The Story of the Keller
/The immediate post war period saw more than its fair share of entrepreneurial adventures. Many were of the automotive variety. Dozens of carmakers sprouted from 1945 to 1950. They achieved varying degrees of notoriety, but just a hand full ever reached even small scale production. The Keller Motor Company was one of those few. The company’s one and only product offering was a wood boded station wagon called the Super Chief. This little car filled many needs, functional as well as altruistic. It was cheap to buy, economical to operate, and if successful could bring prosperity to a recently downtrodden region. But even with all that going for the Keller, it is hard to find anyone - even among car buffs - who has ever heard of it. Like so many of its post-war cohort, by the close of the decade Keller was gone. Its demise was more literal than most…but more on that later.
Keller Super Chief (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
Like the very first Baby Boomers, the Keller automobile was conceived in World War II’s final months. The aircraft industry of San Diego, California had played a vital role in America’s impending victory. Among the region’s key contributors was Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation - or Convair. Two of the war’s more indispensable workhorses were the Army Air Corps’ B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, and the navy’s PBY Catalina reconnaissance seaplane. Both were built in San Diego by Convair. With peace on the horizon, the production of these and other war machines was winding down. Quite a few of the Convair engineers who had designed and built these complex airplanes were about to find themselves out of a job.
John Leifeld, a former Chrysler man conscripted by Convair during the war years, was one of them. Leifeld had always tinkered with the idea of building a car of his own design. He reasoned that with the explosive release of pent up demand for automobiles about to blow, his time was now. Leifeld’s car would be simple and cheap, both to build and to operate - just the thing to navigate the certainty of post-war shortages with ease. He enrolled several of his buddies, who were also talented engineers and newly unemployed. The tiny roadster they designed had an innovative X-frame tubular chassis and a rear-mounted 25hp engine that was covered by a hood that could open from either side. The car weighed in at 600lbs, and projected to cost $600. Leifeld affectionately referred to it as the Iron Monster.
The “Iron Monster” (www.hansenmechanical.wordpress.com)
Talented engineers are good at designing innovative products, and the Iron Monster was surely that. But when it comes to convincing investors to part the kind of money necessary to make these products a reality, those same engineers are often found lacking. Salesmanship is so often the difference between a good product and a successful one.
Leifeld and his team needed a promoter. They found one in Mr. S.A. Williams. Or rather, he found them. Williams was a small time promotor with a taste for The Deal. As he told the story in a bar one afternoon, at a meeting he’d arranged through Leifeld’s brother, Williams had been making a good living buying up failing restaurants, fixing them up, and then selling them at a profit - A ‘flipper’ before the term was invented. He was involved in other enterprises before that, but those details were a little sketchier. This was understandable. One of the missing bits of his story involved time served in prison on a fraud conviction. That morsel not forthcoming, Williams was able to sell himself to Leifeld as the man to make the Iron Monster a reality. Using mostly other people’s money, Williams was able to bankroll further development of what would now be called the Bobbi-Kar.
The Iron Monster was officially called the Bobbi-Kar, named after S.A. Williams’ young son. It was cute enough to want to tell it a bedtime story (www.hansenmechanical.wordpress.com)
Once they had built a running prototype, Williams really got to work. He was a born publicity hound, as media savvy as a Kardashian. He managed to get all 4 major newsreel producers - the social media of the day - to run pieces on the Bobbi-Kar. Newspapers picked up the story and ran with it. Deposits on both cars and dealer franchises soon came pouring in. By the end of 1945, Williams had raised enough money to lease a shuttered aircraft factory for production space. In fact, it was the very same Convair plant that Leifeld and his team worked at during the war.
In the midst of putting together a $5.5 million IPO for early 1946, the California Commissioner of Corporations began asking questions that Williams didn’t want to answer. Without those answers the IPO was waylaid. Plans for the Bobbi-Kar were put on hold as Williams set off in search of environs more friendly to his way of doing business. And to be elsewhere should state officials come calling with further questions…or warrants.
It was during this absence that San Diego native, George Keller, happened to appear at the empty Bobbi-Kar plant. Keller was a veteran executive at Studebaker, until recently being that storied independent’s V.P. of Sales. “Big George,” as he was known in the industry, was likeable, honest, aggressive and blunt. The last being the likely reason he was no longer at Studebaker. Leifeld liked what Keller had to say and hired him as a consultant to help him refine the Bobbi-Kar and expand the product line.
