Talk about a dream that won’t die.
Mark Brislawn and Bill Bauman are giving Studebaker a steel and fluid future.
Thirty-two years after the last cars rolled out of Studebaker’s last-ditch, Canadian factory, both men have developed their visions of cars the company could have built if it had survived.
It’s hard to say where Studebaker stopped and Brislawn and Bauman began.
Brislawn applied his concepts to a custom car while Bauman rethought Studebaker’s trucks.
Brislawn’s “Studebird” is a combination of a 1953 “lowboy” coupe and a 1987 Pontiac Firebird. It’s immediately recognizable as a Studebaker but with modern central shell and running gear–the sort of short cut the company would have applauded (especially the modest expense).
Bauman was disappointed that Studebaker’s powerful-looking 1964 redesign never appeared as a pickup. So, he did it.
“They (Studebaker) just had such good ideas,” said Bauman.
It has been 146 years since the Studebaker brothers sold their first Conestoga wagons (they built three in 1852) and 32 years since the last new cars.
Yet all over America, enthusiasts keep Studebakers on the road. It’s a mixture of appreciation for some groundbreaking ideas and just plain contrariness–the urge to prove that Studebaker did build great cars.
In the late 1930s, Studebaker’s designers were the pantheon of American automotive styling: Raymond Loewy, Virgil Exner, Gordon Buehrig, Duncan McCrae, Dick Teague, Bob Bourke and Brooks Stevens.
Loewy’s imprint can be found throughout American design from the 1930s to the 1970s. He styled everything from Pepsodent toothpaste tubes, Lucky Strike cigarette packets and Oreo cookie boxes to Pennsylvania Railroad steam engines, Schick electric shavers, Greyhound buses and even the inside of President John Kennedy’s Air Force One.
When Studebaker hired him in 1939, it put its design department on a fast–and elegant–track.
Loewy’s team set fashions that shaped the U.S. auto industry. Exner, Bourke and Buehrig reshaped the range in 1947, the first of the post-war lower, sleeker cars.
When Exner left in 1949, Loewy and Bourke crafted the “lowboy” Starliner coupe that would emerge in 1953 and, with its small overhead valve V-8, define the modern personal car.
Bourke developed the model into the Hawk in 1956–still probably the sportiest-looking American sedan–and Brooks Stevens redesigned it in 1962 on an impossibly tiny budget.
Duncan McCrae’s 1959 Lark compact was rushed into production in 10 months and was the most successful model the company ever had.
And Loewy’s swansong (a car so good it was handbuilt for more than 25 year after the company folded!) was 1963’s fiberglass-body Avanti sports coupe–one of which was timed at 171 m.p.h on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
But even with these innovations–and a huge cash infusion from Packard in the 1950s–the inefficient South Bend, Ind., company couldn’t stay afloat. From being the eighth largest carmaker in 1949 (228,402 sales), Studebaker’s star dimmed to just 2,045 in its last year of 1966.
But, thanks to Brislawn and Bauman, the story doesn’t end there.
Brislawn is a 48-year-old hotrodder in Vancouver, Wash., and a sales manager for a machine shop. His grandmother, Esther Getty Studebaker, was related distantly to the carmaking family, and his fascination with the marque extends as far as watches and model race cars.
He once owned five ’53 Studebaker coupes at the same time. While he loved the shape “making them drivable was a real trick.” One day he picked up a hot rod magazine with a story on a car that blended a ’49 Ford coupe and an ’87 Thunderbird.
“I didn’t care about the Ford, but I loved the idea,” he recalled. The project became an obsession.
“I’d drive around with a Studebaker fender in the back of my truck and measure up cars in parking lots to see what would fit. I wanted to use a Corvette but the cross-section was too short.”
The answer appeared in the shape of his boyhood friend Tim Walsh, who runs a body shop and had come across a 1987 “F” body Pontiac Firebird that had been hit front and rear.
Because Studebaker bought parts from other companies–the last two year’s cars had Chevy engines–Brislawn had no philosophical problems with melding the two cars.
From a $750 Firebird and a rusty $300 Studebaker parts car came the Studebird, a dream car people have been knocking down his doors to buy.
“A retired doctor in Eugene (Ore.) made a heavy pass to buy it, then he wanted to me to build another. But I talked to Tim, and we thought `nah.’ “
Lengthening the hood and splicing the front fenders, Brislawn and Walsh found they could reproduce the Studebaker’s proportions on the Firebird shell.
“The front bumper was too wide for the original car anyway,” said Brislawn.
At the rear, the fenders cupped over the Firebird’s and Brislawn duplicated the shape of the Studebaker trunk into which the hatchback dropped neatly. In a surprising coincidence, the Firebird’s hatchback neatly duplicates the Avanti’s rear window.
And that’s the sort of styling echo that Studebaker aficionados appreciate.
Love it or hate it, the Avanti remains a charismatic concept 37 years later, in league with Citroen’s futuristic 1955 DS19.
When Walsh and Brislawn’s enthusiasm flagged after about a year, painter Tim Diltz stepped with an admirably understated white paint job.
Brislawn had an upholsterer friend redo the interior in Studebaker style with piped, low-back buckets. P.S. Engineering knock-off magnesium wheels provided the finishing touch.
