The Arab Oil Embargo had ended in March 1974, but fuel remained expensive through the year. The high gas prices, in conjunction with soaring unemployment and inflation, the plummeting of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its lowest level in a dozen years, and President Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal had led America into a recession. The nation was eager for good news of any kind.

Excitement abounded in November when the recently-formed Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation announced it was developing a high-economy vehicle that would transform the industry. Dubbed “The Dale,” the three-wheeled, electronically-operated, two-seat sports car was said to get sixty to seventy miles-per-gallon, be virtually accident proof, and sell for less than $2,000. Perhaps equally amazing, this wonder-car was the brainchild of a woman.

Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of five, boasted her miracle on wheels was the solution to the energy crisis. The grandiose claim seemed, and was, too good to be true. The car was a sham and Liz the Whiz went on the lam with investors’ money. She also turned out to be something else.

In a broad sense, the Tale of the Dale could be described as “RuPaul meets Nascar.”

 “Liz Carmichael” Perched Aside “The Dale”

 

In promotional literature, The Dale was extolled as “the first Space Age Automobile,” and “designed and built like it’s ready to be driven to the moon.” Equipped with a printed circuit board system in place of conventional wiring, the Dale’s eight-hundred-fifty cc (cubic centimeter) air-cooled two-cylinder engine generating forty horsepower would, Carmichael contended, enable it to reach eighty-five-miles-per-hour.

At one-hundred-ninety-inches long, fifty-one-inches high, and having a one-hundred–fourteen inch wheelbase, the Dale’s dimensions were within the ranges of most cars, but it weighed under 1,000 pounds due to the eliminating of one rear wheel, which, in addition to enabling the better gas mileage, was said to make the car virtually impossible to tip over due to the low center of gravity always remaining inside the triangle of the three wheels.

Carmichael also deemed The Dale the safest of all automobiles because of its special aerospace plastic capable of sustaining a fifty-mile-per-hour impact against a brick wall and that it’s nearly indestructible “rocket resin” made it bulletproof.

 

The Dale Promotional Advertisements

 

The average new car cost roughly $4,440 in 1974; now it is around $47,000. Carmichael said The Dale could be purchased for only $2,000, just under $13,000 in today’s money.

The Proclaimed Car Of The Future

 

Named after a business in Ayn Rand’s anti-collectivist novel Atlas Shrugged, the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation was incorporated in Nevada in August 1974 and headquartered in Burbank, California; Carmichael also leased a corporate office in nearby Encino.

The following month, the corporation began leasing a 15,000 square-foot industrial building in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, for $1,500 per month. Three prototypes of the Dale were made in the building designated as a research and development laboratory.

Carmichael And A Dale Scale-Model

 

In December, three months later, another lease of $13,700 per month was taken out for three aircraft hangers encompassing 150,000 square-feet at the Burbank Airport where Carmichael said mass production of five-hundred cars would begin in June 1975. By September, she predicted 5,000 Dales would be manufactured per month.

Renderings Of the Supposed Assembly Production Plants

 

The money for the expensive rent was generated from the publicity of the “Car of the Future.” People flocked to invest in the Dale after a prototype was displayed at the 1975 Los Angeles Auto Show. More money poured in following Carmichael’s interviews with Motor Trend, Autoweek, Newsweek, and People magazines, as well as the car being showcased on a 1975 episode of The Price Is Right, and Johnny Carson’s mentioning of the automobile on The Tonight Show.

     

The Dale At The Los Angeles Auto Show And On The Price Is Right

 

Liz Carmichael proudly proclaimed 88,000 Dales would be produced in the first year. By the Earth’s next trip around the sun, however, the neon yellow Space Age Vehicle had yet to launch and its demise was imminent.

The Dale Begins To Fail

 

In September 1974, the same month Carmichael began leasing the Canoga Park facility for the purported production of the Dale, the California Department of Motor Vehicles began investigating the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation after discovering it did not have a state permit to manufacture automobiles. Carmichael was also found to have unlawfully sold options to purchase the vehicles, to have sold dealerships for $78,000 to multiple investors in several states, and to have sold various stock options as a condition of employment to many of the over one-hundred employees she had hired.

In December, the California Corporations Department informed Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation it was selling dealer franchises illegally and ordered the company to cease selling stock for public sale. Carmichael ignored the warnings, continuing to solicit investors’ money.

