Note to Jim PEI
There is no 1954 Kaiser Traveler. As I noted in KFOCI HANDBOOK Version 4.0, the traveler in rough but potentially restorable condition that has 1954 Kaiser cowl and tail lights on it is according to the tags a 1953 Kaiser Manhattan 4-door Traveler with the custom interior and paint plus a special order number on the firewall tag. My father's 1953 Show Dragon also got the new cowl and tail lights along with a supercharged engine. When the car was disassembled, it turned out that (according to Mike Barker) the fenders were hand formed test stampings; production fenders had pre-punched holes for "Kaiser Manhattan" script which have different pins than "Kaiser Dragon" script.
Ah, I agree with you completely! Pity there was no 54 Traveler, just like there was no 54 Dragon. What you say is completely in line with what the small manufacturers did...ie, pull cars off the production line (one Studebaker example is the "Frua Larks" that got sent over to Italy for the Frua design exercise) and modify them for special purposes such as show cars, mules for next year's model showing the changes in a running vehicle, or sometimes, from a special internal or external order. The point about the pins/fender is well taken!
As far as the Travelers, there were no 5325 Manhattan Travelers made in regular production (they were all 5315 Deluxe Travelers), although I could swear that I saw a picture once of a one-off factory 53 Manhattan Traveler. I would hazard a guess that it too started off as a 5315, and had the Manhattan trim added, and that car would have been a 999/888 too, I betcha. So, the same way I would consider that "54 Traveler" to be a similar sort of exercise, and definitely they, like the 53, would NOT have had created a one-off body tag just to build an 'feasibility evaluation' car. Similarly, "54 Dragons" and those 2door Carabelas we have heard about--they would have had a tag that was almost certainly different that what they purported to be.
I have seen up close a 1966 "special order car from a little old lady and determined long time customer" Studebaker" in the last few years, that is carefully stored by a former Studebaker dealer. As well, I have a previously unknown and unusual (and perhaps the only one (still) existing??) 1964 Studebaker 2 door "Commander Special" which was a special Canadian factory build, as the build sheet shows, and which all the experts agreed either wasn't original or had the wrong serial number attached, until I got the production order from the Studebaker National Museum. I am very intrigued by factory specials, show cars, and authorized or unauthorized insider modifications, as you might see.
