The Hemmings blog has been finding some interesting items for its "Find of the Day" recently. Yesterday, for example, the featured car was the above 1941 Graham Hollywood. I've always found the Hollywood interesting, because it was the second partial resurrection of the 1936 Cord 810 sedan (below).
Cord, along with its sister companies Auburn and Duesenberg, closed up in 1936. Graham was in dire straits in the late 1930's, and as part of a last gasp, it struck a deal with another automobile manufacturer, Hupmobile, that gave it access to the late Cord's dies and tooling. Hupmobile ended up getting the dies and tooling from Cord's creditors, and tried to resurrect the Cord itself in the Skylark (below), but it had problems with production.
So in 1941, Graham produced the Hollywood. Like the Cord, the Hollywood had a high horsepower, supercharged engine. Unlike the Cord, the Hollywood was a traditional front engine/rear wheel drive layout; as opposed to the Cord's advanced, front wheel drive design. Neither the Skylark nor the Hollywood featured the Cord's distinctive "coffin" nose or retractable headlamps, but the exterior design was otherwise the same. This repeated resurrection of the original design demonstrates why the Cord, and its subsequent iterations, are considered classics.
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