To Be OFFERED AT AUCTION WITHOUT RESERVE at RM Sothebys' The Guyton
Collection event, 4 - 5 May 2019.
Estimate:
$250,000 - $300,000
- Formerly owned by William Snyder and William Raithel
- Documented in Dyke W. Ridgley's Marmon Sixteen Roster
- Older restoration with a national award-winning past
- Offered with a set of new cylinder heads, original sales
literature, and service information
- Classic Car Club of America (CCCA) Full Classic
Like all great pieces of art, the Marmon Sixteen was one man's
vision of perfection. Automobile pioneer Colonel Howard Marmon
created a triumph of pattern-making and foundry technology,
containing at its heart an all-aluminum V-16 engine on a
state-of-the-art chassis. With 200 hp from over 490-cu in., the car
was capable of out-accelerating a Duesenberg Model J, yet it cost
one-third as much. It was dressed by Walter Dorwin Teague Jr., an
MIT student working for his father's industrial design firm, whose
crisp lines, devoid of gratuitous ornamentation and characterized
by sharp design shapes, embodied the lean sportiness of the
age.
It was a design in which superb styling and world-class engineering
existed with harmonious balance, as has seldom been seen before or
since. Like a fine Swiss watch or the best mahogany speedboat, it
whispered quietly but firmly of its owner's wealth and exquisite
taste.
The Guyton Sixteen is one of the few whose original owner is known;
Indiana title records identify him as having been Edward McConnell
of 21 West 42nd Street in Indianapolis. Like most all Classics it
had a period as a "used car," when it was creatively used by a
small-town deputy sheriff as a police car. In 1948, it was sold by
its owner's son, John Steeds, to 17-year-old William Snyder. Snyder
drove the car in his last year of high school and on dates, and it
obviously made a major impression; as a successful businessman he
would go on to become an early and significant Marmon Sixteen
enthusiast and collector. Mr. Snyder went to college out of state
and had to sell the car to a Mr. Chittenden of Bedford, Ohio. It
next passed in the early 1950s to Clarence Stevens of Munson, Ohio,
then later that decade to J.M. Owen of Dayton.
In the late 1970s the car was advertised for sale by Mrs. Richard
Seybold of Tipp City, Ohio, a member of the Studebaker family. It
was sold to William Raithel of Rochester, New York, who found the
original close coupled sedan body to be in very poor condition, the
car having been used to house chickens. Fortunately, Mr. Raithel
had earlier acquired a correct and original Sixteen convertible
sedan body at Hershey and had this body restored on the newly
purchased Sixteen chassis and engine by Wilkinson & Sharpe and his
own shop.
The restoration work was completed by 1985, and Mr. Raithel enjoyed
exhibiting the car for a decade, earning 2nd in class at the Pebble
Beach Concours d'Elegance in 1988 and achieving both an AACA
National First Prize and a CCCA Senior First Prize (no. 1689). He
then sold the car, via the Blackhawk Collection, to Fred Guyton in
1996.
Largely maintained on exhibit in Mr. Guyton's museum since, the car
is now an older restoration. Recent inspection showed that the car
retained its original LeBaron body number tag from 1931.
Significantly, the convertible sedan is offered with a set of the
new, improved Marmon Sixteen cylinder heads, from the recent
reproductions produced by Gary Severns and Dyke Ridgley, which
should prove a boon to any new caretaker who intends to drive the
car as Colonel Howard Marmon intended.To view this car and others
currently consigned to this auction, please visit the RM website at
rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/gc19.
