Founded in 1927, Cadillac’s junior LaSalle brand was ultimately not successful, but it produced year after year of memorable cars.
Lawrence Fisher (standing) and Harley Earl with a 1927 LaSalle Roadster
Three men at General Motors played key roles in the creation of LaSalle: Alfred P. Sloan, Lawrence P. Fisher, and Harley Earl. In crafting his famous price ladder of brands at General Motors, CEO Sloan noted that the price gap between Buick and Cadillac was around $1,000, deciding that Cadillac should fill that space with a companion make. As the division’s general manager, Fisher was given the task of creating the new product, and to help design it he brought in California car stylist Harley Earl, who was soon given a new position at GM: Director of the Art and Colour Section. Renamed the Styling Section in 1937, Earl headed it until 1958.
For the exterior of the new LaSalle, Earl borrowed freely and unashamedly from Hispano-Suiza. ‘Hispano was a car I was deeply in love with, from stem to stern,” Earl wrote later. But meanwhile, he added, “I didn’t want to take a chance and and do something that didn’t look like anything.” The result was a car that was clearly American in style, but as rakish and sporty as most any car on the road when it was introduced in March of 1927.
Mechanically, the LaSalle was a Cadillac. just a bit smaller. The wheelbase was 125 inches, compared to 131 inches for the standard Cadillac. Otherwise the chassis were much the same, with beam axles and semi-elliptic springs fore and aft and four-wheel mechanical brakes. At 303 cubic inches, the LaSalle V8 was smaller in displacement than the 341 CID Cadillac, but more up-to-date with side-by-side connecting rods. Rated at 75 hp at 3,000 rpm (the brochure stated “actually, more than 75”), it provided spirited performance for its time. On the high-speed oval at GM’s Milford Proving Ground, a stripped-down LaSalle roadster averaged 95.3 mph for 10 hours.
Charles Lindbergh
For the inaugural season 11 styles were offered, all with bodies by Fisher. (Cadillac president Lawrence Fisher was the fourth of the seven Fisher brothers, who acquired a large block of GM stock when their company was absorbed by GM.) The body styles included a roadster, a popular four-passenger phaeton, a coupe, a Victoria, and a five-passenger town sedan. The name LaSalle was a parallel to Cadillac in that both were taken from French explorers to the New World. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle is best known for exploring the Great Lakes and claiming the Mississippi River for France.
Originally designated the Series 303 and priced at $2.495 to $2,685, comfortably below Cadillac, the LaSalle sold nearly 27,000 copies in 1927 and 1928, giving a healthy boost to Cadillac volume. However, the LaSalle’s footprint on the automotive landscape was always greater than its actual sales, and as Earl’s influence spread across the GM lines, the youthful styling lost its distinction. LaSalle was discontinued after 1940, but not before producing many years of memorable cars.
GM has toyed with resurrecting LaSalle over the years. Two Motorama concept cars (both now owned by Joe Bortz) were labeled LaSalle, and rumor has it that the 1963 Buick Riviera was to be a modern LaSalle. The public knows the name from the hit TV show, “All in the Family,” whose theme song includes “Gee, our old LaSalle ran great. Those were the days. “
Through the 1930s, LaSalle parallelled Packard in cutting costs so much that the desirability of the product suffered. Oldsmobile blossomed while LaSalle wilted.
My first encounter with a LaSalle was a 1929 sedan owned by a person known as Lillian B. Lansche (cq), who was described a St. Louisan of some renown (her initials were on the door of the car). A neighbor near my home purchased the car around 1961-62, and it was the first auto restoration project I had ever seen in my life. I encountered the car more than 40 years later at the annual Easter Sunday classic car show in Forest Park in St. Louis. When I described the car in question, the person showing it said he had purchased it from the very same guy who restored it so long ago!