Before the Batmobile: Jonckheere's Round-Door Rolls Phantom I at the Petersen Museum

It's been true for a long time that Rolls-Royce* competes in a price category with small airplanes as well as other expensive cars. This 1925 Phantom I, re-bodied in 1934 by Jonckheere Carrossiers of Belgium, makes that aeronautical reference explicit with its Streamline Moderne styling.  The Phantom I was based on the 40/50 model, but improved with four-wheel brakes and overhead valves replacing side valves on the inline six-cylinder engine, which went from just over 7.4 liters to just under 7.7.  A good thing, then, about those 4-wheel brakes, in this case drums with a servo assist based on Hispano-Suiza patents. This Phantom was originally an open cabriolet bodied by Hooper to an order by a Mrs. Dillman of Detroit, the former Anna Thompson Dodge, who had inherited a fortune from Horace Dodge, of the Dodge Brothers. Mrs. Dillman apparently changed her mind, though, and the big Rolls stayed in Europe, where its owner eventually took it to Jonckheere for a new body...

Completed in 1934, the new body was a 2-door coupe, with room for 4 passengers as long as those in rear seats didn't mind the scarce headroom.  To go with the Streamline Moderne theme, the designer or designers (unknown, like the client, because Jonckheere lost records in a fire) decided on circular doors...

…which, in turn, led to adoption of side windows with retracting segments meeting at a center post.

The rear view conveys the vast size of this Rolls coupe, nearly 20 feet long.  Another intriguing detail is the treatment of rear windows, which are obscured by a series of thin louvers flanking the huge dorsal fin. More privacy for those crouching rear-seat passengers, one guesses, but more trouble for the driver, who had to contend with heavy steering, a huge turning radius and not much in the way of ground clearance. The long, skirted teardrop rear fenders combine with the small ground clearance to hide the rear wheels and give a floating effect similar to French designs produced by Figoni or Pourtout. Their teardrop aerodynamic coupes came a couple years later, often featured dorsal fins, and took advantage of lower and lighter chassis from Delage, Delahaye and Talbot-Lago to produce a more graceful result.

Graceful and agile the Jonckheere Rolls may not have been, but it fulfilled its function as a show-stopper, winning a prize at the 1936 Cannes Concours d'Elegance.  The car finally made its way to the USA shortly before World War II, where it served as chauffeur-driven transport for New England businessman Max Bilofsky.  By the early Fifties, the Round Door Rolls had fallen into disrepair, and wound up in a New Jersey salvage yard...

There it was discovered by early classic car fan Max Obie (this car was a magnet for guys named Max), who did basic repair work and painted the car gold.  It passed through other owners before going to Japan during the early Nineties collector car boom.  The Petersen Automotive Museum acquired the car in 2001 and began a restoration with the goal of restoring authenticity; it probably wasn't easy to reconstitute features like the fitted luggage and door hardware because the original drawings had been lost in the aforementioned fire.  

Unlike most Rolls-Royce coachwork until decades later, the Jonckheere body features a slanting radiator with curved base.  This may have helped distract from the tall hood and cowl, a result of the overhead valve engine.  Elongated bullet headlights echo the fender forms.  The black paint chosen by Petersen's restoration team, combined with vast size of the car and its crouching form, gives the Jonckheere Rolls a sinister feel. My first comment to photographer Art Heinrich on seeing his shots was that it looks like a car a vampire might drive.  He replied, "One of the later Batmobiles was on the other side of the floor; they should have put the two together."  You can say that again, Art...

*Footnote + meandering digression:  Amazingly, the only other sustained attn. we've given to a Rolls-Royce in these posts was to a 1932 Phantom II Sedanca de Ville, in "A Car Week Side Trip:  Sleeping Beauties Somewhere in California", posted Aug. 24, 2022.  It was the same car featured in "The Yellow Rolls-Royce", a '64 Hollywood film. That took a bit of focus, considering that the collection we visited also housed 2 Alfa Zagatos, a Ferrari Lusso, and vintage Bentleys.  The only other Rolls owner I've known was a good-humored client who laughed when I suggested that he could've substituted a fleet of used VW Beetles (still cheap back then) for his new R-R Corniche, stashed 'em around town with keys under the mats, and made a sort of public transport system for his extended family and friends.  I didn't suggest that he could've gotten a nice little plane for what the Corniche cost; he already had one.

