Packard, the dominant carmaker in the prestige/luxury car field.

Cadillac management made the canny decision to avoid going downmarket as Packard had done--a move that damaged Packard's image almost irreparably and led eventually to the company's demise 20 years later.

Cadillac chose the high road of an all-luxury line of cars, along with a post-War spirit of technological innovation. By the late Forties, the division had established itself as the "standard of the world," as its now-revived slogan so proudly declared.

The Schwartz Cadillac you see here is a blend of the brilliant young engineers' thinking and the division's more traditional virtues of stateliness and elegance. The Series 75 vehicles retained the general look of the pre-War Cadillacs with a post-War facelift. The car stands tall and dignified. This look was a stark contrast to Cadillac's all-new 1949 Series 60 cars, which introduced the tailfin to the world and embodied a style that was low, sleek, and almost racy for its time.

Yet under the imposing hood of this wood-bodied star-carrier could be seen the future.

The engine of the Schwartz Cadillac is the revolutionary, all-new, overhead-valve/high-compression V8 that established Cadillac (along with its sister division Oldsmobile) as the technological leader of the immediate post-War era.