Funny how a car that stretches this long comes up so short on historical background.
Funny, too, how American Motors essentially disowned a vehicle that could have been its most prestigious.
Of course, American Motors never considered itself a limousine builder. Setting aside the fact that dozens of coachbuilders--not the traditional manufacturers--assembled limousines in the latter half of the century, limousines existed at the complete opposite end of the automotive spectrum from AM's traditional fare. The company hardly even made it easy to convert its products to limousines; unibody construction and the lack of a knock-down program for coachbuilders meant that very few, if any, ambulances, hearses, flower cars or the like used an American Motors chassis.
Top-of-the-line Ambassador SST eschewed six-cylinders and could come with the AMX's 315hp 390-cu.in. V-8. Armbruster-Stageway constructed the Ambassador limousine(s) not for AMC, but for a private leasing company
At least a handful of limousines, on the other hand, did.
For 1969, American Motors made a handful of improvements to the Ambassador, most noticeably the facelift that used horizontal quad headlamps instead of the stacked-style headlamps used since 1965. But a number of less obvious changes took place that year as well, including an increase in wheelbase from 118 to 122 inches and an increase in track from 58.5 to 60 inches.
American Motors capitalized on those changes--along with the introduction of standard air conditioning in the Ambassador the year before--with an ad campaign in 1969 and photos in their brochures in 1970 that posed men dressed as chauffeurs by the new Ambassadors, inviting customers to make appointments for test rides to experience the "rich velour seats" and "posh limousine ride" at their local AM dealerships. "A number of them [the dealerships] have chauffeurs available," the ads promised.
One television ad from that campaign shows a chauffeur picking up a middle-aged suburban couple at their home. The husband and wife naturally enjoy the experience of being driven around the neighborhood, and make sure the driver passes the house of the husband's business partner so he can see the couple in the new Ambassador.
Perhaps inspired by the ad campaign, perhaps driven by a money-making scheme, Robert Estes, the president of Trans World Leasing Inc. in Chicago, decided to commission a number of limousines based on the new Ambassador. For the project, he chose Armbruster-Stageway in Fort Smith, Arkansas, a coachbuilder already well known for its limousine conversions of sedans from a number of different manufacturers.
Armbruster, formed in 1887 in Fort Smith to repair horse-drawn carriages, easily slid into the auto repair business around the turn of the century, but didn't become an actual coachbuilder until the early 1920s, when Jordan Bus Lines commissioned the company to build an extended-wheelbase multi-door coach for short intercity runs. The company billed itself as the originator of the six-door limousine, but built limousines of many different configurations on many different chassis: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, Checker, Chrysler, Pontiac, International.
In the 1960s, Armbruster eventually merged with Stageway, a firm that handled Armbruster's distribution in the Cincinnati area. By 1969, Armbruster-Stageway had become one of the country's largest limousine coachbuilders, employing 55 people in a 50,000-square-foot facility that turned out about 350 coaches on an annual basis.
According to a Milwaukee Journal article from March 19, 1969, Estes received a quote from Armbruster-Stageway of $100,000 for the first car, $80,000 of which was for the dies used to stamp new sheetmetal sections. Build time for the first limousine lasted 18 weeks, and Estes told the newspaper he planned to lease the cars, possibly to "numerous American Motors dealers that want to buy them for corporate customers." Later on in the article, Estes claimed he already had 12 lease orders for the limousine.
About a year later, Guy Casaday, a young AMC enthusiast, thought he saw a 1969 Ambassador limousine, painted gold metallic with a black vinyl roof, entering the Lincoln Tunnel in New York City. He soon after wrote to American Motors to confirm what he had seen, but John Conde, AM's assistant director of public relations at the time, only referred Casaday to Trans World Leasing.
"American Motors does not manufacture the limousine that you referred to," Conde wrote. "We don't know if more than one model has been built or not." The downtown Chicago address that American Motors provided for Trans World Leasing seems to lie directly underneath the Metra-Ogilvie train station.
How many limousines Estes actually had Armbruster-Stageway build remains unclear; the Armbruster-Stageway records from that era are either missing or destroyed. What happened to that first limousine also remains unclear, though Mike Spangler, who edits the club newsletter for the American Motors Owners Association, believes it may have found its way into his garage.
In about 2000, Mike saw an advertisement for the limousine, then located in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, about 30 miles from his home in Jefferson, Wisconsin. "We went to look at the car with the intention of just photographing it for our AMO club newsletter," Spangler said. "But when we saw it, we could not pass it up."
The seller claimed he bought the car from a government auction, and that Wisconsin governors Warren Knowles and Patrick Lucey had used the limousine in their travels around the state, particularly to Kenosha.
But Mike later found documentation in the glovebox that indicated the previous owner had traded a Chrysler for the limousine in Rockford, Illinois--not too far west of Chicago. Regardless, Mike continued to hear of people seeing one of the two governors riding in the Ambassador; one woman even told him she gave Knowles a haircut in the limousine.
As Mike received the limousine, it remained fairly complete, but tired. The suspension had sagged over time, the power window motors had frozen and the brakes had quit working. But the body had been well maintained--enough for Mike to get a glimpse into how Armbruster-Stageway converted this particular car.
To begin with, the Arkansas coachbuilder used an Ambassador SST four-door sedan with the AMX four-barrel 315hp 390-cu.in. V-8, backed with a Borg-Warner automatic transmission and a Twin-Grip limited-slip differential with 3.15 gears. To overcome the Ambassador's unibody construction, Armbruster-Stageway used what Spangler describes as four-inch I-beams to bridge the expanse created by stretching the Ambassador to its current 158-inch wheelbase.
Unlike many other limousines, Armbruster-Stageway welded shut the normal Ambassador rear doors, fashioned a second pair of doors using another set of front door skins and unique door frames, then situated that second pair of doors immediately behind the front doors.
"It's kind of a weird design," Mike said. "This way, the executives or VIPs had to climb through the middle of the car to get to the back seat."
On their way to the back seat, they also would have had to pass a pair of jump seats, the existence of which leads Mike to believe this limousine may be the first Ambassador limo that Armbruster-Stageway built. According to the Milwaukee Journal article, Estes had the first Ambassador built with jump seats "for transportation of corporate personnel," but planned a center divider, full bar, pullout desk and telephone for successive limousines.
Of course, whether Estes followed through with those plans (or even with his plans to lease the limousines to AM dealerships, for that matter) also remains unknown, leaving the exact pedigree of Mike's Ambassador vague. Not as though he has to worry about parking next to another one, however.
"I've checked every roster of every AMC club I belong to, and didn't see another limousine," he said. "We heard that there may be one still running around Boston, but we also heard it may have been junked."
For now, Mike drives it for special occasions--proms, weddings, eighth-grade dances--and to the occasional show. He even once picked up the AMO club president at the airport with the Ambassador.
"There I was among all the other limousines, and the other drivers were all wondering what I was doing there," he said.
Now that's the definition of exclusivity.
