Earl Muntz

The huckster, TV commercial pioneer, automaker and electronics manufacturer--and, as some have called him, marketing genius--Earl Muntz was born on Jan. 3, 1904, in Elgin, IL. He showed an early interest in electronics, and at age 8 had already built his first radio (a few years later he built a radio for his parents' car). He dropped out of high school and went to work in his parents' hardware store in Elgin. At age 20 he opened up a used-car lot in town and actually made a go of it. A few years later, however, on a trip to California, he noticed that used cars were selling for far higher prices than they were in Elgin, so he opened up a lot in Glendale, CA. In the late '30s he had an opportunity to pick up a dozen right-hand-drive cars for next to nothing--they had been made for customers in Asia, but were unable to be shipped there due to the Japanese takeover of most of Asia just prior to WW 2 (one was a custom-made Lincoln built for Chinese dictator Kai-Shek Chiang). Muntz got local newspapers to write some articles about these unique cars, and within two weeks he had sold all of them for a handsome profit. Realizing that L.A. was where the money was, he closed his Elgin lot and relocated permanently to California. Having made a considerable amount of money because of what was basically a publicity stunt, Muntz decided to go even further over the top. He developed the persona of "Madman" Muntz, a somewhat crazed used-car salesman who dressed in outrageous costumes and performed wild stunts (he once featured an old clunker as a "manager's special" and claimed that if the car didn't sell, he'd smash it to pieces on TV with a sledgehammer. It didn't sell, of course, and he kept his promise), on a series of quirky, humorous--and wildly successful--TV commercials that blanketed the Los Angeles area, making him the predecessor of such well-known used-car pitchmen as Cal Worthington ("If I can't sell you a car I'll eat a bug!" and Ralph Williams ("Hi friends, Ralph Williams here!"). He caught the imagination of L.A. television viewers, who took him to their hearts, and "Madman" Muntz quickly became a local celebrity. People would come to his used-car lot not to buy a car but to see him, and at one point his lot was rated by a local travel agency as the 7th most visited site in Southern California. In 1948 race-car driver Frank Kurtis developed and marketed a new two-seater sports car, but only sold 16 vehicles over the next two years. He sold the company and rights to Muntz in 1950. Muntz immediately retooled the car, redesigned it, lengthened it into a four-seater, renamed it the "Muntz Jet" and put it on the market. Although it was a well-built, reliable car and sold fairly wellk for its price (about $5,000), Muntz's improvements in design and amenities--it had aluminum body panels, a removable fiberglass top, a Cadillac (later Lincoln) V8 engine and the back armrests contained a full cocktail bar--increased production costs, and after selling about 400 cars, and losing about $400,000, he ceased production in 1954. If there was one thing Muntz was really known for, however, it was manufacturing TV sets. He made his first one in 1946. A self-taught electrical engineer, he saw that the few TV sets available at the time were big, bulky, complicated, heavy, had small screens and were expensive. By taking apart and examining the various makes of TVs on the market, he figured out how to build a good set, using a minimum amount of parts but delivering a good picture, for less than $100 (the average 12-inch TV set went for about $450). He also included a built-in aerial in his sets, a major innovation--most TVs had to use an aerial that attached to the roof of the building in order to get reception, and apartment buildings at the time often had rules prohibiting the use of aerials on their roofs, so many apartment residents didn't have TVs, making them prime customers for Muntz's sets. He marketed his TVs with the same types of outrageous TV commercials and radio and newspaper ads as he did with his cars, and the sets sold like wildfire. In 1951 alone his company grossed almost $50 million. Unfortunately, by the mid-1950s color TV was introduced and the market for black-and-white TVs like Muntz's shrank precipitously. In 1953 his company lost almost $1.5 million. He hung on for a few more years, but by 1959 Muntz's TV operation was forced to declare bankruptcy and shut its doors. Not one to let adversity get him down, Muntz turned to another market--car stereos. He invented the Stereo-Pak four-track tape cartridge, a direct predecessor to the famous eight-track tape cartridge so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Muntz chose to make it in stereo because many more records were being recorded in stereo than in monaural, and he believed that mono was on its way out. Before Muntz's Stereo-Pak system, the only units that could play pre-recorded music in an automobile were actual record players designed for that purpose--several higher-end cars such as Cadillac and Lincoln offered them as options--but they would skip when the car hit a bump or pothole, often scratching and ruining the record that was being played. Muntz's tape player was called the Autostereo--the manufacturing of which he contracted out to a Japanese company--and could play an entire album from start to finish with no bumps, skips and eliminating the need to flip over the record to play the other side. Muntz also made a deal with the major record companies to license their catalogs and then manufactured the tapes himself, to be sold in his own chain of electronics stores alongside the tape players. Aircraft engineer Bill Lear, who had just developed the LearJet, contracted with Muntz to install his tape players in Lear's aircraft. Lear was so impressed with the unit that he did what Muntz earlier did to TV sets--he took it apart and looked for a way to improve it. He wound up developing his own tape player, the Lear 8-Track. It was wildly successful and demand for Muntz's 4-Track units slipped substantially. In addition, Muntz had not counted on the large number of cartridges returned from dealers when a particular album ran its course, and the credits he had to issue to them for returned merchandise greatly ate into his profits. If that wasn't bad enough, a fire in 1970 at his main office caused severe damage to the facility. All these factors contributed to Muntz closing down his tape player/cartridge business that year. As usual, though, Muntz didn't stay idle for long. He entered the burgeoning home-video market. In the mid-'70s he took a Sony 15-inch color TV, equipped it with a special lens and mirror he had developed, then projected the enlarged image onto an even bigger screen, enclosing the entire unit in a large wooden console. What he had done was to develop one of the first, if not the first, widescreen projection TVs designed for home use. By 1977 he was selling millions of dollars worth of these units every year. Two years later he decided to sell VCRs and blank tapes at bargain prices--usually less than it cost him to buy them--in order to lure people into his showroom so he could sell them the more expensive projection systems. As it turned out, he sold so many VCRs and tapes that he actually wound up making money on them. Not all of his business ventures were successful, though. In the 1980s he invested a lot of money in Technicolor's Compact Video Cassette (CVC), a system intended to compete with Sony's Betamax and the VHS and Super-8 systems. The CVC system tanked big-time and Muntz lost his entire investment and then some. He was forced to close his electronics store shortly afterwards. Not long before his death from lung cancer in 1987 he got into the cellular phone business. By the time he died he was the biggest cellular phone dealer in Los Angeles.