Maybe this has been posted before? I just happened on it on YouTube. My first thought was I want nearly ANY car or truck in this film.
One of the major filming spots on the video is of an original Studebaker Company based in Los Angeles back then. It must have been a busy day as the guy in the Model A truck has to wait for a lot of cars to drive by, in trying to get out of a parallel parking place in front of the service entrance. “As a teenager Paul G. Hoffman (1891-1974) lived out every boy’s fantasy by becoming a daredevil racecar driver. The son of an inventor, Hoffman was fascinated by the mechanical and he was so taken by these wonderous machines he decided to make the automobile his life. At 20 he made it official, dropping out of college in his native Illinois and coming west to Los Angeles where he got a job as a grease monkey with the local Studebaker distributor.” “By the time he was 34, Hoffman was no longer draining crankcases – he was president of Paul G. Hoffman, Inc., Los Angeles and Orange County’s official Studebaker distributor and a millionaire at that. He would later rise even higher, becoming CEO and Chairman of Studebaker itself from 1935-1948 and again from 1953-1956.” “But there was no denying he was also a great automobile man and by 1920, he had guided the Los Angeles Studebaker franchise to such a success it was able to move into a magnificent new headquarters on what was then automobile row, Figueroa Street, just south of downtown. The headquarters of Paul G. Hoffman, Inc., located at 1250 South Figueroa Street, opened with gala fanfare in June of 1920 and was a landmark at Pico and Fig for the next thirty years until in 1950 it went the way of the Dodo.” Hello, Our dad worked in downtown Los Angeles and we drove on Figueroa Street plenty of times from 1948 to 1984. For us little kids, all the way to adults, it was always a challenge to go to the downtown area of Los Angeles. It was a completely different world. Back then, the buildings were usually concrete and brick. Today, they are ten times taller and made of steel and glass. Some buildings have made the trek to today, others destroyed and made into walls of glass along the city streets. The area is best known today as the L.A. Convention Center which turned into the home of the Lakers Basketball team. For us, it is not the most convenient place to travel. But, for others, it is a part of Los Angeles with a lot of history. Jnaki It is a nice place to visit, (well, sort of…) but, the old saying… I would not want to live there. So, after the camera goes down the same street in the opposite direction, next door to the Studebaker Dealer is a detail shop from the 40’s… using Simoniz ! Note: The last few frames of the old film is the California Ship Building location on Terminal Island. We used to go there or at least park and wonder at the goings on building ships of all kinds. But, we went there in 1946-50. It was within a few miles of our Long Beach homes. And, we had relatives living/working on Terminal Island, across and down the street from the shipbuilding location. By the time we were able to drive by with the whole family, the area was cleaned up quite a bit and the lots were less cluttered and had more open space. By the time my wife and I visited the area many years later, the shipbuilding area was virtually gone. The most prominent thing on that same street leading to the end of the peninsula road was the Terminal Island Federal Prison.
I was there in the '40s but too young to remember stuff like that. However, that's how I fell in love with Model A Fords and the unique sound they made going down the street. We had a '34 (?) Essex, a '30s Graham Paige and a '37 (?) Terraplane nicknamed the Yellow Bucket of Bolts. Things were sure different there 78 years ago.
The Jalopy Journal
