, she was seeing patients in her office or making rounds at the hospital. But that morning, she cancelled several appointments and gave herself one hour to go see the Studebaker.
We arrived at the dealership, and there it stood at the curb: a 1953 Commander Starliner hardtop coupe, red with a beige top. My mom gave the car a quick once-over. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” I purred.
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t want a car that just looks good.”
“So take it for a ride,” smiled the salesman, and he handed Mom the keys.
“Are you coming with us?” she asked him. No, he said, he had other things to do. Besides, he’d rather we evaluate the car for ourselves. He didn’t want to interfere. My mother said, “Good.”
So in we hopped, my mom driving, and headed out into the countryside, to Adams Gardens Road – a long, straight stretch with citrus groves and towering palms on either side. Everything was going swimmingly until, all of a sudden, the engine quit. Just stopped dead. No coughing, no sputtering…it just conked out as though some invisible hand had reached in and turned off the key.
My mother pulled over and checked the fuel gauge. Empty. Bone dry. No gas. “That jerk of a salesman didn’t put any gas in this car,” she said. We were five miles from nowhere. My mother, who was usually sweetness personified, was not pleased. She needed to get back the office and start seeing patients. We spotted a farmhouse nearby and assumed they’d have a phone.
Mom got out of the car and slammed the door. “Piece of junk,” she muttered. We walked to the farmhouse and phoned her office nurse to come pick us up. Needless to say, my mother bought another Hudson in 1953, and the Studebaker slipped through my fingers.
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Car of My Dreams
Twenty-four years later, in October 1977, I finally realized one of my teenhood dreams, succumbed to the sirens of Raymond Loewy and Bob Bourke, and bought myself a green-and-cream 1953 Studebaker Commander Starliner coupe. It’s still, in my opinion, one of the most strikingly, stunningly, elegantly electrifying automobiles ever built in America.
I bought the car from Fred Fox, the Studebaker historian, author and one of the most knowledgeable exponents of the marque. Fred lives in Delhi, California, some 60 miles south of my home in Stockton. I ran into him one Sunday at the Turlock swapmeet and mentioned that I was looking for a nice Loewy coupe. Did he know where I might find one? Fred confessed that he owned several and, if I were genuinely interested, he’d sell me one of his Starliners for $1,900 (that’s about $7,000 in today’s dollars).
I jumped at the chance, and Fred delivered the car personally. The coupe had overdrive, no rust, and it looked marvelous inside and out.
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The Loewy coupe’s proportions and lack of extraneous chrome help make the design timeless. That’s Lamm’s Nash-Healey in the garage, back from painting and awaiting the installation of grille and trim.
As I had in the showroom, I used to simply stare at that car. I’d park it in our driveway, sit in a lawn chair and just inhale its loveliness. I’ve stared at lots of pretty cars, but none with the intensity and admiration that I lavished on this Studebaker. The form, the proportions, the lowness, the details like the dimpled wheelcovers, the script at the base of the C-pillar, the simplicity of the grille and the graceful curvature of the nose – everything conspired to stimulate whatever cerebral center in my brain gives me visual pleasure. It’s the same pleasure I take in looking at a beautiful woman, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful flower, a beautiful painting or sculpture. I can’t explain it, but I think you know from your own experience what I mean.
Even before I bought Fred’s car, I’d interviewed Bob Bourke and Bob Koto for an article I did in Special Interest Autos magazine five years earlier. Bourke and Koto were the two designers most responsible for creating the Loewy coupe. Loewy does deserve credit, of course, not only because he was their boss but, more importantly, because he had the skill to convince Studebaker management to put the coupe into production. And that’s a story in itself.
A Century of Studebakers
Studebaker celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1952. The 1953 line was really intended to come out a year earlier, but for various reasons, the factory in South Bend, Indiana, missed that deadline. Instead, Loewy’s staff did a quick and dirty rehash of the 1950-1951 Studebaker, and that served as the birthday child.
So the anniversary models were a year late to begin with. Harold Vance, Studebaker’s president, liked the Loewy coupe but didn’t think it would sell, so he ordered his engineers and production people to concentrate on the bread-and-butter sedan for 1953. He wasn’t keen to put the coupe into production at all, and he kept putting it off.
Raymond Loewy, though, lobbied Vance hard to produce the coupe because, Loewy felt, it would make Studebaker a style leader which, of course, it did. By the time Vance finally pulled the trigger on the coupe, the tool and die makers in Detroit all had full plates, and they couldn’t accommodate Studebaker with coupe sheetmetal dies until a month or so after the 1953 sedans debuted that January.
In desperation, Studebaker contracted with the Budd Company in Philadelphia to make the coupe’s front-end sheetmetal dies. Budd didn’t have enough time to try them out and simply shipped them to South Bend as quickly as possible. When Studebaker stamped the first trial set of front fenders, bumper pan, hood and cowl, the assembly workers discovered that those parts didn’t fit the rest of the body. Panic time in South Bend!
