Studebaker Commander from the '50s Seen in Billings

While returning from a CostCo run I saw a slim, elegant automobile near the corner of Grand and 24th that started a twitch somewhere in one or both temporal lobes of my gradually shrinking brain. It looked like the one above which I snatched from somewhere on the Web, as I couldn't get my camera out of my pocket quickly enough.

When I was a kid in the 40s and 50s the photographer that most people used for graduations and weddings and such lived in an old cheese factory, precursor to loft apartments these days, converted into a home and studio, on the outskirts of Juneau WI, a Mr Norman Rambow. Whatever ever happened to that good name Norman?

Looking back most of us would now instantly recognize him as a gay man, but in those days we had not yet received the enlightenment of out-of-the-closet gaiety; we just thought them different and perhaps a little queer in the usual old-fashioned sense of that word. In any event, Mr Rambow bought this beautiful Studebaker after the company had been producing fairly ho-hum models for some years. He would drive slowly to give all those he passed a chance to admire it. He sometimes waved at the young men, though most of us were playing baseball and dreaming.

Studebaker apparently made wagons to start with, and made a handsome fortune during the Civil War, but eventually they made various kinds of cars, but by the 50s they were mostly fairly plain vanilla as I remember them. I sat and sweated in the backseat of one from the 40s being driven by a daredevil by the name of Walton Schuett. It was winter and slippery on the back roads, all gravel in those days as I recall, so you drove down the middle of the road unless you met someone coming in the other direction. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have seat belts either. In any event, once in awhile Studebaker would make a really fancy car and that is what I saw while driving home from CostCo, and what was stored away somewhere in my brain for lo these many years. A Studebaker Commander I think: at least 50 years old and in very good condition, the car, not my brain.