A new wood bodied station wagon was one of George Keller’s key contributions (www.hansenmechanical.wordpress.com)
Not long after Keller came on board, Leifeld got a telegram from Williams - Pack up the entire San Diego operation onto a railcar and get out here. “Here” was Huntsville, Alabama, at a shuttered Bechtel-McCone Aircraft Corporation factory. It seems Williams had convinced the Alabama Chamber of Commerce that automobile production was just the thing to bring that plant back to life, and get several thousand of its furloughed workers hired back. Months earlier, Williams had established Bobbi-Kar, Inc. with he, not Leifeld, as the sole owner of all assets (Contracts might not have been an engineer’s thing either.) It appeared that if the Bobbi-Kar was going to be built, the team was going to have to pack up and follow Williams to Alabama.
Williams, however, had forgotten to tell his Dixie backers about the difficulties back in California. When the truth did finally arrive - not long after the railcar, in fact – it was found out that Williams was banned from holding office in a publicly traded company. This prompted a fed up George Keller to lead an internal rebellion to oust Williams. It was for the best, even though the best wasn’t very good. With Williams out, financing dried up. Keller and Leifeld were left with 40 employees, a 700,000 sq. ft. factory, and no money to pay for any of it. They lacked even the funds to get home.
That is when a local businessman named Hubert Mitchell came to the rescue.
Mitchell was a man who wore many hats. In addition to operating a roadside diner, a small chain of movie theaters, and a theatrical supply business, he also owned a furniture factory in Huntsville that during the war supplied seats for both scout planes and troop transporters. With not much to scout these days, and no troops in need of transport, Mitchell had found himself with 3,000 unused seats - and the capacity to make a lot more than that. He took an immediate liking to Keller and Leifeld and their automotive dream. And with the little Bobbi-Kar, he thought he might have found a place to put all those seats.
Like S.A. Williams, Hubert Mitchell was a promoter and a wheeler dealer… but without the rap sheet. Back in the 1930s, he claimed to have found the famous outlaw Jesse James - thought to be long dead – indeed alive in an Alabama jail and now ninety years old. Mitchell secured the man’s release, and booked him on a promotional tour throughout the South. Also like Williams, Mitchell saw the Bobbi-Kar as his ticket to the big time. The difference between them was that while Williams sought to enrich himself, Mitchell wanted to bring much of Alabama along with him on the road to prosperity. Not only could this car get his idled employees in Huntsville back to work, all those woody station wagon bodies would keep northern Alabama lumber mills a hummin’, while the production of frames and front ends took their steel from the blast furnaces of Birmingham.
Hubert Mitchell circa 1947 (from the collection of Lance George)
With an enthusiastic pitch for making Huntsville the auto making capital of the South, Mitchell was able to persuade a group of local investors to back him in buying out Williams for $30,000. That money apparently didn’t go very far, because the man was later convicted back in California of counterfeiting $20 bills.
Because of William’s soiled reputation, the Bobbi-Kar name had acquired a stench. It had to go. Mitchell was impressed that, by the sheer force of his personality, George Keller had kept his team together through some pretty tough times. So even though Keller wanted to call the newly organized company Mitchell Motors, Hubert Mitchell insisted on using Keller’s name. The former Studebaker man would be enthusiastically promoted as a modern incarnation of Charlie Nash, John North Willys and Walter P. Chrysler - all rolled up in to one big man. The whole operation was now bonded to the sizable reputation and formidable sales skills of Big George Keller.
George D. Keller (right) (www.Amazon.com)
Mitchell and Keller were soon able to raise $450,000 from investors and would be dealers, enticed by the opportunity to sell this nifty little car for just $848. They now had the funds to further develop the car. The rear engine roadster was dropped in favor of a conventional layout. Its 25hp gerbil wheel motor replaced with a more substantial 49hp Hercules 4-cylinder. Efforts were focused on the station wagon, though a hardtop and convertible were planned for later.
One of the Bobbie-Kar’s original innovations was retained. The “torsilastic” suspension system, similar to that found on military tank or half-track, had two cyliders, one inside the other. that acted as both suspension and shock absorber.(You could say without malice that the Keller handled like a tank.)
Promotional Advert Circa 1946 (www.hansenmechanical.wordpress.com)
One of Keller’s first moves was to open a Detroit office. This made sense. To keep costs down they would be using many off the shelf parts – the Hercules engine, a Hudson gear box, Willys rear end and Pontiac instruments. The shelves on which those parts lay mostly resided in Detroit.
