Studebaker

~ the obit ~

Five brothers named Studebaker ran a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana from February 1852. They made wagons, and by 1900 they were turning out more than a hundred thousand horse-drawn vehicles a year, which made them the largest wagon builder anywhere. They sold to the Union Army and later to the United States government in both world wars, and that government business is what carried the company through stretches when its own passenger cars did not sell.

Electric cars came in 1902 and gasoline cars in 1904, and Studebaker eventually dropped wagons entirely. It survived receivership in 1933 and came back with the Champion in 1939. Its best years were right after the war, when anybody who could build a car could sell one, and 1950 was the peak at 268,226 vehicles. The Raymond Loewy studio gave it the 1953 Starliner coupe, which is still the Studebaker people put on posters.

Then Ford and General Motors started a price war in 1953 that was aimed at each other and took out the independents instead. Studebaker had the highest labor costs in the business and the smallest tooling budget of anyone still stamping its own bodies. It merged with Packard in 1954 and the combination did not have enough money either. South Bend stopped building cars on 20 December 1963. Hamilton in Ontario kept going for two more years, and the last Studebaker was built there on 16 March 1966.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ wagons first ~

The wagon business is the part that gets left out. Studebaker is the only builder of horse-drawn vehicles that made the jump to automobiles and then stayed a serious car company for sixty years. Everyone else in that trade either stopped at carriages or ended up supplying bodies to somebody who had started later. The South Bend plant that closed in 1963 stood on ground the brothers had bought for a wagon works, and the corporate charter ran continuously from the blacksmith shop to the last Cruiser.

~ the lark years ~

The Lark in 1959 was the last good idea. Studebaker cut the overhangs off a full-size body and sold the result as a compact, at a moment when the Big Three had nothing small in the showroom. It sold over 130,000 in its first year and put $28.6 million of profit on the books, and that was the company's last profitable year in cars.

The window shut almost immediately. Ford brought the Falcon and Chevrolet brought the Corvair for 1960, both backed by budgets Studebaker could not match. The Avanti in 1962 was a fiberglass coupe designed in about six weeks and it got attention, but the supplier could not mold bodies fast enough and only a few thousand were built. By then the board was openly treating cars as one division among several rather than the reason the company existed.

~ south bend, december ~

The decision was announced on 9 December 1963 by executives meeting in New York, and the South Bend line stopped on 20 December. That put roughly 7,000 people out of work three weeks before Christmas, about 8 percent of the area's entire workforce, in a city that had been a Studebaker town for 111 years.

The pension fund was badly underfunded when the plant shut, and the South Bend shortfall became one of the cases that got cited through the following decade in the argument for federal pension insurance. ERISA and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation arrived in 1974, eight years after the last car.

~ the last one off the line ~

Hamilton was a modest plant that had been assembling cars for the Canadian market, and for two years after South Bend it was the entire company. It built Larks and Cruisers with Chevrolet engines, because Studebaker had stopped making its own. On 16 March 1966 the last one came off the line, a V8 Cruiser sedan, and the corporation carried on without cars. It bought Wagner Electric in May 1967 and merged with the Worthington Corporation that November to become Studebaker-Worthington, which Cooper Industries absorbed in 1979. The last car is restored and sits in the museum in South Bend.

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