There have been many famous brother teams: the Duesenberg brothers and the Dodge brothers, for example — to say nothing of the Marx brothers, but that's another subject entirely, although Groucho was a paid flak for Dodge for a while. I guess brother acts tend to stick together. (As much as I like Groucho, I always thought Karl was far and away the funniest of the Marx brothers, but don't get me started on THAT…)

Anyway, to get matters back on track here, there were also the Graham brothers — Joseph, Robert and Ray — and they cut quite a swath for a while, too. The Graham brothers got their start building trucks using chassis supplied by the Dodge brothers, the resulting vehicles being sold as Graham trucks. This operation was very successful, but then the Dodge brothers died and their estates sold the car company to Dillon Reed, a New York brokerage house. Dillon Reed, in turn, shopped the company around to the other auto manufacturers. Alfred Sloan at General Motors almost bought it but was outbid by his best friend, Walter Chrysler (and who remained his best friend despite the coup).

Once Dodge was part of Chrysler Corporation, the Graham brothers received a handsome offer for their truck company — with the stipulation that they take the money and stay out of the truck business. The terms were accepted and the Graham brothers promptly bought up the Paige-Detroit Motor Car Company, manufacturer of the respected Paige automobile. That was in 1927. Then, the Paige quickly became the Graham-Paige and, by 1932, the Graham. (The company remained known as the Graham-Paige Motors Corporation even after the Paige name was dropped from the cars.) Are you still with me on this?

The Graham brothers had great success in the early years with their new car company. Production peaked at 78,000 units in 1928 and it seemed that the sky was the limit. Unfortunately, the Great Depression hit the following year and the Grahams brothers were soon struggling for dear life along with all of the other independent car producers.

The Grahams did better than most of the independents, though. Their celebrated "Blue Streak" models of 1932 were very influential on design trends in the industry. Handsome they certainly were, as a result of the work of designer Amos Northup, but sales continued on a downward spiral, regardless. By the middle of the decade, the Grahams were desperate (one of the brothers actually committed suicide) and decided to stake everything on a dramatic new line. Amos Northup was once more retained to do the styling and the result could have been a triumph. But, bad luck intervened yet again. This time it was the sudden death of Northup in a freak winter accident. With the master designer gone, the 1938 Graham line was completed by stylists of far lesser talent.

The Graham company called the 1938 line the "Spirit of Motion" and, indeed, there was a pronounced forward thrust to the body when seen in profile. It soon came to be known derisively, however — and remains so today among old car enthusiasts — as the "sharknose." The styling was actually fairly conventional except for the dramatic front end, but that proved to be too much for potential car buyers. Way too much. The 1938 model year was a terrible one for the industry, in general, due to a sharp, unexpected recession, but it was nearly fatal for the Graham-Paige Motors Corporation. From the pre-depression peak noted above, the company still managed to sell 16,400 cars in 1936. That was pretty dreadful, but it was still better than several other surviving independents (Hupp, Reo and Willys spring to mind). The Sharknose and the recession pushed that figure down to a catastrophic 4,139 units in 1938. By that point, the dealers were fleeing in droves and the brand was probably beyond resuscitation. If a design could ever have been said to have killed a brand, the 1938 Sharknose was it.

That was not, however, the end of the Graham story. Not by a long shot. In fact, it just gets more interesting. After sales drooped to a barely mentionable 3,660 in 1939, the company fell in league with Hupmobile to produce the second-best-looking production cars of the era — the virtually identical Hupp Skylark and Graham Hollywood — using the "coffin nose" Cord body dies. (The best-looking car of the era was the Cord itself.) The story of the Skylark and the Hollywood can be found in the Monthly Mystery Car archive.

Suffice it to say here that the last Graham was built in the summer of 1941 and that should have been that. It wasn't, of course. During World War II, the company was bought up by a group of investors headed by one Joseph Washington Frazer. Frazer had been one of Walter Chrysler's best sales and marketing people (which is saying a lot) and then had gone on to rescue Willys-Overland. Yet, he yearned to build cars himself under his own name. When Ward Canaday wouldn't sell Willys, Frazer bought Graham-Paige. Graham-Paige, in turn, linked-up with the Kaiser interests (steel, shipbuilding, and so on) to launch the most aggressive assault on Detroit mounted by an independent manufacturer in the postwar era and the first Frazers were actually marketed as products of Graham-Paige.

But, that is another story for another day. R&D