Brand Banishment

General Motors has been prominent in the news lately, most recently regarding the bankruptcy of Delphi Automotive Systems, the recently-independent successor to the United Motors parts subsidiary. The troubles of this emancipated child are only one symptom of a larger corporate struggle. It's been popular lately for pundits to call The General a "health care company that makes automobiles."

Corporate cutoffs are nothing new at GM. In December 2000 it was announced that Oldsmobile, GM's longest-lived marque and a founding division of the company, was being abandoned. Then followed a starvation diet of no new product development. Finally, on April 29, 2004, the last Oldsmobile, an Alero sedan, came down the line.

Things had long seemed oh, so promising. Ransom Olds' popular curved dash model propelled the marque to first place in sales until overtaken by Ford in 1906, and it remained in the nation's mind in song for years afterwards. Even during the rather unremarkable 1930s, Oldsmobile trundled along in 5th to 7th place in the industry.

Things picked up in 1940, when Olds became GM's "idea car," introducing Hydra-Matic, the first successful fully-automatic gearbox (thanx to The Auto Channel). Engineering continued apace with the Rocket short-stroke ohv engine for 1949, making Oldsmobile the NASCAR champ for three seasons. "Jetfire" turbocharging of the intermediate aluminum V8 for 1962-3 foretold the rise of turbos in the 1980s, and the daring Toronado of 1966 proved once and for all that front wheel drive was viable with big engines. (It must be said that the concept for the drive package did not originate at GM. It was patented by Frederick Hooven, an engineer under contract to Ford Motor Company, and was intended for the 1961-63 "cigar-shaped" Thunderbirds. Brock Yates says GM licensed the Hooven/Ford patent for the Toro and similarly-configured Cadillac Eldorado of 1967.)

Despite setbacks like the baroquely-styled 1958 models and the ill-conceived diesel conversion of gasoline V8s to campaign the energy-challenged late '70s, Olds enjoyed halcyon days in which the Cutlass became the best-selling single vehicle model in the United States. Even after it was deposed by the Ford F-150 in 1982, the front-drive Cutlass Ciera copped the title for passenger cars. Alas, all good things come to an end, and the division seemed to lose heart. When the distinctive Aurora was introduced for 1995 it was bereft of any external Oldsmobile badge. The rest is history.

Many pundits feel that further brand-letting is in the cards. Buick and Pontiac are alternately rumored to be the next kids to be put on the block. My friend Paul Lashbrook thinks GM may cut the catalog back to simply Chevrolet and Cadillac. He may be right.

The Life of Riley

I remember distinctly my first meeting with a Riley. It was an RMD drophead coupe like this one, and it belonged to cartoonist Robert Osborn, a friend of my parents. The illustrator of, inter alia, John Keats' 1958 book The Insolent Chariots, which excoriated the excesses of 1950s Detroit, Osborn might seem an unlikely Riley owner. He bought the car, however, perhaps on impulse, from a New York Times classified around 1959, and drove it for the rest of his nine-decade life.

Don Irving's Riley RMD is just like Osborn's, only it's been fully restored. The RM-series Rileys are my favorites, because they combine traditional British lines with an emergent streamlining, in the way of that other under-appreciated car, the MG TF. Round and rectangular gauges in a varnished wood dashboard remind one of an old Atwater Kent radio. Ugly sister of the RMD was the RMC roadster, a three-seater car with an enormous, ungainly trunk. Intended to appeal to Americans, it found its best market in Australia, and even that was disappointing.

Victor Riley of Coventry was a bicycle manufacturer turned automaker, which enabled him to describe his automobiles "As Old as the Industry; As Modern as the Hour." Intially they looked like bicycles, but by the 1930s Rileys were among the most stylish of cars, the Kestrel sedans of 1934-38 being a case in point. Alongside the RMC and RMD open cars, Riley built both 1.5-liter and 2.5-liter saloons, the RMA/RME amd RMB/RMF series, respectively. Don also has an RMF, which, when I saw it, was completing restoration. The Riley engine is sometimes mistakenly described as double overhead cam. It has two camshafts, but they are located high in the block and work the valves with short pushrods.

The last "real Riley" is usually considered the 1953-57 Pathfinder, which, although it shares a body with the Wolseley 6/90, has a real Riley engine. Victor Riley was not a good businessman, and his company was absorbed into the Nuffield Organisation (William Morris's empire) in 1938. Morris, of course, joined with Austin to form the British Motor Corporation in 1952, and Riley cars could not escape becoming badge-egineered corporate clones. The One Point Five of 1957-65 was a Morris Oxford/Wolseley knock-off, and a larger, six-cylinder 2.6 borrowed the MG ZA Magnette body shell, a la Wolseley 6/90. With the finned "Farina" body shell of 1959 came the Riley 4/68, later (with a larger, 1,622 cc version of the BMC "B" series engine) the 4/72. The 4/72 continued in production until the Riley badge was retired in 1969; while not an exciting car it did retain a wooden dash, albeit with all round instruments. Perhaps the rarest Riley is the Riviera, a modified 4/72 created by Wessex Motors of Salisbury, Wiltshire. Dressed up with wire wheels and bonnett-mounted driving lights, the Riviera had subtly-bobbed tail fins. Amazingly, this exact car survives. Almost comic among the recent Rileys were the Elf, an upmarket Mini, and the revived Kestrel, a version of the 1100 and 1300 BMC siblings.

