THE HAMMOND DUESENBERG Chassis number 2369 was ordered from the Duesenberg factory in late 1929 as a chassis by Esther Fiske Hammond.

Granddaughter of the head of the famed New England department store chain, Jordan Marsh, she divorced her equally wealthy husband, another Boston retail scion, in 1910 and moved to Santa Barbara, California, where, working through her brother as a straw man of sorts, she bought up considerable tracts of seaside land in what is today Montecito.

When not residing at her own palatial estate in the area, where she threw numerous decadent parties, she would occasionally travel to her second home, neighboring the Wrigley Mansion in Pasadena.

She was a woman one would like to have met—the kind who at age 62 must have seen one of the new Model Js, perhaps bodied by Pasadena’s own Walter M.

Murphy Company, and thus in late 1929 ordered a chassis from the Duesenberg factory and had Murphy fashion it in an appropriately sporting mien.

Not just a “Disappearing ...