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Known Fire Apparatus body builder
Kalamazoo's carriage and windmill industries also benefited from the area's
hardwoods and rail network (five railroads and one hundred daily passenger
trains in the 1880s). In 1887 the City of Kalamazoo had eighteen carriage
firms, which produced 87,000 buggies.
Like many Michigan communities, Kalamazoo was struck by
the automobile manufacturing boom of the early twentieth century. Two of the
city's more impressive early automobiles were the Michigan, with a 22-coat
finish of "Michigan, golden, auto brown" and the Roamer, an imitation of the
British Rolls Royce. Movie stars Mary Pickford and Buster Keaton were two of
the Roamer's most celebrated owners.
Though Kalamazoo's automobile manufacturing industry
never flourished, the city became the home of the Checker Cab Manufacturing
Corporation in 1923. Boasting that its cabs never wore out, Checker combined
innovation and quality to become one of the nation's leading cab
manufacturers in the late 1920s. Though it quit making cabs in 1982, Checker
still produces automobile parts.
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Kalamazoo Coaches 1930s-1940s, Kalamazoo, Michigan
On August 27, 1940, Sales obtained a franchise agreement
from Kalamazoo Coaches, Inc., the manufacturer of the Pony Cruiser bus,
under which Sales was given the exclusive right to sell the Pony Cruiser to
bus operators in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Colorado,
New
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