1948 Mercury Templeton Saturn "Bob Hope Special" Roadster... Lloyd Templeton was not a professional car designer. He was a man from Ames, Iowa, who had an idea and two willing sons, and between 1950 and 1951 they built the only car like this that has ever existed. The body was stitched together from six American manufacturers: a Mercury chassis and windshield, a lengthened Chrysler hood, rear fenders reshaped from 1946 Chevrolets, a Hudson hood repurposed as the rear deck lid, a cut-down 1948 Dodge grille, and 1946 Pontiac bumpers front and rear. None of it should work together. All of it does. Under the hood sat a full-race Mercury 239 cubic inch flathead V8 fitted with rare Speedway finned high-compression cylinder heads, a Fenton dual intake manifold, and twin Stromberg carburetors producing around 200 horsepower. The dashboard was modeled after a B-52 cockpit with 32 individual instruments and controls. The driver sat just ahead of the rear axle. Templeton said he named it Saturn because he believed it would run rings around everything else on the road. He was not wrong. When the car eventually traveled to California, influential people in the film industry noticed it immediately. The plan was to feature it in a movie starring Bob Hope, the joke being to compare the long nose of the car to Hope's own famous profile. The film was never made, but Hope liked the car so much he asked Templeton's permission to drive it anytime it was in California. That is how a backyard project from Iowa ended up being driven around Hollywood by one of the most famous comedians in America. The Saturn received awards from coast to coast, from the Pan Pacific Auditorium in California to the 1952 Speedarama in Minneapolis to a ten-day display as Car of Tomorrow at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. When Templeton passed away in the 1970s, he donated the car to his church. The church never promoted it, and his son eventually bought it back. It appeared on the lawn at Pebble Beach in 2012. There is exactly one in the world, and it was built by a man in Iowa who simply decided to build it. © Automobile Historia #archaeohistories