That car was used for the funeral of Chicago mayor Harold Washington, who died in office, in 1987. The funeral home that performed the service and owned the car was A. A. Rayner & Son of Chicago.
The car was originally black. At some point, Rayner repainted it gold to match the rest of their fleet, and then later repainted it again back to black.
There were two of these cars built, but they are not identical. The Barron Corporation bought the rights to the Miller-Meteor name when Wayne shut down the division. Barron wanted to resurrect the name on a line of then-revolutionary front-wheel-drive coaches. With the Cadillac DeVilles and Fleetwoods still rear-drive cars at the time, it was decided to build the new cars from Eldorados.
Barron hired nearby custom car builder Bayliff Coach to build the prototype. Bayliff's design was quite bizarre, and that says alot coming from someone as into oddball coaches as I am! The Bayliff car was similar in general style to the one pictured above, but it had a two-level roof , and the three-piece side windows were straight vertical even though the body side curved in slightly towards the roof, resulting in the windows sticking out from the side of the car.
Barron was not pleased and decided to build a second prototype themselves. The Barron car featured a single-height roofline, and curved side glass for flush-fitting windows. It is the Barron car pictured in the ad shown above.
After the two prototypes though, Barron decided not to get into the car business. The Bayliff-built prototype was displayed at the 1984 NFDA convention and sold to funeral home afterwards. It is currently one of those "lost to history" cars that I've been trying to track down for the past couple years.
The Barron-built prototype, the tooling that had been created for building the car, and the Miller-Meteor name were sold to Collins Industries. Collins was able to adapt the tooling for the new-for-1985 front-drive Cadillacs, and also reworked it to be a more traditional five-door hearse. But the first couple years of Collins MM production continued to feature the three-piece window on the backdoor.
Collins eventually sold the Barron-built prototype, and it ended up at Rayner's in Chicago. I do not know if Rayner bought it directly or if it passed thru one or more other owners, but Rayner obviously had it by 1987. Rayner kept the car for 20 years, and despite them telling me that they would never part with it and despite me making known that I would appreciate a phone call if the car ever came up for sale, it eventually disappeared from their lot without a word and they have not shared with me where it went.
Rayner did also have a matching Eldorado long-wheelbase flower car, and when I was last at Rayner's a couple years ago, the flower car was still there even though the hearse is gone. I shared photos of the flower car with a few pro-car historians, including the late Bernie DeWinter, and no one had any idea that such a car existed, so its a "mystery car" as far as its origins.
