A Tale of the Dale

The Dale automobile was revealed to the world in late 1973, and the world was interested. It was a time when the U.S. car industry was in turmoil, struggling to absorb the triple wallops of fuel shortages, new emission and safety regulations, and a brutal recession. And it was doing it all quite clumsily. Things got so bad that industry observers had begun wondering aloud if America’s Big 3 dinosaurs would even survive. The time was surely ripe for a new way of approaching the automobile. On cue, a colorful collection of salesmen, dreamers, and scalawags were lining up to make their pitch. Malcolm Bricklin’s gull-winged safety sports car had potential. If Bricklin had been as good at making cars as he was selling them, he might have made it. Bob Beaumont’s electric powered CitiCar might have single-handedly saved the nation from a couple of energy crises, had only period battery technology been up to the task. But the most interesting of them all may have been Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, president of the 20th Century Motor Car Company. She promised a space-aged plastic 3-wheeler called the Dale, that got 70mpg and cost just $2000. As it would turn out, the car, the company, and their creator, were not quite what they appeared to be.

Liz Carmichael’s journey to transform the American automobile, as she told it, began in rural Indiana. A farm girl who rose from the muck to earn a degree in engineering at the Ohio State University. She then met and married a NASA scientist, who later died tragically. Of what, we are not told. It is also not known how long the widow grieved before she met an imaginative and talented engineer named Dale Leon Clift. Clift had built a spunky, thrifty 3-wheeled roadster in his garage out of motorcycle parts. He used it to blast around town on errands, terrifying old ladies and entertaining everybody else. Carmichael was somehow able to convince Clift to sell her his car - along with the right to the designs -in exchange for $1,000 cash, and the promise of $3 million after she’s gotten it into production. The check bounced, but she did name the car after him. 

The next time we meet Liz Carmichael she is at the Los Angeles International Auto Show in late 1973, where she is touting a futuristic looking 3-wheeled sedan called the Dale. It was a show stopper. Even though it had 3 wheels, the design was said by Carmichael to be un-tippable, with a center of gravity within the triangle formed by the 3 wheels. The design removed 300lbs of gas- guzzling weight compared to a similar sized car with 4 wheels. The Dale was touted as being ingeniously simple. Every one of its mechanical components was said to be replaceable in 30 minutes or less. The Dale needed no wiring, either. Everything electrical was handled by a printed circuit dashboard. If that wasn’t miraculous enough, the space aged body was indeed made of an “aerospace plastic” called Rigidex. This “rocket-structural resin” was said to withstand a 50mph impact with a brick wall! The crowning result of this high tech wizardry - Twentieth Century Motors claim of 70mpg economy, 85mph performance, all for a price of just $2000! These were numbers of pure joy to the fuel starved, recession weary consumers of the 1970s. The Dale was acclaimed as an automotive revolution.

And Liz Carmichael, herself, was as attention worthy as her car. At six feet tall, she possessed tremendous presence. And as the first female CEO of an auto company, she had the makings of an icon of the Sexual Revolution. She was written up in Newsweek and People magazine. The L.A. media was all over her. Johnny Carson even mentioned the Dale and its “creator” on the Tonight Show. 

But beneath that shimmering, rocket-structural resin surface, things were a little murkier. California regulators were beginning to look into 20th Century Motors’ financial dealings. Stories began to emerge that a number of 20th Century’s staff, including Ms. Carmichael’s assistant and PR director, William Miller, had ties to the Mob. Those stories got a lot louder when one morning Mr. Miller turned up dead in his Encino office with 4 bullets in his head. A local television investigative news team made a surprise visit to the abandoned Lockheed aerospace hangers that the company listed as its factory. They found no workers, no machine tools and no cars. 

And no Liz. She had skipped town.

When running from the law, one might be expected to lay low so as not draw attention to yourself. Carmichael appears to have figured she’d fool the authorities by doing the unexpected. She had fled to Texas, where she was attempting to restart the Dale, which had been renamed the Revette. Give her credit for chutzpah. Liz had managed to get the TV game show, The Price is Right, to feature a Revette, aka Dale. While the contestant did not guess the Revette’s price, an eagle eyed California regulator watching daytime TV recognized the yellow 3-wheeler hiding in plain sight on national television. A few days later the former 20th Century Motors CEO was arrested outside of Dallas. 

It was then that authorities discovered that Carmichael was actually on the lam twice! As it turns out, her life story was as fabricated as the car she was promoting. Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael had once been Gerald Dean Michaels, who since 1961, had been wanted by the feds for fraud, theft and counterfeiting. After a nearly 2 year investigation and trial, Michaels was convicted in 1975 on the federal charges committed while presenting as a man. 

While appealing the case, a $50,000 bail was posted by someone described as a “mysterious perfume merchant.” This turned out to be a television producer who wanted the exclusive rights to the story for an expose’ he was planning. In the midst of delivering her story, Carmichael promptly disappeared again. It wasn’t for another dozen years that another TV producer, this time with the NBC series, Unsolved Mysteries, found her running a flower stand under the name of Katherine Johnson in…no kidding…Dale, Texas. She served 10 years in federal prison on the earlier charges. Upon her release, it was California’s turn. Carmichael spend another 32 months in jail on charges related to the Dale fraud.

All that time behind bars apparently cured Carmichael of her desire for the limelight. Upon her second release, she returned to Texas to quietly live out her life until cancer took her in 2004. 

It was a heck of a ride.

And what of the Dale automobile? Depending on the source, 20th Century Motors produced either 2 or 3 prototypes. All of them were yellow but only one had an engine - and that one may or may not have been hooked up to anything. Fittingly, one of the Dales resides back in Los Angeles where it all began. It has been a part of the permanent collection of the Petersen Museum since 1994.

Copyright@2020  by Mal Pearson

 Sources

Liz, Jerry and the Steel-Spine Newshound, by Jim Donnelly. Hemmings Classic Car, February 2013

Murders, Transexuals and the Price Is Right, by Jason Tochinsky.  www.Jalopnik.com 4/1/03

Liz Carmichael.  www.UnsolvedMysteries.fandom.com

Dollar for Dollar, the Best Car Never Built!, www.CurbsideClassics.com 11/4/16