House of LeBaron

Howard "Dutch" Darrin, no small contributor to the art of custom coachbuilding himself, praised Thomas L. Hibbard, co-founder of LeBaron, Carrossiers as "the pioneer in the custom-body revolution." To be fair, however, Dutch should have given part of the credit to LeBaron's other founding partner, Raymond H. Dietrich.

Hibbard and Dietrich met in 1920, while working as draftsmen for Brewster & Company in Long Island City. In those days Brewster manufactured both custom coachwork and complete luxury automobiles. However, Tom and Ray felt stifled by the tyrannical and conservative William H. Brewster. They had been educated in art and design; and they bristled at making body drawings for other designers.

So they approached Grover C. Parvis, the New York Packard agent for custom bodies, about freelancing a limousine or two. Somehow, Brewster found out. He fired Dietrich; Hibbard quit. And so the two young men found themselves freelancing full-time a little sooner than they had planned.

Fortunately, Hibbard and Dietrich understood the importance of building an impressive image as well as a quality product. Finding their own surnames a bit drab, the appropriated someone else's. Hibbard's father knew an architect named LeBaron, which sounded expensively French, especially when followed by Carrossiers. Image also guided their search for a location; they rented offices at Two Columbus Circle partly because they liked the sound of the address.

They hired an office manager, a fresh-out-of-Dartmouth grad named Ralph Roberts and for a while, the three of them were LeBaron. They couldn't build bodies themselves, so they survived by selling drawings to companies that could. At that time, the custom body trade depended largely on bulky, upright limousines designed to maximize interior room, while sporting cars wore very little bodywork at all. So Tom and Ray drew elegant, flowing sports cars; and closed cars that sacrificed a little interior space for a more low-slung and racy line.

Their strategy worked. By 1921, LeBaron had sold illustrations to half a dozen established New York coachbuilders, as well as complete working drawings to Parvis. In 1922, they hired a watercolor artist named Roland L. Stickney, and skillfully placed self-promoting articles in fashionable magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair. Edsel Ford noticed their work, and ordered body designs for Lincoln. And soon Hibbard and Dietrich were sketching bodied for nearly half of all the European chassis imported through New York. (It was LeBaron that designed, and later built, the "Ostruk" bodies for Minerva's U.S. distributor.)

They established LeBaron so firmly, in fact, that the company thrived long after its founders had departed. Hibbard met Darrin in 1923, and they sailed to Paris to investigate the feasibility of building LeBaron bodies in Europe. But once over there, they decided to cut ties with New York and set up their own coachbuilding firm. Ray accepted his partner's resignation cordially, and even suggested that the new firm of Hibbard & Darrin might handle LeBaron's overseas business.

Dietrich himself stayed a little longer long enough to engineer a friendly merger with the Bridgeport Body Company in Connecticut in 1924. At last, LeBaron could build what it designed. And the New England location, far from the curious eyes of Detroit and New York, helped secure orders from Ford and Packard for secret prototypes and show cars. But Edsel wanted Dietrich in Detroit, and in 1925 he arranged for the Murray Corporation, which supplied production bodies for Lincoln, to finance Dietrich as an independent design consultant. Ray sold his LeBaron stock to office manager Roberts who, as the new majority stockholder, then sold out to the Briggs Manufacturing Company in early 1928.

For a while, LeBaron maintained a New York Office, now at 728 Fifth Avenue, to cater to the exclusive carriage trade. Roberts remained in charge there and, under his aegis, LeBaron expanded into aircraft, consulting on interior designs and color schemes for Fairchild. On the automotive side, demand for one-off custom bodies grew through 1928 and '29.

Of course conventional sedans, town cars, and landaulets accounted for much of LeBaron's business, but the designers tried to grace even these inherently conservative styles with a sporty, low-to-the-ground feeling. As a design signature, LeBaron originated a raised, pennant-shaped panel on top of the hood and cowl usually painted a contrasting color that observers quickly dubbed the LeBaron Sweep." But Bridgeport dropped the distinctive hood just as quickly, once Fleetwood, Auburn, and others began to imitate it.

More enduring LeBaron innovations include rear-hinged doors whose leading edges follow the slope of the windshield (conceived to aid entry and exit, but they looked great, too) and convertible tops that fold flat behind the seats.

With Briggs' backing, LeBaron moved the Bridgeport operation to a newer and larger building. There, carpenters framed the bodies in seasoned wood, braced by manganese castings. Metalworkers hand-hammered the aluminum body panels. It was painstaking work, but with some 100 employees, the Bridgeport plant produced around 200 custom bodies per year or nearly one every working day.

But the depression suddenly ended LeBaron's full-custom operations; both the Fifth Avenue office and the Bridgeport factory closed at the end of 1930.

Roberts moved to Detroit, where Briggs had set up the new "LeBaron-Detroit Company" on Meldrum Avenue to build "semi-custom" bodies generally in runs of five to twenty for Lincoln, Packard, Chrysler, Stutz, Graham-Paige, and others.

LeBaron-Detroit also supplied untrimmed "bodies-in-white" for standard production model from Stutz, Marmon and Pierce-Arrow. A separat operation, called LeBaron Studios, consulted on Briggs' mass-produced bodies. LeBaron, in fact, designed all of the open bodies for the Ford Model A, and most of the new body style for the Ford V8 in 1933. Both the semi-custom and mass-market operations benefited from the resulting exchange of ideas, and many talented Briggs designers including Hugh Galt, Phil Wright, and Jack Wilson moved up to LeBaron.

One car to embody the grace and elegance of LeBaron was the 1934 Packard II OB Sport Phaeton, which represented a radical new direction for both Packard and LeBaron. Its torpedo fenders and fluid lines reflect the ideas of Packard's young design chief, Ed Macauley while its long, long hood, which sweeps back over the cowl to create the illusion of even greater length, has been attributed to Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, who had joined Packard as a design consultant in 1932.

With its 147-inch wheelbase, the 1108 was the largest and most expensive chassis offered by Packard that year. A 7.3-liter V12, producing 160bhp at 3200 rpm, could haul the 5130-pound car from 0 to 60 mph in about 20.4 seconds and that was pretty good in those days. Packard built only 960 12-cylinder cars in 1934, and only five of those carried the LeBaron Sport Phaeton body.

Four of the five survive. This one, according to current owners Ray and Lou Bowersox, was de Sakhnoffsky's personal car. Pioneer television personality Herb Shriner restored it in the Fifties, and used it occasionally for cross-country travel. After his untimely death in the '70s, the Packard passed through several hands before the Bowersox snapped it up in 1986. It had been re-restored by Pete Rossi of Chicago, and Ray first spotted it in 1984, at a Classic Car Club of America tour in Nova Scotia.

The aerodynamic form of the Packard Sport Phaeton foreshadowed Briggs' Lincoln-Zephyr and LeBaron's own Chrysler Thunderbolt and Newport. By the mid-Thirties, however, demand for even semi-customs had faded, and LeBaron relied increasingly on modified Briggs Stampings in place of its own hand-tooled sheet metal.

Then the Second World War shut LeBaron down forever. Briggs management turned in all of the coachbuilder's records, drawings, and photographs for wartime recycling. And after the hostilities, Briggs sadly but perhaps wisely absorbed the LeBaron Studios into its own design operation.

Chrysler bought Briggs in 1953, and in 1957 revived the LeBaron name for top-of-the-line Imperial outfitted with somber, monochrome color schemes. It was a curiously conservative conveyance for a nameplate once associated with innovative, aerodynamic, and sporting creations.

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