Photos from the Hemmings archives.
Even though they’ve been officially retired for nearly 60 years, the jet-age Futurliners get plenty of attention these days, whether due to their restorations, official recognition, or for blockbuster sales. Rightly so: They tower over pretty much anything else on the road short of a big rig and look like a Buck Rogers space dream. But for all the attention they receive, their just as radical predecessors get almost none.
In the mid-1930s, with the Depression wearing on many Americans and rural areas still largely unexposed to scientific and technological advances, Charles Kettering decided to take the myriad exhibits that GM displayed at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair on the road. While his idea was sometimes referred to as the Caravan of Progress, pretty much every photo and record we’ve come across – including early design sketches for the vehicles that would carry this traveling show – used the name Parade of Progress.
Those vehicles would surely stand out on their cross-country road trip, forming a caravan that stretched for two miles down the road. Nine GMC and Chevrolet tractor-trailers would haul gear, tents, generators, and pretty much everything needed to put on the show. A command car was built out of a stretched 185-inch-wheelbase 1936 Chevrolet that implemented the relatively new technology of in-car air conditioning. A brand-new example of each of the six GM brands (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, La Salle, and Cadillac) joined the caravan every 2,000 miles. And leading the show, eight giant red-and-white purpose-built vans.
Dubbed Streamliners, the vehicles looked much like moving vans of the period, sporting massive all-steel domed roofs. GM’s Fisher Body Fleetwood plant in Detroit got the task of building the eight 23-foot Streamliners on 223-inch-wheelbase truck chassis powered by GMC-built straight-six gasoline engines (none of the sources we consulted identified the engines’ displacement, though in his history of GMC, Donald Meyer supposed it was 239 cubic inches). GM’s designers specified that six of the Streamliners – in two groups of three – join via canvas awnings so that Parade of Progress visitors could tour the displays within. A seventh Streamliner incorporated a stage, which the massive 1,200-seat silver canvas tent enclosed for the 45-minute shows; and the eighth Streamliner provided support.
Kettering specified that the Parade of Progress make its way to smaller cities across America, where it would showcase GM and Frigidaire products and awe visitors with demonstrations of induction heat, spectroscopes, and other emerging technologies. Attendance at the five-day shows often exceeded the population of some of the towns the Parade stopped in. Yet it also visited larger cities – notably New York City for the 1939 World’s Fair – and other countries, including Mexico and Cuba.
The Streamliner-led Parade of Progress lasted three years, until Kettering and GM decided to update the exhibits, make the whole spectacle larger, and replace the Streamliners with the dozen Futurliners in their original 1940 configurations. As little as we know about what happened to the Futurliners after GM decided to dispose of them in 1956, we know even less about the fates of the eight Streamliners.
We’ve only ever come across one post-Parade mention of the Streamliners, in Fred Crismon’s U.S. Military Wheeled Vehicles , which notes that the above Streamliner, photographed in 1941 at Fort Holabird, had been purchased by an unspecified Georgia community and donated to the Army which converted it into a mobile stage “for use in putting on USO-type shows at Army camps.”
What ultimately happened to it and the other seven Streamliners at this point is anybody’s guess. A lot of metal went into the Streamliners, and they likely racked up plenty of miles in their three-year tour, so it’s conceivable they were all scrapped. However, as we see can infer from the Fort Holabird Army Streamliner, GM tried to find buyers for the Streamliners, so it’s also conceivable some were repurposed, perhaps as moving vans or motorhomes, or possibly rebodied with stock GMC cabs. It’s unlikely, but perhaps one or two might still be out there, a half-rusted away reminder of a time when giants rolled the highways.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1Bdgk4E
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