Henry Kaiser, Troy Ruttman, and Madman Muntz: Three Originals

Two of the men mentioned above appear in the photograph on the cover of this issue. Henry J. Kaiser does not, just his namesake automobile manufactured at his plant near Ypsilanti, Michigan. Of the three, however, only Kaiser's has remained a name to be reckoned with in American history: the entrepreneur behind Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams; builder of a third of the entire World War II U.S. merchant fleet, as well as the world's largest cement plant at Permanente, California, and a steel mill in Fontana that employed as many as 11,000 workers; founder of the Kaiser Medical Care Program in Oakland, which became the template for the HMOs so much in current news; developer of Hawaii Kai, another template, in this case for the luxury resort hotel complex; chief of an industrial firm that made hundreds of different products, from airplanes to dishwashers. In 2004, the Oakland Museum of California staged an exhibition about Kaiser's "impact on the modern economic and cultural landscape" called Henry J. Kaiser: Think Big. Not everything Kaiser created survives today—only a couple of those merchant ships, and the steel mill replaced by California Speedway, a land reuse entailing minimal toxic-waste cleanup. But he certainly left monuments.

By comparison, Earl Muntz's fame was fleeting—and yet his name did become a punch line for Jack Benny and Bob Hope, he is enshrined in the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) Hall of Fame, and a sports car called the Muntz Jet is a rare treasure among collectors. And, while California's premier historian Kevin Starr is probably correct in calling Henry Kaiser the most "surprising character" in the state's history because of his "eccentric Wizard of Oz personality," for sheer eccentricity Kaiser was no match at all for Earl Muntz, who was as colorful a character as ever marched to the tune of American enterprise.

Muntz and Kaiser may never have actually met, but their lives intersected in 1947 when Muntz became the California distributor for the Kaiser automobile and its companion make named for Kaiser's partner Joseph W. Frazer. With the two of them as president and chairman of the board, respectively, the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation turned out enough cars at Ford's old Willow Run bomber plant to capture 5 percent of the U.S. market before Frazer left the firm in 1949, and Kaiser produced nearly 750,000 autos all told before folding his hand in 1955. These included Kaisers, Frazers, a fiberglass sports car called the Darrin, and one of the first autos later to be dubbed "compact," the Henry J, which, if nothing else, "reinforced the industry's conviction that Americans were not interested in small fuel-efficient cars"—Rudi Volti's words in his new book, Cars and Culture (Westport, Conn., 2004).

But the name Henry J brings us back to the photo, taken a couple of years after the end of the war, when Henry Kaiser (1882–1967) and Earl Muntz (1910–1987) had both hit their stride, Kaiser assembling 2,770 Liberty ships, Muntz selling many times that many used cars when Detroit assembly lines were converted to military production. The car shown here is a Kaiser, but it could just as well be a Frazer—later on, with the debut of the "Anatomic" Kaiser, the styling of the two makes differed, but in 1947 they were virtually identical save for chrome trim and interior appointments. Most likely, the track is a half-mile oval called Carrell Speedway in the town of Gardena, which staged weekend events for prewar hot rods called "the roarin' roadsters," and for "late model stocks"—the kind of competition from which NASCAR would flower. These were usually well-established makes like Fords, Mercs, and Oldsmobiles, but on at least this one occasion a car from fledgling Kaiser-Frazer went to the races also.

A mechanic has pulled off the brake drum to check the lining or wheel bearing, and a gentleman in dark glasses and bow tie glances at something else, perhaps another car taking qualifying...