A FRAT HOUSE, A TENOR, A ROCKEFELLER, AND BILL HARRAH

Serial number 7803597, this CL Imperial dual-windshield phaeton has a known history that begins on the front lawn of a fraternity house in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1946. While passing through town on one of his frequent national tours, popular radio tenor and early car collector James Melton spotted the Imperial and fell in love with it immediately. Melton was ordinarily a collector of Brass Era automobiles that predated the Chrysler by two decades or more, but he felt that the Imperial would be the right car for driving while at his Palm Beach house. He soon negotiated to buy it from the fraternity brothers.

With the Imperial being, at the time, only 13 years old, Melton had some trouble having it “restored.” He first entrusted a local body shop with the task but, aside from the application of a beautifully subtle cream and cocoa paint scheme, was unsatisfied with the results. Finally, he called up his friends in engineering at Chrysler Corporation and Briggs (the parent company of LeBaron), and they told him to send it to the factory. It was returned to Melton three months later, completely restored by the men who had built it originally, with Spike Briggs even having correct, all-new hardware made for it from the original drawings! As owners had experienced some difficulty with the original overdrive transmission from 1933, in Melton’s car Chrysler engineers fitted an overdrive truck transmission, which worked splendidly.

The tenor enjoyed his Imperial until 1961, when, shortly before his passing, it and many of his other cars were sold to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller for exhibition at his Museum of Automobiles in Morrilton, Arkansas. In 1975, following Rockefeller’s death, the collection passed en masse to the famed Harrah’s Automobile Collection, where the Imperial continued on display for some years. It was prominently featured in Dean Batchelor’s well-known book on the Harrah collection in 1984.

Later the Chrysler passed through the hands of Tom Barrett, and spent time at the Imperial Palace Auto Collection in Las Vegas as well as Dale Fowler’s well-known collection in Massachusetts. The present owner added it to his own distinguished fleet in 2015.

With its history known back to its teenaged years, and including especially prominent collectors directly from the early post-war era to present, this has long been one of the very best-known of all Imperial phaetons. It awaits proud exhibition and enjoyment by its next satisfied connoisseur owner.