Part of the problem had to do with the flexibility of the frame. Studebaker’s chassis engineers had been ordered to lighten the frames of all 1953 models, using 13-gauge steel instead of the standard 11-gauge. This worked all right for sedans, but the coupe stood on the Land Cruiser’s longer 120.5-inch wheelbase, and when the powertrain got lowered onto the frame, the weight actually bent the rails slightly. This bending became a factor in keeping the coupe’s front-end sheetmetal from mating with the main body structure. In other words, the whole pilot assembly process ended up in shambles.
Someone on the assembly team finally suggested putting shims along the frame between the two body sections, and that pretty much solved the problem. But by the time actual Loewy coupes got shipped to dealers, it was March 1953, and a lot of customers who’d fallen in love with the car, as I had, had moved on to other purchases.
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Rear looks as striking as any other view. In 1954, Studebaker went to thicker steel for their frames, which took care of the 1953 model’s flexibility problem.
Even so and despite Harold Vance’s trepidation, the Loewy coupe sold quite well in 1953, capturing roughly 46 percent of that year’s total output. Studebaker could have sold more coupes if they’d had greater plant capacity. Then, too, the coupe hit dealer showrooms toward the end of the Korean War, at a time when the American car market suddenly switched from shortage to glut. This was similar to the situation after World War II, which shifted from a seller’s to a buyer’s market in 1950. A similar flip-flop took place in 1953, and Studebaker very much felt the crunch.
Studebaker customers soon discovered that the 1953 coupes didn’t have the build quality they’d come to expect. I noticed that in my own Loewy coupe. I could feel the frame flex, the car had a symphony of squeaks and rattles, and when you slammed the doors, they tended to sound like muffled kettle drums (well, not quite, but it certainly wasn’t the reassuring thunk built into most cars).
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Except for twin exhausts, Mike left the 232-cu.in. V-8 unaltered. The Loewy coupe looked fast but wasn’t, and Studebaker hadn’t prepared for the horsepower race. Studebaker engineers didn’t leave enough “meat” in this engine to go much beyond 289 inches, this at a time when rivals had V-8s in the 400-cu.in. range.
My coupe was stock, and its performance didn’t come close to matching its appearance. The Starliner looked sporty and fast, and while it was sporty, it was anything but fast. The 232-cubic-inch V-8 was really too small to provide competitive performance, and Studebaker intentionally hadn’t built much “meat” into the engine for future growth.
Intentionally? Yes, because South Bend’s engine engineers had counted on postwar predictions from General Motors Research Labs that future gasoline octane ratings would soon rise above that of aviation fuel. Charles Kettering, GM’s research boss, saw higher octane ratings and higher engine compression ratios as the next big thing.
Studebaker bought into that and developed its postwar V-8 so it would accept compression ratios of up to 14:1. The idea was to increase engine power and efficiency by progressively raising compression rather than by expanding displacement. Unfortunately for Studebaker, the oil companies didn’t go along with Kettering’s vision, automotive octane numbers stayed flat, and Studebaker was left holding the small-displacement bag.
When Studebaker punched out its V-8 to 259 cubic inches for 1955 and then 289 cubic inches for 1956, that became pretty much the engine’s practical size limit. (Studebaker also used Packard’s 352-cid V-8 in the 1956 Golden Hawk, and then a supercharged 289 in the 1957 Golden Hawk and subsequent models.)
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The Commander’s instrument panel had four working gauges next to the steering column. The dials looked good, but proved hard to read.
Another problem with 1953 Studebakers, at least in my view, was the slowness of its non-assisted steering: 5.5 turns lock to lock. After I’d owned my Starliner a couple of years, I ran across another 1953 Loewy coupe in Fiez’s Auto Wrecking here in Stockton. That car had power steering, the GM Saginaw option, so I bought the entire mechanism – pump, hoses, belt, Pitman arm, everything – for $35 and installed it in my car. After that, driving around town became more comfortable.
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Rear seat had deep foot wells and a fixed center armrest.
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Shallow trunk accommodates spare and not much more.
In the four years I owned it, I put less than 5,000 miles on the Studebaker. I loved to look at it, but it wasn’t much fun to drive, and I had other cars that were. So in August 1981, I placed for-sale ads in Hemmings and Cars & Parts. I ended up selling my lovely Loewy coupe to Kenny Buttolph, the research editor of Old Cars Weekly. I had $2,299.80 in the car at that time, and Kenny paid me $2,500, so I walked away with a grand profit of $200.20, not that I’d bought the car expecting to make money.
Kenny kept the car through at least 1984, and he doesn’t remember who bought it after that. In September 1999, JoAnne and I, accompanied by my sister and her husband, were vacationing in Yellowstone, and on our way to see Old Faithful, a green-and-cream 1953 Starliner coupe flashed past going the other way (the colors were officially called Tahoe green and Olympic gray). It looked exactly like my old car, and I wanted to turn around and give chase, but I felt I couldn’t subject the three other people aboard to that distraction. So we kept going. I still wonder about that car and who was driving it.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.