Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1951 Kaiser Deluxe Sedan
This series is about automotive history as seen through vehicles at the ends of their lives, and the history of the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation is an especially fascinating one. We admired a 1947 Frazer Manhattan in a Denver boneyard a year ago, and today we'll take a look at another Kaiser-Frazer product that appeared at a yard just south of the Denver city limits.
Henry J. Kaiser was a construction-industry giant even before World War II, but he became a superstar in the eyes of the American public for building thousands of urgently needed cargo ships in a hurry (at one point assembling a Liberty Ship in under five days). After the war, Kaiser teamed up with the legendary automotive-industry warlord who made his bones at Willys-Overland, Joseph W. Frazer, to build cars. The Willow Run B-24 bomber factory near Detroit (then the largest building in the world) was purchased, and Kaiser's plan was that the Kaiser-Frazer Company would soon dominate the industry. How hard could it be?
It turned out to be really hard, in fact, because GM, Ford and Chrysler just needed a few years after the shooting stopped to create brand-new postwar designs and build them more cheaply than any upstart newcomers could. For the whole story, you'll want to read Aaron Severson's excellent article at Ate Up With Motor; the short version is that Kaiser-Frazer sales were great through 1948 (when any new cars would sell to Americans desperate for them), then cratered. Frazer departed in 1951, the year today's Junkyard Gem rolled off the Willow Run assembly line, and Kaiser stopped building passenger cars for the United States market in 1955. Having bought Willys-Overland in 1953, though, Kaiser made good-enough money building Jeeps and that operation was sold to American Motors a few years after his death.
This car was one of hundreds stored at CAP's private-reserve yard for decades, but now it has been put in the general U-Pull-It inventory (along with more than 20 first-generation Mustangs).
The interior is rough from all those years of outdoor storage, but you can see that it was once fairly plush.
It has been many years since this car was on the road.
