1951-54  Muntz Jet

You name it, and Earl “Madman” Muntz built it—or so it seemed. His creations included a racy four-passenger sports car called the Muntz Jet—actually a 1951-54 four-seat sporty luxury car derived from a two-seat sports car built by American genius race car  builder Frank Kurtis.

The Jet was America’s first post-World War II “personal luxury car,” arriving long before the first four-seat Ford Thunderbird, which debuted for 1958.

The flashy Jet cost $5,500, when a Cadillac convertible—America’s most widely desirable car--was $3,987.

Muntz told me in a 1969 newspaper interview that he lost $1,000 on each Jet made because he could “never get production volume up to a profitable level.” Labor costs were a stiff $2,000 per car because it was basically hand-built by craftsmen who were essentially race car builders. The pleated custom upholstery, alone, cost $600 per car.

A toal of 394 Jets were made. Celebrity owners included actress-princes Grace Kelly and other celebrities, including singer Vic Damone. A Jet officially was valued in 2009 from $50,000-$85,000, although I’ve seen really nice ones easily sell for more than $100,000.

The Jet was just perfect for early 1950s Hollywood and was in major movies. It had potent Cadillac and Lincoln V-8s, a removable padded “Carson” steel top, custom upholstery and a minibar.

Many Jets had wild pastel body colors—purple, blue, salmon and pink. Interiors also were colorful, featuring synthetic snake or iguana skin, besides leather. A padded dashboard and seat belts were safety items ahead of their time.

The dashboard was filled with race-style Stewart-Warner gauges in a machine-turned fascia. There was a tachometer (when only sports cars had one) vacuum gauge, two temperature gauges (one for each cylinder head) and a 160 mph speedometer.

“I called it the Jet because jet planes were just coming in, and it was the speediest word you could think of,” Muntz said with a grin in the 1969 interview.

Muntz was accompanied by publicity whiz Mike Shore, who helped turn him into a madcap used-car impresario and an entity in Southern California. Muntz flooded the radio with zany commercials and was pictured as a zany cartoon character on billboards, wearing red flannel underwear, boots and a Napoleon hat, which was Muntz’s trademark. He pioneered oddball television commercials with his wild “Madman” persona, which got publicity from unusual stunts and costumes.
 
It all led to good-natured jokes about Muntz heard on national radio programs such as “The Bob Hope Show.” Hollywood tour buses put his huge used car lot on their itineraries.

Muntz was a shrewd businessman behind his wild Hollywood persona. He sold cars and consumer electronics from the 1930s to the 1970s. He died from lung cancer in 1987 at age 73, and accomplished more in his lifetime than virtually all men do in one.

Cars and electronics were Muntz’s true loves. A high school dropout to help his parents’ business, he became fascinated by electronics at an early age. He built his first radio at age 8, then one for his parents’ car at 14. He also bought old Ford Model Ts, fixed them up and sold them at a profit.

Muntz opened his first used car lot in his home town, Elgin, in 1934, but found during a California vacation that used cars in that state were selling for a lot more than in Illinois. He thus flooded his newly established used car operation in the Los Angeles area with thousands of autos from Illinois. 

You have to understand the man, Muntz, to understand his car. A born promoter, Muntz made and lost fortunes and was married seven times. He dated the world’s most glamorous actress, Ava Gardner, and other celebrities, including comedienne Phyllis Diller. He was part of Hollywood’s celebrity crowd and knew everyone from Dick Clark to famous cowboy movie star/singer Gene Autry.

Muntz lived in a house in the West Hollywood hills in which everything was painted or upholstered in white. He also maintained a home in the Chicago area.

The Jet was one of many Muntz projects, although one of his favorites. Besides operating his used car operation in the L.A. area, Muntz was an air conditioning manufacturer and an all-aluminum house and motorhome builder.

Other car ventures included being a dealer/distributor in California and New York for the new, successful Kaiser-Frazer auto operation, when new cars were in great demand after World War II. His new and used car businesses were said to be grossing $72 million annually by 1947.

Often ahead of his time, Muntz later was a wide screen television producer and early cell phone promoter. He invented the Muntz Stereo-Pak 4-track tape cartridge. It was a predecessor of the Stereo 8 cartridge, also known as the “8-track” developed by U.S. inventor Bill Lear, of Learjet fame.

Muntz also designed a car stereo tape player that could play an album without changing tracks or turning the tape over, without skipping. Muntz reportedly sold $30 million worth of car stereos and tapes in 1967.

One of Muntz’s most famous creations was the first low-priced television receiver. It sold  in the early 1950s for the then-unbelievably-low $99.95. Others cost three to four times as much. In 1952, Muntz TV Inc. grossed nearly $50 million.

The sets worked best in metropolitan areas close to TV transmission towers, where signals were strong. That was OK with Muntz because most who bought his televisions were urban dwellers with marginal incomes. As with his used car operation, Muntz TVs were given wacky promotions. (Muntz is credited with inventing the abbreviation “TV,” and named his daughter “Tee-Vee,” although she preferred “Tina.” )

Muntz was the country’s fourth largest television set producer before major televsion producers forced him out of the business.

The Muntz Jet was derived from a low-production 1948-49 two-seat American-engine sports car from Indianapolis 500 race car builder Frank Kurtis, of Glendale, Calif. The car got good reviews, but Kurtis decided to concentrate on race cars, so he sold the sports car operation to Muntz for $200,000. Muntz had bought a 1941 Buick show car designed by Kurtis and was intrigued by the Kurtis auto operation of the late 1940s.

While the basic styling of the Kurtis car was retained for the Jet, Muntz knew there was more of a market for a four-seater. So he had top American auto race driver Sam Hanks help him redesign the car, stretching the wheelbase to 113 inches and installing the new Cadillac overhead-valve V-8. He quickly named the car the Muntz Jet.

The first 28 Muntz Jets were built in California wth aluminum bodies, but Muntz soon moved production from Glendale to Evanston, where Jets were built in a large warehouse.

The Jet’s wheelbase was increased another 3 inches and Lincoln V-8s were used in place of the Cadillac V-8, which has hooked to a General Motors HydraMatic automatic transmission.

The Jet never had a conventional convertible top, so its removable top had to be left at home if taken off because there was no place to store it in the car.

Body construction was switched from aluminum to steel, which was more durable and cheaper. The car was incredibly strong. For one thing, its stretched box-section perimeter frame looked as if taken from a heavy duty truck.

But all that made the Jet much heavier than the Kurtis two-seater had been. And adding to the weight were such items as the minibar and, of course, a super Muntz radio in an elaborate under-dash console.

Although the Jet had grown heavier than the Kurtis model, Road & Track magazine wrote in 1961 that the Jet was “a deluxe high-speed convertible touring car in the American manner” and offered “the fastest acceleration and highest top speed of any American-built car available from the salesroom floor today.” (Muntz actually sold cars directly, without showrooms.)

Indianapolis 500 winner Wilbur Shaw wrote in Popular Science magazine that the Jet “corners beautifully” with “no sway on a hard, flat turn.” Racer Sam Hanks reportedly took a Jet with an aerodynamic undercarriage to 128 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats. That was really moving in those days, especially for a luxurious, heavy four-seater.

Losses from the costly Muntz Jet operation finally caused Muntz to close it. Decades later, he still spoke fondly of it.