Stude dealer in Tangier, Morocco (calling Mr. Quinn)

[mbstude]

I don't know if this place (Salvador A. Hassan) was a dealership or parts depot..Stephen Allen's just purchased several crates full of NOS parts that originated from there. I'm digging through the stack of invoices from where they bought parts from South Bend, and I thought that it was too cool not to share.

Anyone know more about the place?

[Studebaker Wheel]

Feel pretty certain that it was a dealership.

[mbstude]

Feel pretty certain that it was a dealership.

Maybe they were supplying other dealers? Some of these invoices have high quantities. 80 tires, for example.

Do you have any other info on this dealer?

[Studebaker Wheel]

Maybe they were supplying other dealers? Some of these invoices have high quantities. 80 tires, for example.

Do you have any other info on this dealer?

Probably do in the Overseas edition of the Studebaker News dealer publication. Takes a long time to go thru all of those however so don't expect a response in the near future.

[TX Rebel]

Even with Tangiers close proximity to Spain, it is interesting that the correspondence is in Spanish, not Arabic. Mr. Hassan's unusual combination of a Hispanic & Christian first name with an Arabic & Muslim surname is interesting. With a major city by name of Casa Blanca, the country must have had considerable influence from Spain in the past. I have read that European Vandals migrated there and settled centuries ago. Morocco's history & culture are apparently as diverse as its taste in automobiles. If the info can be obtained, an article about that dealership would be an interesting read, just as we have seen articles about Studebaker in Israel, Australia, S Africa & other exotic locales around the globe. Studebaker certainly made its mark in Africa and other continents around the world.

[junior]

... If the info can be obtained, an article about that dealership would be an interesting read, just as we have seen articles about Studebaker in Israel, Australia, S Africa & other exotic locales around the globe. Studebaker certainly made its mark in Africa and other continents around the world.

yes indeed...was in Sri Lanka last week and met a local car guy who informed me that there was a Studebaker dealership in Galle, the city where I was staying. He did not know the name of it, so I did some snooping on the net and came up with a reference to Love Brothers. The local was showing me his 48 Chevy, 27 Austin 7(wow small car) and 30 something Austin Wolseley. He knew of 3 existing Studebakers in the country. Cheers, Junior

[JRoberts]

Studebakers are/were around all over the world weren't they. More proof of that is this picture I had found while looking for information on Asmara, Eritrea. My dad was stationed there in the late 1950's and the family was there with him. As I was searching I found a picture with a Studebaker in it. I was blown away. As I said they're everywhere. This picture was said to be in the 1940's, but some how I believe it is later than that. I do not remember there being a Studebaker dealer there when we lived there, but at the time of this picture and on into the early 1970's there were American army personnel stationed there and that may be how this Studebaker got to Asmara.

[S2Deluxe]

This picture was said to be in the 1940's, but some how I believe it is later than that.

It does appear to be a '50 - '52 Stude.

Mark

[t walgamuth]

The open two seater in front of it looks interesting too.

[kurtruk]

And the Chevy Suburban has to be a '49 or later. Just beyond the palm tree on the right looks to possibly be a Big Three post-war car with visor...

[go-studebaker]

Hi All,
I do know of this dealership.

The story of how this dealership stock came to the US is a little more complex and something that could have come out of Wayne Carinis's Chasing Classic cars as this was all about finding the King of Morocco's 1925 ? Avions Voisin.

Lets back up a bit and go over what I knew of this and I will bring you up to date later.

Information about it came across my bows in about 2004 / 5 when I was visiting at Peter Schotanus's place in Hilversum Holland. Peter at the time ran a company called Studebaker Select which went broke at about this time. I had previously bought the Dutch delivered 1933 Model 56 St Regis Brougham from him with 80k original km, so always had a good relationship with him. Peter is a complete live wire and always seems to be moving at 110mph and fun to be around.