These moves were simple and strait forward. What was not simple was filing for an initial public stock offering. Keller Motors needed to raise another $5 million to order tooling and pay for an initial supply of parts. But, in the wake of various levels of stock shenanigans on the part of fellow automotive startups like Tucker and Davis, the SEC was relentless in its demands for transparency. So even though Keller and Mitchell were playing by the rules, it took close to 2 years and $130,000 in attorney fees before they were allowed to proceed with the IPO.
In the meantime, Leifeld and Keller were putting the final touches on the Super Chief. For simplicity’s sake, they concentrated their efforts on the station wagon. At the time, Willys was having success with its Jeep station wagon, selling an average of about 25,000 per year. Crosley had just rolled out its own little wagon that quickly become the company’s #1 seller. For Keller Motors the wagon made even more sense. Wood bodies didn’t need expensive tooling, just the ash wood from the forests of Northern Alabama, and the skilled woodworkers which Huntsville had in abundance.
Keller promotional advert Circa 1949 (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
By the Summer of 1949, John Leifeld had managed to put together a makeshift assembly line. Once funding was secured, the plan was to make 7,000 cars in the first year of operations, eventually ramping up to ten times that. But for now, Leifeld focused on a small production run of 6 Super Chief wagons. Their stock prospectus said Keller Motors would be “in production,” and by god, it was.
George Keller meanwhile had secured suppliers, and signed up over 1,500 franchised dealers. When stock sales finally began at the end of September, it seemed that Keller Motors would succeed where the others like them had failed. They were about to become a publicly held company.
Kellers on the production line (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
By October 4th 1949, Keller Motors had raised over $3 million. Success appeared imminent. They were going to be funded! A celebration was planned that evening at the Hotel Algonquin in Manhattan. All company officers were in attendance. The food came, the drinks flowed, and the party lasted into the night. The next morning everyone likely had a hefty hangover. All except one, and he might have preferred it to the alternative. Later that day Big George Keller was found cold in his bed, dead of a heart attack at age 56.
Keller promotional advert Circa 1949 (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
When Hubert Mitchell made the decision to focus his promotional efforts on the persona of George Keller, it was predicated on the idea that George Keller would be there to lead the company to the promised land. Without the magic of Big George’s personality, it was as if a spell had been broken. Reality reasserted itself. The Keller team had been a somewhat inexperienced one to begin with, and now it was even less so. It had a weak dealer network, consisting of mostly used car lots and gas stations. They that would be selling a woody wagon in a market for woodies that was suddenly showing signs of rot. (Plymouth would introduce its steel-bodied Suburban wagon the following year, slashing both production and maintenance costs… and sounding the death toll for the woody) Under this scrutiny, investors became skeptical. In an interview some years later, Mitchell said that if he had it to do all over again, he would have “built the business and advertising around the car, not any one man.” Despite heroic efforts by Mitchell over the next couple of months to pull a rabbit out of the hat, with the Man gone, the edifice that was Keller Motors crumbled.
The Keller after Keller
The state of Alabama has ever had only three homegrown carmakers. The first was the Great Southern Automobile Co. of Birmingham, that produced an unknown, but presumably small number of touring cars from 1913-17. None exist today, and the marque is lost to history. Preston Motors, also of Birmingham, fared a bit better. It was optimistically thought to have produced as many as 500 Premocar tourers and roadsters from 1919-23. President Warren Harding rode in one when he visited Birmingham in 1923. Alas, rust, along with the scrap metal drives supporting WW2, seem to have taken every last Premocar (though, two radiator badges were saved from the smelters, and can be found in separate collections in Alabama and Georgia.) The story of Preston Motors lives on at least, in J.D. Weeks’ book, Premocar: Made in Birmingham.
President Harding in a Preston Premocar
The legacy of Alabama’s third car maker lives on in more substantial form - even though the odds were stacked against it.
Estimates are that no more than 18 Kellers were manufactured in Alabama from 1947-49 (there were also 2 Bobbi-Kars built in San Diego). The earliest cars were pretty much disposable - design mules for evaluation, or photo shoot mock-ups without drivetrains or steerable wheels. Then came a few pre-production prototypes that were given to representatives for promotional tours and to recruit dealers. Most of these cars would have later been later cannibalized. The always cash-strapped company needed the parts to build the 6 documented 1949 Keller Super Chiefs they needed to show to Wall Street investors. Given all that, it seems a stretch to think the number of individual cars in existence ever reached 2 digits.
