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The two legendary 1983-1984 Miller-Meteor three-door Eldorado hearses were
the brainchild of Spencerville, Ohio's Jack Hardesty, the owner of a small
funeral home supply company called the Barron Corp. Hardesty was also Lima,
Ohio's first sports and imported car dealer and went on to found the Lima
Coach Co, a hearse conversion company that specialized in Dodge Caravans.
When Miller-Meteor went out of business in 1979, Barron Corp. purchased the
trade name of the once-famous coachbuilder. He also owned the local Ziebart franchise,
and most of the work on the second Eldorado was done in the large Ziebart shop.
Bud Bayliff assisted Hardesty in building and engineering the first 1983
Eldorado prototype which was constructed at Bayliff's Lima, Ohio body shop.
In late 1984 Hardesty sold the rights to the Miller-Meteor trade name along with the tooling
for the Eldorado coaches - which also happened to fit Cadillac's new 1985 front-wheel-drive
DeVilles - and the second 1984 Eldorado prototype to Collins
Industries of Hutchinson, Kansas. Hardesty's front drive tooling was the
basis for the 1985 Collins-built Miller-Meteor-Cadillac front drive coaches
which were produced in Hutchinson through 1992.
Hardesty was one of the first builders to develop a bolt-on
stretch for the new Dodge Caravan minivan, which first appeared in 1984. He offered the stretch conversion by
itself, as well as building funeral car conversions using it, but that
effort lost its popularity once Chrysler developed its extended minivans in
1987.
Hardesty's Lima Coach Co. kept busy doing conversions of the extended
minivans, and later sold the operation to a local businessman.
After that, things at Lima Coach went downhill quickly because of the new owner's
reluctance to do any advertising or promotion of the conversions, so it
didn't last long. After selling off Lima Coach, Hardesty kept himself busy
by offering components to funeral directors so they could do their own
minivan service car conversions.
© 2004 Mark Theobald - Coachbuilt.com, with special thanks to Bernie DeWinter
IV.
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