Jordan Playboy History

The Playboy debuted in 1919 as part of Jordan's Series F, a smart two-seat sporting roadster that replaced the earlier Sport Roadster. Like its early stablemates it used a Continental L-head straight-six (the model 9N, roughly 303 cubic inches and about 56 horsepower), with Jordan's hallmark bright colors and low, rakish lines. It quickly became the marque's signature car, and the Playboy name carried through to the very end: the final Great Line Eight-based roadsters of 1931 (a handful assembled from leftover parts into early 1932 as the firm was liquidated) still wore it.

The Playboy's lasting fame rests on advertising rather than mechanicals. In the Saturday Evening Post of June 1923, Ned Jordan ran 'Somewhere West of Laramie' — sixty-odd words of romantic copy, illustrated with a woman in a cloche hat racing a cowboy on horseback, that sold a feeling rather than a spec sheet. It is widely cited as one of the first and most influential pieces of image-based, emotion-led car advertising, and it pitched the car explicitly to liberated women as well as men.