Re: Packard Bikes
Posted by Leeedy On 2023/5/10 7:18:28
Now to 1940. And for Schwinn fans worshipping down on their knees... we return to the almighty Schwinn-Built prewar Packard bicycles.
Frankly I have forgotten the location and name of the town where this shop was located.
However you can see that they were selling bicycles made by Arnold, Schwinn & Company (ASC). The comma is correct (the ad is wrong)... there was nobody named "Arnold Schwinn" but rather Mr. Arnold and Mr. Scwhinn went into business making bicycles. Thus "Arnold, Schwinn & Co." was the name of their business.
You can also see that this shop was selling both Packard-branded and La Salle branded bicycles that were both Schwinn-Built.
Of course car guys then and now will presume these names had automotive origins. But the bicycle industry purposely kept this a murky connection. For instance, "La Salle" in this case was a name actually used by the W-D of Chicago Cycle Supply Company (location obvious). If one had a Schwinn-Built bicycle with a "La Salle" name on it, this meant it came to the dealer via Chicago Cycle Supply Company– a large W-D that handled ASC products and others.
The name, LaSalle didn't come from the car, but from a downtown district and street. My grandparents who started an insurance company in Chicago used to stay at the huge, grand old LaSalle Hotel downtown Chicago... when downtown was nice. With Chicago Cycle Supply Company (AKA "ChiCyCo") in the downtown business district it was a natural to adopt LaSalle as one of the many bicycle brands offered. For car people, a whole new realm for the term, badge engineering.
ASC bicycles rarely, almost never said merely "Schwinn" on them until after WW2. But instead came with hundreds, perhaps thousands of names on them. This is why the company coined the term, "Schwinn-Built."
In those times in the USA, bicycle shops could choose from an assortment of existing names offered either by the manufacturer or by the wholesale-distributor that served them. Shops and retail stores could also make up their own headbadge design and name for an incredibly low price.
Contrary to popular and mythical belief of today, ASC neither started this method, nor was the only bicycle company using it. MOST American bicycle makers, wholesale-distributors (W-D) used the same process. Ditto for retailers and individual shops. This had zero to do with Schwinn– no matter who says otherwise.
The artwork in this advertisement was standard late 1930s/early 1940s ASC iconery. The boy with a fully decked-out Deluxe Autocycle on the left and the girl with her fully equipped ladies' model appeared in numerous ASC publications, brochures and even a full-sized color prewar poster (we had the huge color poster years ago, but it "disappeared" while being framed at a shop in central California).
By the way, the thick cross-bar attachment on the handlebars of the boy's bicycle was cast aluminum and carried a built-in, illuminated speedometer along with electric horn and headlight button controls (see my 1941 Schwinn Packard Deluxe Autocycle pictured earlier in this thread).
Image courtesy of Leon Dixon and National Bicycle History Archive of America (NBHAA.com).
Attach file:
Schwinn-BuiltPackards1940.jpeg (125.78 KB)
Frankly I have forgotten the location and name of the town where this shop was located.
However you can see that they were selling bicycles made by Arnold, Schwinn & Company (ASC). The comma is correct (the ad is wrong)... there was nobody named "Arnold Schwinn" but rather Mr. Arnold and Mr. Scwhinn went into business making bicycles. Thus "Arnold, Schwinn & Co." was the name of their business.
You can also see that this shop was selling both Packard-branded and La Salle branded bicycles that were both Schwinn-Built.
Of course car guys then and now will presume these names had automotive origins. But the bicycle industry purposely kept this a murky connection. For instance, "La Salle" in this case was a name actually used by the W-D of Chicago Cycle Supply Company (location obvious). If one had a Schwinn-Built bicycle with a "La Salle" name on it, this meant it came to the dealer via Chicago Cycle Supply Company– a large W-D that handled ASC products and others.
The name, LaSalle didn't come from the car, but from a downtown district and street. My grandparents who started an insurance company in Chicago used to stay at the huge, grand old LaSalle Hotel downtown Chicago... when downtown was nice. With Chicago Cycle Supply Company (AKA "ChiCyCo") in the downtown business district it was a natural to adopt LaSalle as one of the many bicycle brands offered. For car people, a whole new realm for the term, badge engineering.
ASC bicycles rarely, almost never said merely "Schwinn" on them until after WW2. But instead came with hundreds, perhaps thousands of names on them. This is why the company coined the term, "Schwinn-Built."
In those times in the USA, bicycle shops could choose from an assortment of existing names offered either by the manufacturer or by the wholesale-distributor that served them. Shops and retail stores could also make up their own headbadge design and name for an incredibly low price.
Contrary to popular and mythical belief of today, ASC neither started this method, nor was the only bicycle company using it. MOST American bicycle makers, wholesale-distributors (W-D) used the same process. Ditto for retailers and individual shops. This had zero to do with Schwinn– no matter who says otherwise.
The artwork in this advertisement was standard late 1930s/early 1940s ASC iconery. The boy with a fully decked-out Deluxe Autocycle on the left and the girl with her fully equipped ladies' model appeared in numerous ASC publications, brochures and even a full-sized color prewar poster (we had the huge color poster years ago, but it "disappeared" while being framed at a shop in central California).
By the way, the thick cross-bar attachment on the handlebars of the boy's bicycle was cast aluminum and carried a built-in, illuminated speedometer along with electric horn and headlight button controls (see my 1941 Schwinn Packard Deluxe Autocycle pictured earlier in this thread).
Image courtesy of Leon Dixon and National Bicycle History Archive of America (NBHAA.com).
Attach file:
Schwinn-BuiltPackards1940.jpeg (125.78 KB)This Post was from: https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=256865