Photo Credits

All color photos:  Art Heinrich 

Monochrome photos:  3Dmodels.org

 

Forgotten Classics: W. Eugene Smith's "Dream Street", and a Bulletnose Studebaker Ragtop

A framed monochrome photo faces the entry door of our place in Boulder.  It's small enough that some visitors never notice it. It's called "Dream Street", and was taken by W. Eugene Smith in 1955. The placement of the elements seems dreamlike, and the absence of "St." after "Dream" makes the latter word seem more like a suggestive verb than a noun, especially with its central placement in the composition, parallel to the picture plane.  Even the car, leaning into the trees, seems to be dozing off. What little we see of the road vanishes into foliage, so we have to guess where we might be.  At first sight, it was easy to guess that Smith was exploring someplace in rural America, or in suburbia, then in the midst of its rapid postwar expansion. Something about that sign and the cheerful '50 Studebaker* convertible suggests the optimism and prosperity that were part of the Fifties...

...and which are reflected in this Studebaker ad from 1951.  But the "Dream Street" photo was part of a wider project, one of Smith's first as a member of the Magnum Photo cooperative.  When Stefan Lorant hired Gene Smith to produce 100 photos celebrating Pittsburgh in its 200th year, he'd expected the project might possibly take 3 weeks.  In the end, Smith spent about two years exploring and taking photographs, producing over 12,000 negatives.  It turns out that "Dream Street", like the photo below, was taken in one of the neighborhoods housing the many African Americans who had fled conditions in the South to work in what was then an industrial powerhouse. The photographer's combination of curiosity, obsessive perfectionism, and fearlessness (he'd been wounded in the head and hand photographing combat in World War II) led him to get close enough to show the power of a steel mill's blast furnace, and to spend time with the inhabitants of the town's forgotten corners as well as its exclusive clubs.  In an attempt to show the true character of a big city, Smith went from Dream Street to Pride Street...

Gene Smith documented a different America than the one we have now.  When Smith took his last Pittsburgh photos in 1955, the Voting Rights Act was ten years in the future.  But labor union membership peaked at about a third of the workforce in the Fifties, and overall income inequality was near its lowest level ever.  In 1955, average CEO pay was about 20 times that of the average worker; by 2022 the Economic Policy Institute found that the average CEO made 344 times that of the average worker. The 1950 Studebaker ad below, touting the streamlined, bullet-nosed Champion design ("free from bulging excess bulk that might squander your gasoline") seems to be in an egalitarian spirit; after all, it asks what a farmer, not a movie star, thinks of their new car...

During the late Forties and early Fifties, Gene Smith's approach to his art brought him into frequent conflict with the editors of Life, but he produced landmark photo essays of ordinary people like "Country Doctor" in 1948.  His pioneering 1951 essay on a black nurse, Maude Callen, serving an impoverished community in rural North Carolina, led to the funding of a foundation serving that community.

What finally happened to the artist who made "Dream Street", and to the company that made the dreaming car?  Smith's project of making an epic visual symphony of the Pittsburgh photos blew his budget and never came to fruition, but he organized some of his best shots into a spread in the 1959 Popular Photography Annual.  Smith's goal of documenting a story in such a complete way that it would change minds was finally met beginning in 1971, when he documented the catastrophe that befell the Japanese town of Minimata as a result of mercury poisoning by the Chisso Company, whose hired thugs beat the photographer so badly that his vision was damaged... 

Some justice resulted from publication of Smith's photos.  In 1974 Minimata survivors won their first lawsuit against the Chisso Company. Smith's definitive book, a pioneer on the environmental justice shelves entitled Minimata, was published the following year.  W. Eugene Smith began a teaching career at the University of Arizona in November 1977, and died from a massive stroke at age 59 in October 1978.  It wasn't until the arrival of a new century that his Pittsburgh Project photos would get a comprehensive viewing in their home city; the Carnegie Museum of Art mounted this show in November 2001.  A book on the Pittsburgh Project, entitled Dream Street, finally appeared last year.*

Studebaker, like W. Eugene Smith, sometimes flirted with bankruptcy, but managed to produce some memorable work that rose to the level of art.  The company's board of directors gave up manufacturing cars in the US after the 1964 model year, despite the best efforts of company president Sherwood Egbert, who wanted to keep going with the new cars his team of  industrial designers had produced. Somehow, though, they'd never managed to make a friendlier-looking car than the Bulletnose...

