Arnold Altman dies Aug 3

Altman, 88, maker of Avanti cars Engineer was driving force behind former Studebaker sports car for 17 years

Ad Links Buy a link » Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times Arnold "Arry" Altman, who was largely responsible for making the futuristic Studebaker Avanti, "the car that refuses to die," has died. He was 88. Altman died Jan. 7 in his native South Bend, Ind., of lung cancer.

The Avanti, whose name means "forward," sprang from Indiana's car-building culture that began in the 1890s and produced such vintage marques as the Auburn, the Marmon and the Stutz.

Altman grew up steeped in that tradition. He earned an engineering degree at Purdue University, served in the Navy during World War II and went into business with his late brother, Nathan, and late partner, Leo Newman, in a South Bend automobile dealership, Newman and Altman.

The cars they sold were hometown products -- Studebakers and Packards -- and that is how they encountered the unconventional Avanti. It was love at first and lasting sight.

In 1961, Studebaker Corp. President Sherwood H. Egbert conceived of an exciting, quality American sports car as a last-ditch effort to save the venerable but failing company. He wanted the car to compete with the Maserati, the Morgan and the Jaguar.

Egbert hired industrial designer Raymond Loewy, a pioneer in modern streamline automobile design, and on April 26, 1962, the original

1963 Studebaker Avanti was introduced. The sleek newcomer was futuristic inside and out -- its fiberglass body enclosed the first disc brakes and the first full steel roll bar in an American-built car.

Critics, drivers and dealers -- including Altman -- raved. Avanti easily sold its 4,700 original models, but the attention-getting car could not save the corporation. After only two model years, Studebaker ceased operation in Indiana on Dec. 9, 1963, and shut down Avanti. The company foundered in Canada after that before going out of business in 1966.

Enter the Altmans and Newman. In 1964, they and a few other investors bought the Avanti name and Studebaker's leftover inventories of parts, production tooling and two plant buildings in South Bend. They hired

20 Studebaker employees from the 6,000 put out of work when the company shut down.

Using General Motors drive trains and many custom parts, they rolled out their first "Avanti II" in 1965. They were soon profitably producing about 200 hand-built cars annually and selling them for more than $21,000 each -- cash only.

"I'm an engineer, and my brother was an engineer," Altman, who became president after Nathan Altman died in 1976, told Forbes magazine in

1981. "We're doing this because we love the car."

Altman kept the Avanti in production from 1965 until he sold the company in 1982. The next owner went bankrupt in three years, primarily after trying a new paint that blistered and peeled, infuriating owners and dealers.

With production stymied by 1986, an estimated 7,300 of the beloved cars still remained on the road.

Sporadic production -- under ever-changing ownership -- moved to Youngstown, Ohio, in 1987, ceased in 1991, and was revived in 2000 at a plant in Villa Rica, Ga.

For Altman, however, no 21st century Avanti would ever be the one his employees had so lovingly built with 1,000 man-hours. He was also skeptical of any modern market for a hand-built car.

"I talk to young people," he said in 1995, "and they don't even know what ... I am talking about when I say Avanti."

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