New car Allstate Sales

[Gordie]

There has been some controversy about where Allstates were sold when they were new.  There were several Sears stores in the South that were supposed to be the only stores officially licensed to sell the new cars but my Allstate was purchased from the Grandson of the original owner who remembered him getting it at the Sears store in Santa Barbara CA and others remember seeing  Allstate's in San Francisco and other large Sears outlets.  Does anyone have an invoice for an Allstate sale from other than the officially licensed stores in the South?  Allstate's supposedly were not offered in Sears Catalogs but does anyone have an ad from one?  I know that there were newspaper ads but if Sears did not advertise there would have been very limited exposure for Sears customers to see one of the new cars.  I know that a few magazines did road tests on the Allstate and there were many for the Henry J.  Sears did have sales brochures for both years of the Allstate as well as a postcard illustrating the 1952 model.

[HJ-ETEX]

Jim Lape and Dave Antram brought an Allstate to the KF National at Hoffman Estates (Chicago) Il. Their claim was a woman who worked for Sears outside of the recognized Southern Area went internally to get her Allstate. If this is true, why not else where? As you suggest Gordie, is there an invoice for this deliveries?
Another thought comes to mind is the Darrin. I am told that several dealerships had Darrins on loan to demonstrate, but they didn't actually sell any of the cars.  Perhaps Allstate cars were shown outside of the Southern area as a means of testing additional markets?

[Corsairdeluxe]

Antram's ALLSTATE. I was interested in it.

[joefrazer]

Here's the invoice for the Allstate sold new in Michigan.

[Gordie]

Thanks for sharing that invoice as it is the first one that I have ever seen for an Allstate. It is interesting that the invoice is a generic one with only Sears Roebuck Co. and no address but they do have the buyers address in Michigan.  I wonder where the Sears store was?  It is also interesting that Sears only used stores in the South and Southwest to test market their new cars.  It would seem more logical to have a new Allstate in every store that had an automotive service center.  Perhaps K-F did not want to make all of the K-F dealers upset by having them be in direct competition all at once and nationwide.  They certainly would have sold a lot more cars if they were available in the bigger car sales areas in large cities.  Initially there were over fifty K-F dealers just in the Southern California area under Earl Muntz's distributorship.  Earl Muntz opened up a used car lot on Sepulveda Blvd in Van Nuys Ca and I was curious and stopped by to see what it was.  I was also a used car dealer at the time.  I did not meet Earl but his Muntz car was parked by the office.  That used car lot did not last long and several months later he opened his Muntz Stereo store a few blocks North on Roscoe Blvd and Sepulveda.

[HJ-ETEX]

Perhaps the marketing people had a better handle on who would be interested in buying an Allstate car than I have. There were no performance or luxury distinctions between a HJ and an Allstate. The best idea I can think of is some buyers might trust a Sears Automotive as opposed to a Filling Station that just recently acquired a KF dealership. But those sort of KF dealerships were purged around 1950 weren't they?

[swade41]

Anyone ever hear of this

"Special 51 J that was retagged as a 52 Vagabond and then to a Allstate. 1952 and a half Allstates are very rare making those taillights even rarer since GM loaned them the lamps for that half year model only."

[Fid]

swade41, that info is not correct at all. It's true that the first '52 Allstates were reserialed '51 Henry Js (just like the '52 Henry J Vagabond) but they have tail lights similar to the '51 style Henry J tail lights. The car in the picture has some GM tail lights (look like Buick) that someone else put on it after the fact.  They are not original to the car.  The car in the picture appears to be a Henry J which is evident by the marks left by missing trunk script.

[joefrazer]

They are Buick tail lights.

Amazing how stories take on a life of their own!