Brislawn reckons he has only about $10,000 invested in the Studebird “but I called in a lot of favors. This was a labor of love. You can’t do it for dollars.” His next project?
“Well, we wondered about a convertible. I’ve seen pictures of the two-seater Bob Bourke designed to compete with the ’55 T-Bird.”
Across town Bauman takes care of Studebaker’s unrealized truck plans.
Bauman, 52, is a lifetime mechanic and imaginative tinkerer with 22 Studebakers in his past.
His current driver is a 1964 Studebaker Champ pickup. Designer Brooks Stevens revised the Lark (renamed Commander, Challenger and Daytona) for 1964 in a more massive shape but Studebaker was so short of money that a Champ pickup truck was never put in production.
However, it seemed such a good idea that Bauman built one.
Bauman’s second-generation Champ is his second “imaginary” truck.
The first is the 1961 “Larkero” or “El Larkamino” that sits outside his house.
It occurred to Bauman that if Studebaker redesigned the Champ pickup in 1960 to use the front of a Lark sedan, why couldn’t he put that same cab back on a sedan frame, like a Chevrolet El Camino? The bed presented more of a problem, as Studebaker was buying Dodge truck beds, which were too wide to look like anything but a mistake. So he created his own.
Satisfied, he picked up a magazine to find that Studebaker had built 2,000 such vehicles for sale in Argentina.
Bauman’s 1964 Champ turned out to be much more difficult as he struggled to merge a Commander sedan shell with a pickup cab.
“The key to the shape was the rain gutter on the roof, it had to line up,” he said. “I cut the roof and spliced it with the rear of one of the older pickups. The old sedan door pillar keeps the structural integrity.”
Bauman’s best compliment came from an unexpected source. “I was at the Puyallup (Wash.) swap meet about 10 years ago, and this old guy came up to me, walking with a cane.
“He asked me: `Is that your truck?’ then introduced himself. He said, `I’m Bob Temple and I used to design Studebaker trucks. We did a couple of those, but you’ve done better than anything we built.’ “
As if his 1964 pickup wasn’t enough of a challenge, Bauman is now building a four-door crew-cab pickup for his friend, ironworker Joel Johnson.
“We had to cut the roof down two inches at the back and narrow it three inches and we’ll stretch the frame about 18 inches,” said Johnson, who reckons he has owned 70 Studebakers (and whose home is surrounded by nine).
“There’s so much interchangeability. They’re just big Tinker Toys,” he said.
Bauman has his own plans and produced a sketch of the “Commandero.” “I think it’s time for a Studebaker sport-utility,” he said.
IN THE TIME OF STUDEBAKER
Studebaker of South Bend, Ind., was the only carmaker that survived from the days of the covered wagon into mass auto production. Here’s a brief history:
1852–First Conestoga wagons sold.
1876–Studebaker wagon wins gold medal at Philadelphia Centennial celebration.
1902–Studebaker enters auto business in 1902, with an electric car.
1904–First gasoline Studebaker, a 2-cylinder, 16-horsepower touring car, bows.
1908–Studebaker reaches No. 3 behind Buick and Ford.
1911–Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Co. combines with Everitt-Metzger-Flanders Co. of Detroit to form Studebaker Corp.; EMF 30, Flanders 20, Studebaker-Garford 40 and Studebaker Electrics made.
1913–All cars–4- and 6-cylinder models–bear Studebaker name.
1920s–Manufacturing gradually moves from Detroit to South Bend; Big Six, Special Six, Light Six and Standard Six produced.
1927–Model names changed to President, Commander and Dictator; Erskine small car introduced.
1928–Studebaker buys Pierce-Arrow, a Buffalo, N.Y., luxury-car maker.
1933–Studebaker goes into receivership; sells Pierce-Arrow.
1934–Land Cruiser, styled after the Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow show cars, and Cruiser introduced.
1936–Designer Raymond Loewy, who oversaw the development of the Starliner/Starlight, hired; cab-over-engine trucks introduced.
1937–Coupe-Express, the first El Camino, introduced.
1939–6-cylinder Champion and Commander and 8-cylinder President introduced.
1947–“Which Way Is It Going?”–with similar stying front and rear–new series of Champions and Commanders announced.
1950–Radical “bullet nose” debuts; Studebaker No. 8 in industry with 228,402 cars produced.
1953–Low-slung Loewy coupes and hardtops introduced.
1954–Studebaker joins forces with Packard, which produced its first car in 1899; Conestoga station wagon premiers.
1956–Hawk series of “family sports cars” developed.
1957–Golden Hawk hardtop is supercharged.
1959–Lark compact series produced in 10 months.
1962–Brooks Stevens redesigns Hawk into Gran Turismo.
1963–Fiberglass Avanti breaks 29 speed records at Bonneville Salt Flats, topping out at 171 m.p.h.; sliding roof Lark Wagonaire station wagon introduced; South Bend, Ind., factory closes, production confined to Ontario.
1964–Lark replaced by squarer Challenger, Commander, Cruiser and Daytona models.
1965–Hawk GT discontinued.
1966–Studebaker halts production.
Source: Studebaker, “Studebaker: The Power Years”