*Footnote:  A selection of W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh photos entitled "Dream Street" was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023.  A film dramatizing Smith's efforts to document the human cost of years of mercury poisoning by the Chisso Corporation was first shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020.  The film,"Minimata", directed by Andrew Levitas, features Johnny Depp in the role of W. Eugene Smith.  Possibly due to the global pandemic, it was not released in the US until February 2022.

For more details on Dennis Varni's unique Bulletnose Woody hot rod pictured last above, see "Green Streamline Dream", posted here on June 12, 2017. Other posts involving Studebakers include "Forgotten Classic: 1953-'54 Studebaker Starliner---Sleeping Beauty from South Bend" (Feb. 20, 2021), "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie" (Sept. 1, 2015), "Max Hoffman: An Eye for Cars, and the Studebaker Porsche" (May 2, 2016), "Lines of Influence: The Avanti and How It Grew" (Feb.17, 2016), "Lines of Influence Part 2: Avanti Antecedents" (Feb. 18. 2016), "They Don't Build 'Em Like They Used To..." (Feb. 24, 2016) and "Vanished Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress, 1933" (May 31, 2020).  

Photo Credits:

Top:  Magnum Photos & the Heirs of W. Eugene Smith

2nd, 4th & 5th:  Studebaker Corporation

3rd:  Artsy Auctions

6th:  Henry Holt & Company, Publishers

7th:  The University of Chicago Press

Bottom:  the author

Bodied by Zagato Part 4 : Aston Martin

After contracting Italy's Touring Superleggera to design the DB4 saloon (really a coupe) and launching the successful production car in late 1958, David Brown's Aston Martin team began to consider a competition-oriented version of the car to compete with Ferrari's 250GT.  Their first effort was the DB4 GT, still with Touring's DB4 body style, but 5" shorter than the DB4 on a 93" wheelbase, and with covered headlights.  It appeared in fall of 1959, but Aston had another surprise in store.  It was the still-lighter DB4 GT Zagato, with alloy bodywork designed and built by that firm.  It appeared a year later, in 1960 at the London Motor Show.

The shell seemed even more tightly contoured around the drivetrain, cabin and chassis frame than the alloy bodies of the other DB4s.  More curvaceous than other Astons, Ercole Spada's design for Zagato was, in a word, sexier...

As with all hand-built cars, detail differenced abounded. The green Zagato above has a lower nose than the red car, and sliding side windows to save weight.  The original plan was to build 25 of the Zagato-bodied GT, in addition to 75 DB4 GTs.  Most sources say that only 19 were built, with 4 "Sanction II" cars built at the request of Aston chief Victor Gauntlett in 1991, and 2 Sanction III cars by 2000, to use up the chassis numbers for the originally planned production.  Though those later cars offered 4.2 liter engines, the original DB4 GTs all had the 3.7 liter twin-plug version of the twin overhead-cam inline six designed by Tadek Marek.  Standard DB4s made do with a single spark plug per cylinder...

By the time DB4 GT Zagato production ended in 1961, some cars were built without the covered-headlight feature, which was briefly disallowed in the Italian market.  The left-hand drive car below may have been built for a European client...

Those "re-sanctioned" DB4 GT Zagatos weren't the only Zagato-bodied Aston Martins to appear after the original run of lightweight coupes.  A quarter century after the last DB4 GT rolled out of Zagato's shops, Aston Martin resumed working with Zagato by releasing the first of a limited series of Vantage V8 GT Zagatos, about 5 inches shorter than the standard Vantage but on the same 102.8" wheelbase.  Even though the fashion for wedge shapes was fading when the first car appeared in 1986, designer Giuseppe Mittino modeled the new car on the wedge theme, fronted by rectilinear lights flanking a square-rigged version of Aston's traditional grille. The only interruption of the downward slope of the bonnet was the hump that cleared the Weber carbs on the 430 hp, 5.3 liter engine.  The greenhouse was airy, with then-fashionable inset "toll-booth" windows and flush glazing.

52 of the coupes were built by the time production ended in 1990, right around the time Zagato was preparing to build those Sanction II versions of their DB4 GTZ...