If you crave more information about Rileys, there's plenty on Rob's Riley Page. I'll leave the last word about Riley to Robert Osborn. In his 1982 autobiography he wrote that his RMD had lines that "only a capable artist could have devised."

Pilgrimage to Chocolatown

In 1905, Milton Hershey built a chocolate factory in south central Pennsylvania. Over the next few years he built a model town around it, and began construction of an amusement park. Fifty years later, the newly-chartered Hershey Region of the Antique Automobile Club of America held their first National Fall Meet at Hershey. It rained, and a quarter of the cars left.

Weather has been a regular curse of the Hershey meet ever since, although in good years the autumnal sun of Indian summer makes browsing the 10,000 vendor spaces and 1,500+ car auto show an aficionado's delight. If Beaulieu Autojumble is just what the doctor ordered, Hershey is an overdose.

The fiftieth anniversary Hershey Region meet (there was one earlier Hershey event hosted by another region) was true to tradition, with diluvian results. Before the rains came, however, there were two warm, partly cloudy days, sufficient to see at least a majority of the wares on sale. Those who came looking for cars could have chosen a nearly-original 1929 Cadillac Fleetwood cabriolet, a Franklin touring car, a Crosley Hotshot, a "heart-front" Brewster Ford, or a '40 Buick phaeton. Plymouth fanciers would have been too late for this '33 sedan, "SOLD" by the time we got there. Milk route followers liked this Divco, and project participants grooved on a 1915 Saxon chassis. For liliputians there were both an American Austin and a Bantam.

Probably the majority of Hersheygoers were looking for parts. For them there were trunks, hub caps, automobilia, engine blocks, even radio city. Some vendors were eclectic, others remarkably specific. While some vendors boasted of their years of attendance, buyers came with multiple generations. For 50 bucks you could have bought a 1924 Cad rad, but why? No part of it seemed usable.

The rains started early Friday morning. In past years, the whole meet would quickly turn to mud, but now much of the area is paved, and fewer than half the fields require assisted extrication. As the precipitation became more earnest, huddled masses took shelter. Some, like the Society of Automotive Historians, packed up early, retiring president Joe Freeman and Benz Award chairman Don Keefe appropriating table cloths for rain gear.

Friday evening gave welcome respite at the SAH awards banquet, where The Stanley Steamer: America's Legendary Steam Car received the prestigious Cugnot Award for the best book of 2004 in the field of automotive history.

By Saturday morning, however, the skies were still falling, with no relief promised for a week. I reluctantly hitched up my hacienda by dawn's early light and began my homeward trek.

Say When

Not so long ago we pondered this timbered Mopar. In 1946, Chrysler printed literature for five wood-bodied cars, but put only two of them, the Town & Country convertible and the Town and Country sedan, into production. According to author and historian Richard Langworth, seven "Club Coupes," which were really an early manifestation of the hardtop convertible, were built, and a single "Brougham," a two-door sedan. The "Roadster" style, according to Chrysler designers interviewed by Langworth, existed as artwork only.

Thus we wondered who built this roadster, sold at auction in Phoenix, and how and when. The answer arrived from CarPort visitors within days. Dave Duricy, resourceful proprietor of DeSotoland, sent several pertinent links. RM Auctions, which sold the roadster for $143,000 in 2002, described the car as built from a Windsor sedan (sic) by the late Town and Country collector Lloyd Mayes (1933-2003). The project took several years. The car was accurately described in the auction catalog, so the tire kickers that told Fred Summers it was one of three originals were either spinning yarns or perhaps confusing it with the brougham. In any case, thanks to Dave's web-crawling skills we now know who and how, though not precisely when.

Langworth notes that the three-passenger roadster did eventually see production, but not as a Chrysler and not with a wood body. Instead, the concept became the Dodge Wayfarer roadster, built from 1949 to 1951. The reasons for this undoubtedly involved cost. The Town & Country convertible was the most expensive non-Imperial Chrysler from 1946-48. Mopar product planners probably figured out that a premium three-passenger ragtop would not sell well. They were right. The three-passenger roadster didn't sell terribly well as a Dodge either, where it was near the bottom of the price list. Only 9,325 were made in three years (though slightly more, truth to tell, than the Town & Country sedan - 7,975 - or convertible - 8,569 - from 1946 to 1948).

Windows started this thread, and with windows we'll finish it. The Dodge Wayfarer roadster, as introduced, didn't have side windows - side curtains provided the only weather protection. Within months, vent wings and roll-up windows had been added to the roadster's doors - at no extra cost. Would the Chrysler roadster have had windows? The illustrations show a chrome window frame, so the answer is undoubtedly "yes."

Clever CarPorters are invited to tell us the next window-less American roadster, of any seating capacity, introduced after the Dodge Wayfarer.