Peter and his son Coon heard about this from the owner who was in his 80's and apparently living in France at the time.
They both flew over and looked at the stock that was in this Packard / Studebaker dealership and brought back a few parts. It was a major dealership that had closed down and had loads of early 1950's parts in the stock in the basement of the building that had never been picked through. In my display cabinet, I have an early 50's Packard plastic emblem that came from Mr Hassan's dealership. Also buried in the basement was a mid 20's Avions Voisin that was complete to the firewall.
Peter mentioned that the owner wanted to sell, but the problem was that you could not export car parts out of Morocco unless it was recorded as scrap metal. He also mentioned at the time that the Avions Voisin was worth good money, but since I am predominantly a Studebaker man, that information was lost on me. The only way to get it our of Morocco was to load everything into a truck and drive it right around the Mediterranean to France. Something Mr Hussan was prepared to do if a deal could be struck. Personally this may have been a smoke screen on Peter's part as I would have thought that there were plenty of freighters crossing the Med into France from Morocco or Algeria. At this stage, from memory, Peter mentioned the sum of 60 to 80k Euros. Weather or not it sold for this amount, I have no idea, but it was a number put on the table and like anything, you at least need some number to work out if you have the means necessary to pull it off or not.
After Studebaker Select's demise, Peter was hard to talk to about Studebaker's. He loved what he was doing in Holland with the make and took it very personally when it all came to an end and how the receivers treated the value of his parts. Even I was horrified at this story.

Anyway, I still got on with Peter and Liesbeth fine and would always drop in when I was in Holland. I did mention several times if I could have the contact details of the person that had the dealership in Morocco, but he just wouldn't give me the information even though he was out of the game and unable to proceed. I would have been more than prepared to pay him for it if I could strike a deal with the owner, but the information stayed with him. He did give me a photo of another 33 sedan from his file that was taken in Holland when the cars was new and some other things from his file on my St Regis.

I never chased anything more on this snippet of information I had and searches of the internet did not bring up anything on this dealership.

Buying myself in 2004 / 05 would have been a little challenging at the time, but I could have put the money on the table if needed. We had a new house with great storage and since I was just getting into selling seriously on eBay. My knowledge of Studebaker and parts was reasonably good and since I had spent 3.5 years living in Toronto and going to every Studebaker meet I could get to in that time, my general knowledge on parts was and still is pretty good.

So like anything, if you snooze - you loose. I did not get of my lazy back side and get the dealer info from the museum and jump on a silver bird in the sky and see if I could find the building in Tangiers.


Now fast forward to mid 2016.

I have been dealing with Max Merrit for my Packard parts and in June 2016 Fred Brunners wife Jakie emailed me to see if I could get a case of Specialist wine for Fred's daughters wedding. They get the UK Stude club newsletter forced upon them by myself and when I get on the blower ordering parts we can talk for ages about stuff in general. So I bought a case of plonk and sent it over to them in Indiana.

In one of the emails, Jackie Bruner had mentioned that the she and her husband Fred had just come back from Montreal where she had enjoyed the most strange dish French Canadians love - Poutine, with a bunch of Packard and Studebaker parts that had come out of Morocco. Max was sorting through them as he wanted to off load the Studebaker parts. So I asked her about weather a Avions Voisin was in with the parts. Yepper.

Apparently a Canadian collector had a picture of the King of Morocco in a mid 1920's Avions Voisin. How he came to find the Studebaker Packard dealership parts and the car in Tangiers, I don't know, but he got up and got out there and did what was necessary to get everything.
In July / Aug 2016 I was looking on a great website called prewarcar.com and noticed that the Avions Voisin was for sale. In the listing they mentioned that in order for them to get the deal over the line to get the car Mr Hassan had mentioned that he always liked a 1950 Champion Convertible and that if the deal was to go ahead that the buyer would have to supply one to Mr Hussan plus cash. Weather this actually happened or not, I don't know, but it was mentioned in the listing.


At the time, I did email Ed Reynolds to inform him that Max Merrit had a bunch of Studebaker parts he was going to move on.
Personally I am glad Stephen Cade has them now to help him along getting back into the game of Studebaker.

Well done Stephen, those parts have had an interesting life.

This story in the end was all about liberating the Avions Voisin - the parts were the side show.

Studebakers were exported all over the world and I am sure they took shed loads of them into Morocco and Algeria. They had power and style and were pretty bullet proof compare to the underpowered, crazy design French cars that were available at the time.
Du Jardin in Paris was selling heaps of Studebakers in this period and I think around 10,000 Studebaker's were assembled by D'Ieteren Fres in Brussels from the 1930's to the mid 1960's.