Because the Zagato coupe exceeded Aston's expectations by selling more than the 50 planned, Aston Martin decided to have Zagato build just over 3 dozen Volante convertibles. Visual differences, beyond the soft top, included concealed headlights and a flush, simulated Aston grille with air intake below, and most significant, a flush bonnet without the power bulge, because of fuel injection replacing the Webers...

Things were quiet on the Zagato front for another dozen years, but Ford's acquisition of Jaguar and Aston Martin produced the DB7, originally with chassis based on Jaguar's XJS and using its AJ6 engine design. The car was a success, with 7,000 eventually built, so Aston decided to offer a more exclusive Zagato version.  Styled by Henrik Fisker and Andrea Zagato, the DB7 Zagato version had a shorter wheelbase (100" vs. 102") and was six inches shorter.  A mix of alloy hood, doors and deck, with steel front fenders, made it lighter than the standard DB7. The only engine was the new Vantage V12 developed by Ford.  99 of the coupes found customers in its only year, 2003, with the 100th car going to Aston Martin's museum...

Aston also offered the AR-1 Zagato the same year.  For some reason, the roadster version reverted to the standard 102" wheelbase.  This wasn't to add extra seats; the AR-1 was strictly a 2-seater car.  And the occupants were likely to get wet in a downpour, as there was no convertible top, only a tonneau cover to cover the seats when parked.  Most of the 99 cars built were sold in California and Florida, though one RHD car was built for the home market...

The impractical AR-1 perhaps foreshadowed the growth in the market for what could be called instant collector cars.  Marek Reichman's design for Aston's One-77, which appeared in 2009 and began production (of 77 examples) was one such, but it wasn't a Zagato product.  The V12 Zagato offered by Aston Martin in 2012-13 was also designed by Reichman, but it carried Zagato's "Z" insignia.  The tightly contoured alloy panels, complete with double-bubble roof, were built by Coventry Prototype Panels, which had bought Zagato in 2011.  Though 101 cars were planned, customer cars amounted to 61, plus 2 racers and another 2 prototypes.  So the V12 Zagato was even more exclusive than the One-77.  This was likely a plus for customers, because in this stratospheric price class, exclusivity had become the whole point...

…as Aston Martin may have discovered when it built a whopping 325 of the carbon fiber bodied Vanquish Zagato from 2016 to 2018. The car was offered in coupe, Volante convertible, Speedster and Shooting Brake styles. One investor guide cautioned subscribers that prices had dropped to only 80% of original list because of the number of cars on the resale market. Pretty though, especially at its debut, when the car was posed at Villa d'Este on the Western shore of Lake Como.

*Footnote:  We took a look at Bertone-bodied Aston DB2s in "The Other Arnolts" ( posted 10-15-16) and the Aston Martin DB4GT Bertone and Ferrari 250 SWB Speciale in "Cousins Where They Meet the Eye (12-26-18).  One of two Touring Superleggera-bodied DBS prototype cars is pictured in "Touring Superleggera Part 2" (Oct. 6, 2020).

Photo Credits

Top thru 3rd:  Linda La Fond  

4th & 5th:  the author

6th & 7th:  bringatrailer.com

8th:  girardo.com

9th thru 11th:  wikimedia

Bottom:  jbrcapital.com

Film Review: Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car"----Secrets and Confessions in a Red Saab

A red 1987 Saab 900 Turbo serves as a refuge for Tokyo stage actor and director Yusuke in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's 2022 Oscar-winning "Drive My Car", based upon a short story by Haruki Murakami.  The vintage left-hand drive car (in a RHD country) from an extinct company doesn't seem like such an odd choice when we see Yusuke and his TV screenwriter wife Oto listening to vinyl records on an old turntable, and observe that while driving, Yusuke listens to cassette tapes of Oto reciting dialog to help him learn his lines. The car serves as a kind of confessional, too, as the couple discusses their decision not to have another child after losing a 4-year old daughter to pneumonia...

Director Hamaguchi throws us into the story without bothering with opening credits; these appear over 40 minutes into the film, after we are already drawn into his themes of secrets and loss. The story darkens after Yusuke has a road accident which his doctor diagnoses as a result of glaucoma, and darkens again when he discovers that Oto's connection to a young TV actor named Koshi is more intimate than she has hinted...