Keller’s tiny production numbers - coupled with wooden bodies that were hard to maintain and costly to repair - suggest that 70 years of weather and termites would have likely rotted any remaining trace of a Keller into nothingness. So is it by the heartfelt commitment on the part of three Huntsville area families that three Kellers survive today. They have found their way back home to Alabama.
The earliest known Keller - and thus the oldest existing car ever made in the state – has been owned by brothers Vance and Lance George since 2013. Vance is an automobile enthusiast, while Lance is a historian. Their Keller is a piece of automobile history. Since their return, each of the surviving Kellers have been given a name. This one is the “George” car, named for its current owners, and also for Big George himself. It had been a demonstrator model used by the company’s Indiana distributor. For several years, it racked up miles throughout the upper South, drumming up public interest in Keller, and enticing perspective dealer franchisees. The George car shows evidence of being painted at least 4 different times. That is because fresh paint jobs would have allowed the rep appear as if he were driving a new Keller when attending subsequent meetings and events. When I saw this car in the George’s garage this October, it looked like it has indeed lived 4 lifetimes. But it is safe and dry now (and kinda red), a relic of Huntsville’s past preserved.
Lance George with the “George” Keller (2019)
Keller #2 is called the “Mitchell” car because it has spent nearly its whole life within the family of Hubert Mitchell - the man who bankrolled Keller Motors, and came closer even than Preston Tucker to launching a successful post-war auto company. The Mitchell car was one of a trio brought up to New York City in late 1949 to promote Keller to the public and to Wall Street. When the company fell apart after the death of its namesake, those wagons went into the hotel basement until bills could be settled. Six months later, Hubert’s daughter, Mitch, and three of her classmates, were able to travel north to fetch the cars. While the fate of the other two is long lost, this one stayed with Mitch, where she drove it though 4 years at university. She later gave the car back to her dad, who drove it regularly until 1975. This family heirloom is now owned by Hubert Mitchell’s grandson, Buzz Howell. I didn’t get to meet Buzz on my trip, or see the Mitchell car, but I understand it is in a better shape than the “George” car (…or Big George himself, for that matter.)
The “Mitchell” Keller in 1991 (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
If the George car is now an artifact of Huntsville’s history, and the Mitchell car a family heirloom, the third remaining Keller is a piece of the past made new again. This is thanks to the efforts of father and son, Ron and Sam Barnett, two of Huntsville’s more passionate car collectors.
What would become the “Barnett” car was discovered, acquired, and partially restored by the elder Barnett. Ron was not only a car collector but an automotive historian and past president of the AACA. His dream was to locate a surviving Keller and bring it home to Huntsville. Over the years, Ron researched Keller extensively, collecting reams of information, photos, letters, documents and brochures. His efforts were finally rewarded when, in 1993, he located an actual car. It was a ’48 Super Chief wagon, owned by Jim Mckay of Independence, Missouri. McKay had been the Kansas City representative for Keller Motors. George Keller himself handed Jim the keys to this car back in early 1949, and he’d kept it ever since.
Like its bro, the George car, this one was in rough shape when Ron found it. (And it got worse before it got better. Much of the fibrous roof disintegrated while the car was being trailered home) It would take multiple thousands of hours by Ron over the next 5 years to rebuild the partially rotted wood body and get it running. After that, it was up to Ron’s son, Sam, who made it his mission to take this car to the next level of finish. A car a customer might have admired while browsing the showroom of a Keller dealership in 1949…had one ever existed. Back in its day, this car was really no more than a rough-hewn, hand-built prototype. Thanks to the Barnetts, you could say this Keller is better than new.
Ron Barnett’s Keller in 1998 (www.HuntsvilleRewound.com)
Sam Barnett’s “better than new” Keller in 2019
The relic, the heirloom, and the time capsule. Yes, not many folks have heard of the Keller. But thanks to the efforts of three proud families, a few more will.
Copyright@2019 by Mal Pearson
Sources and Further Reading:
The Huntsville Times, May 19, 2013, Kelly Kazek. Last of 3 Remaining Kellers Comes Home to Huntsville
The Decatur Daily, Mar 12, 2002, Ronnie Thomas. State’s First Carmaker
The Birmimgham News, Dec 25, 1998, Kent Faulk. Built to Last
The Huntsville Times, Sept 5, 1995, Deborah Story. History on Wheels
The Huntsville Times, Sept 13, 1988, Mike Paludan. The Keller
The Huntsville Times, Dec 15, 1976, David Cagle. Hubert Mitchell Still had Memorey
www.huntsvillerewound.com/HSVkellercar.htm