South Bend Studebaker museum (#0108)

In the South in my youth of the 1950’s and 1960’s, just about everyone drove Ford or GM products, with a few Chrysler people. My parents were always running against the norm, driving American Motors, the few foreign makes that were around in those days, a couple of Kaisers (my favorite), and my brothers continued that tradition by buying used Studebakers – one of my first cars in high school was a Studebaker. With that family tradition, and hearing that there was a major Studebaker museum in South Bend, I had to visit. The exhibit was quite good and I learned a lot -- what follows is just a sprinkle of what I found interesting.

…..

For some reason I had assumed that car manufacturers started out as that, car manufacturers – as tinkerers who figured out had to make an auto, and grew from there. It was rather surprising in the museum to realize how stupid my notion had been. I had somehow never realized that horse-drawn wagons had actually been mass-produced and that there were major manufacturers with coast-to-coast dealerships and even sales overseas. As indicated in this picture, Studebaker cars weren’t some new thing basically started from scratch, but actually a development from an existing, and very well-developed business of horse-drawn carriages. Even as I write this, I’m still amazed at my lack of knowledge of industry prior to autos.