If "Drive My Car" is a road movie, it is partly one about regret for roads not taken.  We see Yusuke drive off into the night rather than engage when Oto asks when they can talk, because there is apparently something she needs to tell him.  After driving around listening to his wife's voice on tape, he returns to discover that she has collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage.  She does not recover. Two years later, an emotionally shut-down Yusuke agrees to direct a production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" in Hiroshima.  An unusual aspect of the production is that dialogue will be delivered in any languages the individual cast members speak; the finalists speak Japanese, Korean, English, and sign, with subtitles for the audience.  Another quirk of the program is that the theater company assigns Yusuke a driver, owing to an accident caused by a cast member in a prior production.  The driver turns out to be Misaki, a woman of 24, whose mastery of impassive inscrutability equals that of Yusuke, who is 47.

The selection of Hiroshima and its environs as a location fits Hamaguchi's theme of loss, and recovery from grief, as well as providing some stunning landscapes for the red car to traverse.

One of the reasons the film draws us in easily is that the performances are so unforced and natural that at times we feel like we're watching a documentary.  So natural that it feels like we're intruding when Oto (Reika Kirishima), tells Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) a story she's writing while they make love. The story is about a high school girl who sneaks into the home of her unsuspecting crush to leave personal items in his bedroom.  Later in the film, after he's been cast in "Uncle Vanya", TV actor Koshi (Masaki Okada) tells Yusuke that Oto had told him the same story, and that, unlike Yusuke, he knows the ending.  These secrets are revealed, of course, in the back seat of the confessional red Saab, while the imperturbable Misaki (Toko Miura) drives.

An emotional turning point in the film happens when the theater company manager played by Jin Dae-yeon invites the director and driver to dinner at his home. Yusuke doesn't want to intrude, but he realizes the manager has something important to tell him.  It turns out that he's been keeping a secret too...

It's that Lee Yoo-na (played by Park Yu-rim) who has a lead role in the production, delivered in the Korean version of sign, is actually his wife.  After being welcomed by Lee Yoo-na and the couple's cheerful pooch, Yusuke and Misaki sit down with them to converse and enjoy the food.

This conversation is one of the rare moments when Yusuke cracks a smile.  He reveals that Misaki drives so smoothly and skillfully that "when you drive with her, you forget you're in a car."

It's a moment of levity that prepares the characters for more surprises and revelations which should be shared only in general terms, because "Drive My Car" is a suspense movie as well as a road movie.  One development is that the actor playing Uncle Vanya is arrested by the local police, forcing the theater company managers to tell Yusuke he has only two choices: either to play Uncle Vanya himself as he is so familiar with the part, or to close the production down.  We'll leave  you to guess how that turns out...

...because there's more for the protagonists to process than the possible shutdown of the play. Misaki reveals to Yusuke that she has felt guilt and despair since she escaped from a collapsing house during a landslide, and her mother did not.  They travel to snowy Hokkaido in one of the film's last scenes, to the landslide site, in another moment of emotional reckoning.  This movie about a play threatened with a shutdown, a story within a story, was filmed during the pandemic shutdown, with the snow scenes completed in November 2020.

In the film's final scene, we see Misaki shopping in a Korean supermarket.  She places her groceries in the red Saab, and a canine pal emerges from the back seat for a snuggle.  Some have suggested that this indicates that the protagonists have moved on with their lives, and that Yusuke has given Misaki the car.  But director Hamaguchi has given us clues in previous scenes to decode this one.  The cheerful pooch seems to be the same one that attracted Misaki's attention at dinner with the manager and his wife. Our understanding of how this story ends may hinge on whether this is the same dog.

Having viewed these scenes multiple times, I've decided it is indeed the same pooch.  So my interpretation is that the theater troupe has gone to Korea to put on "Uncle Vanya" there.  The Korean-speaking manager and his wife, a member of the cast, would of course make the trip as well.  And Yusuke, with his deteriorating vision, would want to have his driver along, especially as she'd expressed interest in Korea.  This is a more believable explanation for the "same dog" plot turn, because nobody in their right mind would ever give away this dog... 

Photo Credits:  

All photos are from the film, produced by "Drive My Car" Production Committee, C & I Entertainment, Culture Entertainment, and The Match Factory; distributed by Bitters End.

