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Panhandle man restoring rare car

Lloyd Blocker, owner of Trio Motors in Pensacola, found his 1948 Keller Super Chief in a recently purchased warehouse full of antique cars.

CANTONMENT - Many know about the Tucker and will remember the Kaiser and Frazier automobiles, but hardly anyone knows about or has seen the Keller Super Chief.

Only a few prototypes were produced, and only three of those are known to survive. One is in Cantonment. Lloyd Blocker, owner of Trio Motors in Pensacola, recently purchased a warehouse full of antique cars in Bastrop, La. In the mix of more than 20 vehicles, he found a Keller.

"I didn't know what a Keller was," Blocker said. "It was in with a '35 Ford, a '63 Studebaker Avanti, a 1930 Packard and a 1953 Corvette. I was moving many of the cars to Cantonment, ignoring the Keller. Then my wife looked the Keller up on the Internet, and when I found out how rare it was, I brought it right away."

The wooden station wagon is intact but does not run and needs restoration work.

Ron Barnett of Union Grove, Ala., who owns another of the Kellers, said Keller Motors began in California as the Bobbi-Kar and later was moved to Huntsville, Ala., where George Keller was hired as an adviser. In 1947, a group of investors and Keller bought the company and were joined by Hubert Mitchell, an entrepreneur from Hartselle, Ala. The company was incorporated in Delaware on Nov. 25, 1947. According to an article published in Special Interest Autos in 1975, Mitchell and Keller sold franchises and took in $450,000 on a 10-day trip to New York.

To get production tooling,the company decided to sell common stock, and half the issue was presold. On Oct. 5, 1949, just a few hours before the stock sale was finalized, George Keller was found dead of a heart attack. That pulled the plug on Keller Motors.

"Of the prototypes, we know one car went to the junk yard," Barnett said. "One was made into a tractor, and one was run over by a train."

Mitchell's grandson, Buzz, owns the other car.

[Last modified June 20, 2005, 04:55:37]