In Part I of these series, we saw how General Motors had developed a brilliant way to design the Cadillac Fleetwood 75 Series without spending very much money at all and, in so doing, set a standard for limousine design for years to come. In Part II, we saw how James Nance — first at Packard, later at Lincoln — applied what Cadillac had done but used outside conversion houses to do the actual work.

The limousine conversion industry, like the professional car conversion industry, had risen to meet a demand for a specialized type of vehicle that was not being supplied by the major automobile manufacturers. Many potential limousine customers were unhappy at Cadillac's ascendancy because they did not like Cadillacs, or because they wanted something less common, or because they simply wanted something that could be tailored to more personal tastes than an "off-the-shelf" limousine could offer.

Several of the manufacturers, too, were unhappy to be out of the field, even though they could not justify the economic drain of attempting to compete in it. Chrysler had dropped its production seven-passenger cars at the conclusion of the 1954 model run, but was back the following year with a conversion based on the Imperial sedan. The Crown Imperials, as they were known, were built for at least ten years by the Ghia firm in Italy before the model was dropped.

Lincoln, on the other hand, had had nothing at all since the Custom series ceased production after the outbreak of World War II. The 1959 conversions supplied by Hess and Eisenhardt in Cincinnati that we covered in Part II comprised the first tentative effort to address this problem. Unquestionably the most renowned of the postwar Lincoln limousine conversions, however, were those done during the 1960s by the Chicago firm of Lehmann-Peterson, Inc.

George W. Lehmann was the scion of a wealthy Chicago family and the businessman in the firm, while Robert W. Peterson handled the manufacturing end. They got together in 1962 when Lehmann had the idea of producing stretched limousines on the Lincoln chassis. Lehmann realized that Lincoln-Mercury had nothing to compete with the 1,600 or so factory limousines that Cadillac was then producing annually. At least two 1963 limousines were built without Ford Motor Company authorization. Ford officials clearly liked the concept, though, because, starting in 1964, the cars were tested, marketed and warranted through Lincoln-Mercury Division. They were even included in the standard showroom catalog for several years running.

The Lehmann-Peterson design was more than just another conversion, though. It represented a genuine departure from past practice, and set a style that is almost universally used in the trade today. Cadillac's clever approach to the limousine problem had been the industry norm until that time. This, as we have seen, involved placing the added length behind the rear doors. The reason this made so much sense for Cadillac was that it enabled them to use standard Coupe de Ville rear fenders, and, thus, hold tooling costs to a minimum. The rear doors and the roof were the only significant unique stampings in the entire car — and the roof was originally cobbled together from the C-Special roof used by the Sixty Special until it got too bothersome to do it that way and Cadillac opted for separate tooling.

The 1961-65 series Lincoln Continental, however, had no two-door model, so Lehmann and Peterson put the "stretch" between the doors by, literally, sawing a sedan in half and inserting a new middle section. This configuration, in turn, made standard jump seats awkward, so they installed rear facing occasional seats with a cabinet in between that could be used as a bar, television console, storage area, or whatever. It was as brilliant a solution to the limousine conversion problem as Cadillac's had been to the factory-built limousine problem.

The 1964 Lehmann-Peterson Lincoln was projected at a retail price of $13,400 and 15 were built that year. Production rose to 130 units in 1966 before going into a decline. In all, some 286 production versions were built between 1964 and 1968.

One of the most famous was built in a rush for an unexpected client. When Pope Paul VI, arrived in New York City on the morning of October 4, 1964, he was escorted to a waiting Continental limousine that had been specially designed and built for him by Lehmann-Peterson on eight days notice. Lehmann-Peterson had been contemplating a parade car conversion for several months and had even selected one of the 1963 prototype limousines for the purpose. After an evening phone call from Lincoln-Mercury Division on September 22nd, the car was rushed through from design to completion and shipped to New York by truck on September 30th. The car had a detachable, transparent rear roof section, as well as side and back step plates for security personnel. The rear seat was elevated and illuminated at night. A public address system was provided to enable crowds to hear the Papal blessings.

An undetermined number of Lehmann-Peterson limousines were built in 1969 and one 1970 prototype was reportedly built before the Lehmann-Peterson/Lincoln-Mercury relationship ended. One of the last of the 1969 limousines was fitted with Mark III front and rear exterior trim, perhaps in an attempt to rekindle interest at Lincoln-Mercury, but this concept apparently did not catch on. What caused the relationship to falter is unknown. The author was doing research on a Lincoln history in Detroit in 1980 (The Lincoln Motorcar, now long out of print) and inquired of Lincoln-Mercury people at that time about what had happened. No one would or, most likely, could supply the answer. There had been so many staff changes at the division that the corporate memory then hardly went back more than two or three years. (The public relations director had been on the job for about a week! And, as John Banner used to say, knew nothing! A good man, this fellow is now vice-president of communications for Toyota'a American operations.)

Lehmann-Peterson, Inc., was dissolved in 1970 and some of its assets were taken over by Moloney Coachbuilders of Palatine (later Schaumburg), Illinois. Their first brochure, issued in 1971, used photographs of the last Lehmann-Peterson prototype and also the 1969 Mark III version. It is not known that any additional Mark editions were built, but Moloney continued to build Lincoln limousines following the Lehmann-Peterson design for many years, as well as numerous other Lincoln and Cadillac based conversions of various descriptions. The numbers produced, however, were small because conversions were expensive to build. Cadillac undercut the conversion houses by many thousands of dollars with its factory-built jobs and could have continued to dominate the segment indefinitely.

What really turned the market upside down was Cadillac's disastrous decision to phase-out the rear-wheel drive Fleetwood models in 1985. They were determined that the new front-wheel drive C-body could be adapted for limousine application and even set up a new facility, which was run by Hess and Eisenhardt, to manufacture them. Alas, the unibody design of the new car was woefully unsuited for long-wheelbase models and Cadillac's hard-won near-monopoly of the field collapsed overnight. Conversion houses from one end of the continent to the other rushed in to fill the void using the design developed way back in the 1960s by Lehmann-Peterson. Worse, they did it with Lincoln Town Cars for the most part. No one wanted to have anything to do with the front-drive C-body and Cadillac was trying to kill the rear-wheel drivers. The latter effort was a dismal failure, for the customers refused to stop buying them, but Cadillac did succeed in driving almost all of the conversion business to Lincoln. Someone should write a book someday about all the self-inflicted disasters at Cadillac in the 1980s. (Oh, silly us, someone did. That would be Cadillac: The American Standard, which is available from the Ride&Drive Book Rendezvous.)

At any rate, when the dust settled, the cycle had been completed and conversions came to utterly dominate the limousine market, and this situation continues to our own era. The huge majority of these conversions are Lincoln based, although other brands show up from time to time, as well. R&D