Edsel Ford Had a Better Idea: The First Lincoln Continental

It's too bad we couldn't find a photo showing a 1936 Lincoln Zephyr towing that shiny aluminum Airstream Clipper* trailer at some airfield with a Douglas DC-3 in the background.  Then you'd have an image showing at least 3 of the design landmarks from 1936.  On the automotive scene, there was also Gordon Buehrig's front-drive Cord 810 the same year, but the price difference meant that Ford sold over 10 times as many of designer John Tjaarda's streamlined Lincoln Zephyr, the new mass-produced alternative to the expensive Model K*, which was still priced at and above the Cord level. The Zephyr, like that Lincoln K, offered standard V12 power, but unlike the 60 degree V in the 414 cubic inch K, it was a 90 degree, 267 cubic inch engine based on the Ford V8. Sales were good, considering there was a Great Depression going on, but fell from nearly 30,000 cars in '37 to just over 19,000 in '38.  Henry Ford's son Edsel thought that a sportier Zephyr with European-inspired lines might create some showroom traffic.  Designer Bob Gregorie came up with this prototype in 1939... 

Beyond rear fenders with a bit less slope to their teardrop profile, Edsel's prototype went into production as the 1940 Lincoln Continental.  The photo below shows two details specific to that first model year: the red teardrop-shaped Zephyr badge, and thin vertical bars that overlap the trim surrounding the twin grille openings.  Also, the 1940 Continentals had conventional door handles as shown above; these were replaced by push buttons in 1941.

The 1941 ad below highlights the fleet appearance of unadorned, streamlined forms on the Continental coupe, which was produced in larger numbers than the cabriolet. But production was limited for the two years that preceded misguided efforts to decorate the car and make it look more massive.  In 1940, Lincoln produced 350 coupes and 54 cabriolets.  For 1941 coupe production rose to 850, and there were 400 cabrios.

The Zephyr series received a still more fluid form for 1938, and this '41 coupe model shows off smooth curves and a long deck. There was also a 4 door sedan (the black car in the background below) and a club coupe with more interior space and a shorter deck. The Zephyrs and Continentals comprised the whole Lincoln line for the 1941 model year; the big Model K had been discontinued the previous year.

Above, the blue Zephyr coupe can be compared with the Continental cabriolet from the same year.  The cars share the same chrome-outlined grille detail simplified from the overlapping bars of '40, and the same headlights, parking lights and bumpers.  But Zephyrs didn't get the Continental's push-button exterior door handles until 1942, when production was cut short by the onset of war. That year, a restyle sacrificed the simplicity and grace of the Continental, so we're concentrating on the '40 and '41 cars. 

Zephyr V12 displacement was increased to 292 cubic inches for '40 and '41; the engine was bored out slightly to 305 cubic inches for 1942, but returned to 292 for postwar cars.  Problems with early versions of the Zephyr V12 included overheating caused by small cooling passages, with resulting bore warpage and ring wear. 1948 was the last model year for the V12 Continental, and for any Continental until the Mark II showed up for 1956. The interior of the yellow cabriolet shows off materials typical for upper crust cars of the Forties: simulated wood on the dash, brass-colored trim around the instruments, bakelite switches, and leather seats.  Unlike Fords from these years, the Continental and Zephyr features a one-piece windshield... 

Edsel Ford, the only child of the cranky and eccentric company founder Henry, could not have been aware that his automotive brainchild would become a fixture in stark postwar detective and crime stories (below, Humphrey Bogart takes Lizabeth Scott for a drive in 1947's Dead Reckoning), because he died during that war, in spring 1943. He never saw the heavier-looking, over-chromed postwar version of his favorite car, though the 1942 model was a preview.  And he never had any inkling of the car that would be named after him; a mostly overdecorated land yacht with a horse-collar grille would appear over 14 years after his passing.

*Footnote:  

We featured a history of the Lincoln K Series in "Forgotten Classic:  Lincoln Model K, Not Your Average K-Car", posted Nov. 9, 2017. The Airstream Clipper was featured with other pioneering streamliners in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile:  Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.  And we looked at the 2nd great Continental design, Elwood Engel's 1961, in "When the Sixties Really Began: 1961 Lincoln Continental", posted Nov. 18, 2015.

Photo Credits

Top:  archiveboston.com

2nd:  The Henry Ford (museum)

3rd & 8th:  Volo Automotive Museum

4th:  Ford Motor Company

5th thru 7th:  the author

Bottom:  Columbia Pictures