Newman and Altman: the dealers who bought the Avanti

1964 - 1982

The store: Newman and Altman was a South Bend dealership, and what it sold was the hometown product: Studebakers and Packards. Its partners were Leo Newman and the Altman brothers, Nathan, called Nate, and Arnold. Arnold Altman had grown up steeped in the city's car building tradition, taken an engineering degree at Purdue, served in the Navy during the Second World War, and gone into business with his brother and Newman selling the cars their own city made. When Studebaker president Sherwood Egbert conceived the Avanti in 1961 as an exciting, quality sports car to save the company, and Raymond Loewy's design reached the showrooms for 1963, the men at Newman and Altman met the car as dealers. It was, in the obituary's phrase, love at first and lasting sight.

The purchase: Studebaker ceased operation in Indiana in December 1963. Early in 1964 Altman, Newman and a few other investors bought the Avanti name and Studebaker's leftover inventories of parts, production tooling and plant buildings in South Bend, and hired twenty Studebaker employees from the six thousand put out of work when the company shut down. The fuller Avanti history puts the February 1964 purchase at six buildings in the old complex, some 500,000 square feet, one of them the building where the original Avantis had been finished, where the obituary record says two plant buildings; the leg prints the purchase on both accounts and names the difference rather than choosing between them, the same discipline it applies to the Hammes addresses. The new company was the Avanti Motor Corporation. Its first Avanti II was built on 22 July 1965 and formally introduced to the public in South Bend on 2 August 1965, built with General Motors drive trains, the Corvette's 327 cubic inch engine among them, and bodies from Molded Fiberglass of Ashtabula, Ohio, which had supplied the original bodies and agreed to supply the revival.

The course: The dealers also kept the dead factory's other promise, parts. Newman and Altman owned Standard Surplus Corp. to sell surplus Studebaker parts, bought the huge remaining parts warehouse in Plant Eight in about 1971 or 1972, and went on supplying the remaining Studebaker dealers through successor parts companies: the store that could no longer sell new Studebakers spent decades keeping the old ones running. Nate Altman died in 1974 and his brother Arnold took the reins. Arnold kept the Avanti in production, hand built in small numbers in South Bend, until he sold the company in 1982; the rights to the Avanti II passed on 1 October 1982 to real estate developer Stephen H. Blake. Arnold Altman died on 7 January, in his native South Bend, at 88. The closing line writes itself and the record lets it: two local dealers refused to let their hometown's flagship die with its factory, bought it, built it for seventeen more years, and kept its parts flowing for longer than that. There is no other story like it in either city's leg.

Sources:

1. Arnold Altman obituary reporting (Associated Press, January 2007, carried by MotorsForum): the Purdue degree and Navy service, the Newman and Altman dealership selling Studebakers and Packards, the 1964 purchase of the name, parts, tooling and buildings, the twenty hired employees, production kept to the 1982 sale.
2. Studebaker history record, studebaker-info.org, The Avanti, part 3 (the February 1964 six buildings and 500,000 square feet; the first Avanti II of 22 July 1965 and its South Bend introduction of 2 August 1965; the Molded Fiberglass bodies and the 327 engine).
3. Avanti history records (Nate Altman's death in 1974, carried in Hagerty's valuation record; Stephen H. Blake's purchase of the Avanti II rights, 1 October 1982).
4. Studebaker Drivers Club, Southern California chapter newsletter, May 2024 (Standard Surplus Corp., the Plant Eight warehouse purchase of about 1971-72, and the successor parts companies).