My gut feeling with this Studebaker / Packard Dealer was that Mr Hassan was the main contact point for any Studebaker Packard dealer in Morocco to go through to get parts from America, hence he had probably had a great inventory.

Below is a picture of 82 year old Uli Birnbaum from Germany with his daughter Ursula taken at the International Studebaker meet in France last year with his 1956 Power Hawk that was sold new in Algeria. Behind that is Raymond Loewy's personal 1972 Avanti II that he owned for many years and that was photographed in front of Concorde.





These are excerpts from Jackie Bruner's emails she sent me in June 2016 to give you a heads up that it wasn't easy getting this shipment into Canada. But like anything, working on cars is like banging your head against a brick wall. The more you do it, the better you get at it........

Evidently the whole shipment was originally rejected by Canadian customs, then shipped to France to be re-palletized because the wood used was initially incorrect, then back to Canada.
One of the pics is of a guy on the runningboard with his arm out. He is striking the same pose as the (don’t quote me on this, It’s someone famous but I cannot recall) grandfather of the king of morocco that was in the photo of the vehicle they were using as a reference when looking for the car.

A collector in Canada had his guy looking for that car and when he found it the deal was all the parts had to go with it. So that guy contacted Fred. Fred returned the call but never heard back from the guy until last summer. We drove to Montreal when the parts arrived last August. Fred was able to look at a few parts on the top layer. Sometimes you hit the jackpot and sometimes you don’t. This load had a bunch of Studebaker parts in it. Max has been sorting through it since we got it. That was probably something like September. He is inventorying the Studebaker parts and reboxing them. Hopefully we can unload them to somebody. The collector got his long-sought-after car at the same time the parts arrived in Canada.

As we visited with this collector’s representative in Montreal (his name is Steve Maman who owns an exotic motorcycle shop in Montreal called The Prancing Horse) he not only showed us countless pictures of this collector’s stash of cars, he told us the story of how, when he was in Africa looking for this car, got a tip about cars once owned by Saddam Hussien in Iraq. He traveled there and learned how women and children were being held by ISIS. He is Jewish and explained how his people had waited six years to be liberated during the Holocaust and could not watch this atrocity without doing something. He founded the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI). Here is a link to an article about him.

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/steve-maman-the-jewish-schindler-opens-up-on-saving-yazidis

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[mbstude]

Greg.. I have to say thanks for taking the time to write out all of that. I'd heard tidbits of that from Stephen (from Max and Fred) but it's always fun to learn more from another perspective (and yours is always a good one). There's a lot of history and cool stories around this inventory and I feel pretty fortunate to be a part of it. It sure is a lot of fun, anyway.

As far as the Studebaker parts go.. One thing about Stephen buying it all is that it's soon to be on the market. After 60+ years of being hidden and then shuffled around the world, the parts are now being added to our inventory and will will soon be available for the first time ever. There are a lot of really cool items that have probably never been offered from any vendor. A lot of the "shiny" stuff will be on our tables in South Bend in May.

Greg, I'll post a few pictures later of some of the parts spread out on the warehouse floor. You'll get a kick out of it. And it's always a pleasure to hear from you. Will you be in South Bend?

[go-studebaker]

Hi Matt,
I was wanting to do this as an article for our UK newsletter at some point under the title of 'The one that got away' so I will use it eventually, now that I have just written it. I have also just done a little editing to it about another part of the story I had forgotten about.

From what Peter Schotanus said in 2004, most of the parts were late 40' to mid 50's and there was a lot of golden parts in the inventory and probably heap of black parts as well due to the harsh environment the cars would be subjected to in Morocco.

You will have a lot of fun sorting through that lot and it will do wonders to deepen you knowledge.

Please send me some pictures of the inventory laid out as it would make a great finish to the story. If you can send me a PM with your email address that would be great.

Yes I will be in SB in May. I am catching a lift over with Bob Peterson in his camper van bringing a car to SB for a Canadian chappy. What could possibly go wrong. A real boys trip and I am seriously looking forward to it now, since I havent done something like this since my mis spent youth...

Are you working for Stephen now ?

Rearguards
Greg

[mbstude]

Here's a quick pic of some of the shiny. I'll be happy to help with your article any way that I can.

[mbstude]

A translucent "White Onyx" '52 wheel.




I'll send you my email Greg and I'll send more pics as we go along.