Whatever happened to the lost LaLee Streamliner?

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The whats and whys surrounding this cool streamliner were shrouded in mystery when these pictures were made public several years ago, but much of its mystery has by now been solved thanks to the expertise of the enthusiasts of the internet. We wanted to share it here with you nevertheless, if for no reason other than that it's such a smashing vehicle.

A 1938 article in Popular Mechanics magazine revealed it was built by ‘a California airman’, who had been ‘borrowing ideas from the transport planes he has piloted’. It stated its V8 engine was aided by a supercharger and could top 120 mph, or return 18 mpg at 60 mph. There were some really cool features, too. The front wheel spats, for example, turned with the wheels themselves. The doors were opened by a button on the dash and the roof was opened with the touch of another button on that same dashboard ‘embodying the same mechanism applied to raising and lowering landing gear in an airplane.’

It wasn’t long before somebody else found that the pictures were taken in or close to Dearborn on February 10th, 1938, and, apart from the car itself, show the ‘airman’, a man called Daniel LaLee, along with Jack Knight of United Air Lines and a model named Betty Bryant. Well done. Next, it turned out that the car had made it onto the silver screen in 1941. One of the year's big musical comedies, Nice Girl?, features the coffin-nosed streamliner on Samoa plates. As well as that, a 1984 documentary named The World of Tomorrow included original film footage of it, too.

Interestingly, with the car now known as the Dan LaLee Streamliner, a woman named Jana Chrumka wrote: 'I believe the original Daniel LaLee car was designed and built by my grandfather, Ellsworth Clyde Ledbetter, in a gas station (south of Michigan Avenue in Dearborn) on a 1934 Ford chassis. Ellsworth was an aerospace engineer. According to my father, Elmer E. Ledbetter, his dad, Ellsworth, and his uncle Mike Greenwald, who was a Dearborn policeman, would race this car up and down Telegraph Road after it was built. My mother, Joan Ledbetter, verified yesterday that my grandfather, Ellsworth Clyde Ledbetter, contracted with Daniel LaLee to design and build this car.”

LaLee seems likely to have financed the project, but shouldn’t it perhaps be the Ledbetter Streamliner? One more thing: the car is said to have ended up in the collection of King Farouk of Egypt later in the 1940s, so could it still be waiting to be rediscovered in northern Africa...

Words: Jeroen Booij; pictures: Mad4Wheels
 

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