1939 Studebaker coupe express
 

I have been daydreaming about one of these lovelies. They are built on the passenger car frame with the same doghouse. It has one of the most graceful pickup beds ever and it has factory independent front suspension.;)

Can someone instruct how to make this picture larger, please?

To make it show up bigger here or to reproduce into an inspiration poster of sorts?

For here, if you scroll over the pic on Google Images, for example: right click and select "Copy Image Location" then come here, click the Insert Image icon (yellow mountain scene?), right click and select "Paste" and you get this:

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/i...zI1jfxfmrj0i3z

Beautiful design to my eyes Tom. I still like the hudson model very much as well. Perhaps the survival rate of the hudson model was better or they built more of them.. I base this only on seeing a few of the hudsons but never the studebaker varient.

This studebaker kind of has simularities to the 39-40 ford era in frontal design. Ford was running so strong in the marketplace back then it is understandable though.

I owned a 1939 ford two door sedan from the far north of Canada. Reflector headiights and all. It never left the town it was delivered to until the cars owners brought it south and sold it to me. There were no roads at all out of that northern town.

For those that never drove simular cars or they were well before their time. Between the exterior running boards and the body tapering towards the front. The front seat was not overly wide inside. By todays 1/2 ton standards the cubic feet of internal volume amount in the cab was perhaps little more than half. It was cozy by my definition. One slightly unusual to me design component is the laid back windshield for the times on this model.

http://imageshack.us/a/img850/5697/studebaker.jpg


..........lost a bit of resolution in upsizing it............

I found a bigger original on Google images.

http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/...1&d=1351001957

Life and death of a San Francisco 1939 Studebaker
 

My dad's first car was a 1939 Studebaker Commander. He was courting my mother who lived across the bay in Mill Valley from his home in San Francisco. He got a left over 1939 when the 1940's came out. The dealer was Ansel Schloss Studebaker in SF and the salesman took him out to Ocean Beach and taught him how to drive it.

It cost $1,000 brand new!

He'd been taking the ferry boat and train across the SF bay, to come to my mother's place in Marin County (where they had met on a Sierra Club hike on Mt. Tamalpais) for their dates.

Then one day he showed up one day in "this big new fancy shiny car" my mom told me one day.


My mother used to drive me my brother and our dog "Brownie" (a cocker spaniel/irish setter) to the beach in that car when we were kids. I remember the wood dash and mohair seats in it.

Finally my dad bought a new 1954 Ford Ranch Wagon and the Studebaker was only used to drive to the bus stop down the hill where he would walk to the bus stop and take the old "gray dog" to work in SF where he was a customer service engineer for IBM, the only job he ever had in his life....fixing the primitive IBM computers when they broke down.

Finally it was time for the Studebaker to go...in 1959.

He made arrangements to sell it for $20 to a 16 year old kid, but got furious and backed out when he learned the kid's father had NOT given his son permission to own a car.

Soon after that, he was driving it to Mill Valley to visit my grandmother over the old Mill Valley Grade from Corte Madera, when it failed.

He gave it away to the tow truck driver instead of paying him!

It had 55,000 miles on it - and I was 11 years old, too young to get it.:(


~~~~

I miss it. I miss my dad so much more, he died 6 years ago. My mother died just 10 days later of a broken heart. Afte 64 happy years of marriage.

~~~~

As I recall, there were 4 Studebaker models back in the late 1930's:

Going from the cheapest to the most luxurious and expensive:


The "Dictator" (dropped when Hitler and Mussolini became famous and nortorious)

The "Champion"

The "Commander"

The "President"

I don't think I can buy it for $1000.;)

The studie trucks had the laid back windshield up until the late fifties when they switched to the lark cab. I believe it was designed by the Raymond Lowey studio.

You probably could ---if the currency were in Gold Certificates from the 1930's

1937-1939 ranks ( for me) as one of the best eras of US car design, ( along with 1963-1965).
Very few ugly cars in that period.

Lincoln and LaSalle produced some beautiful cars in that period.

There is also an element of the lincon continental design of that perios present in the front end of that studebaker come to think about it. The grill is wide like some of them where.

I also did not realise that Raymond Lowery was doing design work for studebaker that early. The local studebaker dealer in my present area was very active and sold a lot of product locally before I moved here.

About the only studebaker left here is the closed dealerships service truck perhaps a 1 1/2 to three ton studebaker truck in good restored condition. A 1954-55 vintage or close to it.

I had a chance to pick up an early dictator sedan with wooden artillary wheels that needed a fairly minor restoration. He wanted too much even twenty five years ago for it.

Some of the best design work in my opinion was done in the middle depression years. They really pulled it all together to sell the cars in that period.

There were several brands back then that eventually became orphan cars. Almost all brands that had only a very small portion of the domestic market to themselves got catagorized as such. Studebaker, Hudson, Willys,Fraser, Henry J to quote some. Plus a few others that do not come instantly to mind.

Studebaker pushed high fuel milage when fuel was very cheap. I am not really sure of what eventually killed studebaker. Economy of scale production wise may have eventually sealed their fate though.

Our family had two willys cars and one willys station wagon. Only one Hudson over the years though. The hudson was a 46 or 47 and was quality built but had an odd body design compared to the majority of brands. This was our families extent of orphan cars owned.

The three companies Peerless, Pierce arrow, and Packard that were generally creditied with building the best cars in reasonable numbers at one time. Although not cheap to buy all failed over time. They just failed to produce cheaper cars for the masses when they perhaps should have.

I think economy of scale is about right. My dad used to say that GM could put them out of business any time they wanted to as they owned so many of the companies that made parts for stude such as diffs and trannys.

barry,
I would argue that Packard, did, indeed, build lower prices cars for the masses. Their problem was that there was not enough difference between a 110, or a 120 and the Senior Packards--at least visually--they cars were very similar--and they all carried the Packard name. Packard might have done better if they had named their lower-priced lines something different--like Cadillac and LaSalle.
After the war, Packard was slow to market an automatic trans and and an OHV V8 engine.

I have read that Packard lost image because of building the junior lines. They looked very similar and the large difference in size is only evident when they sit side by side. The large cars must be nearly twice as heavy.

Cadillac's strategy with the lasalle seemed to work. The first LaSalles after the cadillac buyout were essentially Oldsmobiles with caddy grills, straight eight and all IIRC. They soon switched over to Caddy v8's.

It is very similar to the fords, mercury and Lincolns about the same era. All handsome cars.