Michael Lamm’s post on the “Chrysler” Streamliner created quite a response from many Dean’s Garage readers—clippings from Magazines, photos, and even a Jack Armstrong video that featured the car.

The gallery of images is from Geoff Hacker of Forgotten Fiberglass.

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Back in the early 1970s, I edited and co-owned a magazine called Special-Interest Autos. My partners were the principals of Hemmings Motor News.

As SIA editor, I regularly flew from California to Detroit to research articles and gather photos for future issues. In doing that, I’d typically drop by as many Detroit research facilities as time allowed. They usually included three or four libraries at General Motors (GM had 37 active libraries at the time), the Henry Ford Museum archives, the auto history collection of the Detroit Public Library, the AMA library and the Chrysler archives.

In those days, Detroit’s research facilities were open to just about anyone, and visitors were free to roam and browse at will. I could choose photos, and the car companies would nearly always make dupes for free and mail them to my office—very different from today.

On one such trip, I stopped by the Chrysler archives looking for pictures of experimental cars of the 1930s and ’40s. In a file of styling photographs, and I stumbled across a series of 8×10 glossies of a 1936 scale model that looked to me like a Bonneville streamliner. Interesting, I thought, and I tried to find out why this model was built, who made it and what became of it. No one seemed to know.

Then, about a month ago, I happened to be watching a movie called Speed. The movie, released in mid 1936, starred a very young Jimmy Stewart. The plot revolved around his work for a mythical car company. Stewart’s character had invented a new type of carburetor, and to test its performance, the company entered a car in the Indy 500 and also built a streamliner to set speed records at Muroc.

Some of the stock footage in Speed clearly came from Chrysler: scenes of assembly lines and executive offices. Also, most of the passenger cars in the movie were 1936 DeSotos, so apparently Chrysler Corp. had a hand in making this film.

More to the point, the significance of that streamlined scale model finally dawned on me. The clay must have been a study for the shape of the movie streamliner, a car called the “Falcon.” I have no proof, but the similarities between the 1936 Chrysler scale model and the 1936 Falcon are remarkable: the envelope body, the glass canopy and the large, single tailfin.

I’m not sure I’ve actually solved a mystery here, but I’d like to present the evidence as a possible theory. And I’d very much appreciate hearing from anyone who knows more about the connection (or lack thereof) between the Chrysler model and the movie streamliner. –Michael Lamm

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To celebrate Chevrolet’s 100th anniversary, we’d like to focus on the man rather than the car. Louis Chevrolet began developing his namesake automobile in 1911. The Chevrolet brand became an icon and a tremendous success, yet he, Louis, received little profit from it.

Although Louis Chevrolet was much more than a race driver, racing is what made him famous. In 1905, he beat Barney Oldfield and Walter Christie, the two best-known drivers of the day, at New York’s Morris Park in a 90-horsepower Fiat. In the process, Chevrolet set a track record of 68 mph which, in 1905, was like establishing the speed of light. Later that year, he beat Henry Ford and Walter Christie in a one-mile race at Cape May, New Jersey. Those two wins brought Louis Chevrolet instant recognition as one of America’s most skillful and daring race drivers.

It also brought Louis Chevrolet to the attention of William C. Durant, who had just founded General Motors. Durant hired Louis in 1909 to race Buicks, at the same time hiring Louis’s brother, Arthur, to be his personal chauffeur. Over the next two years, Louis piloted Buicks to an impressive list of victories. But because he crashed nearly as often as he won, he had the foresight to invent the rollbar.

In 1910, after Durant lost GM in a stock dispute, Louis Chevrolet began to develop a stylish, upmarket car for Durant’s comeback into the auto industry. That effort ended up being the first Chevrolet, introduced in Jan. 1913. The car boasted a veed radiator, six-cylinder engine, the first gearshift lever in the center of the floor and an emergency brake hidden under the dashboard. The Chevrolet automobile sold 10,000 units in three years (including 3,500 earlier Little models), earning millions for Durant and setting him up to again take control of General Motors. Durant rewarded Louis Chevrolet with $10,000 in Chevrolet stock.

But then Durant decided to bring out a less expensive version of the Chevrolet to compete with Ford’s Model T—a wise move but one that Louis Chevrolet didn’t like. He preferred to see his name on more prestigious cars, so he sold his stock to Durant and walked away. It didn’t take long for Louis to realize his mistake.

Louis Joseph Chevrolet was born on Christmas Day, 1878, the son of a Swiss watchmaker. His father taught him about clocks, watches and things mechanical and also instilled in him a high standard of precision. The family moved to France in 1886 and, as a teenager, Louis became enamored of bicycles. He built several, raced them, and then took a job in a machineshop in 1895.

Legend has it that the next year, American millionaire Cornelius K. Vanderbilt was touring France in his very expensive new car when it broke down. No one could fix it, but young Chevrolet stepped up and got the car running, whereupon Vanderbilt assured Louis that his future lay in the United States.

Louis subsequently became a mechanic for several French automakers, notably Darracq, Hotchkiss, de Dion Bouton and Mors. Mors sent him to Canada in 1899, and from there Louis went on to New York, where he got a chance to drive a Fiat race car. The pairing seemed natural, and Louis Chevrolet divided his time in New York between racing, selling and repairing high-end European cars.

After his father died in France in 1901, Chevrolet began to bring his family to the U.S., including his two brothers, Arthur and Gaston, both of whom joined him in racing. In 1905, Louis married. His wife, Suzanne, gave birth to a son, Charles, in 1906 and another, Alfred, in 1912. In 1915, Louis became an American citizen, but by that time GM and the Chevrolet automobile were in Louis’s past, and he’d moved forward in racing.

In 1914, he began building Frontenac race cars, a name that dominated the Indianapolis 500 for several years. All three Chevrolet brothers entered the Indy 500 in 1916, and Gaston won the race in 1920, only to crash and die six months later in California. Louis also modified a tiny Cornelian cyclecar and drove it in the 1915 Indy 500 but didn’t finish. Frontenac eventually branched out into designing and marketing performance parts for the Model T (Fronty Fords) and others.

That business prospered, but Frontenac lost a fortune trying to develop a passenger car along with Stutz. The Depression hit Louis Chevrolet hard, as did the death of his son, Charles, in 1934. He became a consultant to Chevrolet Division that year but had to leave in 1938 due to a stroke. Louis Chevrolet entered a retirement home in Florida and died on a visit to Detroit in 1941. All his personal papers, engineering drawings, photos, etc., were destroyed in a fire at his sister’s home in New Jersey. Louis and Gaston Chevrolet are buried side by side at the Holy Cross cemetery near Indianapolis.

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Marlowe from ALCHEMYcreative on Vimeo.