Forgotten Classic: Ghia's 1954 Plymouth Explorer Show Car

This distinctive coupe at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA may look oddly familiar, if you're the kind of person who goes to car shows.  That's because even though the 1954 Plymouth Explorer is a unique specimen, it combines themes and details from other designs by Ghia's Luigi Segre, and by Chrysler's Virgil Exner...

There's the strong horizontal emphasis, for example, with the metal molding linking the wheels revealing a piece of ivory-colored trim that emerges from something like an air vent.  This detail appeared on Ghia's "Supersonic" bodies on Fiat V8 chassis from the previous year.  The glassy greenhouse also appeared on the Supersonics, and predicted Ghia's work on the VW Karmann Ghia the next year.  The front fender shapes had appeared on the Ghia-bodied Dodge FIre Arrow I in 1953, and would be repeated on Fire Arrows II through IV, and on the Chrysler-powered Dual-Ghias* that would see limited production in 1957 and '58.

The rear view gives some idea of how Segre's ideas may have influenced Exner's Forward Look for the 1955 Chrysler line. It's clean and glassy, with flowing fender forms and subtle haunches over the rear wheels. No fins yet; restrained fins had already appeared on the Supersonics, but Exner would wait until '56 to graft bigger ones onto his Forward Look.  The only impracticality here is that the exhaust pipes exit through the lower openings in those chrome tail light bezels. 

The dash design, with its individual round bezels molded into the surface ahead of the wood-rimmed wheel, would find echoes in instrument panels of the Sixties and beyond.  Bucket seats flank a console that predicted Sixties Detroit products as well. The column shift connects to a semi-automatic 3 speed, and power is provided by the larger of two inline sixes offered by Plymouth in '54, with 110 hp from 230 cubic inches...

Chrysler sent the Explorer back to Europe after 18 months of touring the US show circuit, and the car wound up in Holland eventually, painted gold and with a Jaguar engine transplant.  Rescued in the Eighties by collector Joe Bortz, it was traded to another collector, restored to its original color scheme and drivetrain, and is now displayed at the Petersen near a color rendering from Exner's Big Fin Forward Look.  The front end is perhaps Explorer's most unique element, with a blocky grille whose main shape hints at the later Dual-Ghia, while the big round headlight bezels have an English feel...  

After this concept car, Chrysler would abandon the Explorer name, leaving Ford to use it on a wild, doomed, mid-engined show truck in 1973, and finally on their SUV for the 1991 model year.  

Meanwhile, a Plymouth-powered car with Ghia design had gone into something approaching production. This Ghia-bodied Almost Plymouth was the Ghia 450SS from 1966-'67, with svelte 2-seater shell covering a 273 V8 and 4-speed gearbox from Plymouth's Barracuda mounted in a Fiat 2300 chassis.  Unlike the lone Plymouth Explorer, nearly 5 dozen of the 450SS reached customers, but it turned out to be another story of how making sports cars can empty your bank account, and we've told it in an earlier post.*

*Footnote:  Ghia-bodied Chrysler show cars, and the Dual-Ghias, appear in "The Italian Line: Ghia Part 1—International Style", posted here on 10-22-20 and the "The Italian Line: Ghia Part 2---From Custom to Corporate", posted 10-31-20.  Dual-Ghia history is reviewed in more detail in "What Defines a Production Car, and Why Would Anybody Pay $3 Million for One?", from 8-29-15. The unlikely saga of the Ghia 450SS was told in "Foreshadowing Fiat Chrysler: Ghia 450SS", on 3-14-16. 

Photo Credits

Top:  Gogo Heinrich 

Bottom:  The author

All other color photos:  Art Heinrich 

Monochrome photo:  

Ford Overland Explorer:  Ford Motor Company

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 with 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 hardware bits 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 the 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