Liz Ignores The Legal Notices

 

At the lab where the automobiles were supposedly being manufactured, DMV Senior Special Investigator Bill Hall found only empty aircraft hangers showing no evidence of ever having an assembly line. The company’s rent of the buildings was found to have expired.

Of the three prototype Dales produced, only one was able to run on its own power. All had been constructed from shoddy materials, had unattached accelerators, doors held together by house door hinges, windows that bent back and forth, and rear wheels buttressed by two-by fours.

Carmichael’s Crumbled Car: Left To Right:

Bendy Windows, Unattached Accelerator, House-Door Hinges, And 2X4s 

 

Most tellingly, the “cars” had lawn mower carburetors and an engine typically found in portable generators.

The three existing Dale’s were more of a car prop than a prototype.

A Car In Name Only

 

In February 1975, the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation’s assets were seized, the company was placed in receivership, and Liz Carmichael and ten other company employees were charged with thirty-one counts of fraud, grand theft, conspiracy to commit theft of over $10,000, and multiple corporate securities violations, including selling both dealer franchises and cars that did not yet exist. Over 5,000 investors were believed to have been bilked out of nearly $6 million.

Knowing the authorities were closing in, Carmichael had abandoned her proclaimed Space Age car for a more primitive mode of transportation: running. She hastily relocated to Dallas where she attempted to reestablish her company, only to be slapped with similar grand theft charges two weeks later. She again absconded before being arrested.

Carmichael Leaves The Car and Takes The Cash

 

On April 12, nine weeks later, Carmichael was nabbed in Miami after a woman recognized her from a news photo as her neighbor. Under the name Susan Raines, the former CEO-turned-fugitive was working for a dating service.

Carmichael Is Caught

 

Carmichael claimed she had degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio State University and an MBA (Master of Business Administration) from Miami (Ohio) University, and that her husband, Jim, had been a structural engineer for NASA prior to his 1966 death. At various times, she also professed to have previously been a stock car racer, the owner of a company that modified cars, the builder of custom and experimental vehicles, and the patent holder on a “self-skinning foam.” All of these contentions were erroneous.

The most shocking of Liz Carmichael’s laundry list of lies, however, was unrelated to the criminal charges against her.

Liz’ Lies

 

As a six-foot-tall, two-hundred pound woman who frequently wore mini-skirts and high heels, Liz Carmichael turned a lot of heads. The large lady had truthfully said she had five children . . . but she was not their mother.

In searching Carmichael’s abandoned Dallas home, police found numerous wigs, female prosthetics, padded bras, hair remover, and gender transition-related literature.

Liz Carmichael was determined to be the assumed transgender identity of a man on the lam.

Ms. Liz Is A His

 

Fingerprints confirmed con woman Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael and con man Jerry Dean Michael, a federal fugitive for the past thirteen years, were one in the same.

Michael had fathered ten children with the four women he had married from 1954-59. After failing as a door-to-door salesman, newspaper publisher, and pet store owner, he was convicted in 1961 of writing multiple bad checks throughout the Los Angeles area and of counterfeiting, having printed fake money through a front called the Los Angeles Distribution Company. The following year, he jumped bail and fled with his fourth wife Vivian and two-year-old son Brian.

Sometime thereafter, using an alias, Michael faked a major car accident. Over the following few years, he was found to have used several sobriquets including Jerry Barrett, Mike Moran, Mike Morgan, William Trace Parker, and William Richard Raines.

By the late 1960s, the man charged with counterfeiting money was also feigning his gender, having created the new female identity of Liz Carmichael, dressing as a woman, and self-administering hormone injections in preparation for a vaginoplasty, i.e. a sex change operation. He had also allegedly had breast implant surgery in Mexico in 1969.

Jerry Dean Michael

Becomes Geraldine Elizabeth Carmichael

 

In the course of Michael’s thirteen years at large, he and Vivian used stolen records to frequently change identities, and they had four more children. While living in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1966, Michael, under the name William Parker, was arrested on child abuse charges, but they were dropped and he was released before his real identity was learned.

Michael was found to have also lived in Tampa, Miami, Dallas, and back in Los Angeles while on the run.

Michael Slips Away

 

The five children Jerry Michael had fathered with Vivian, fifteen-year-old Brian, thirteen-year-old Candi, ten-year-old Wendi, nine-year-old Shawn, and three-year-old Michael, were confirmed to be those living with Liz Carmichael both before and after she had fled. She had home-schooled them and had said she was their mother.

The Carmichael Kids With Their “Father”

 

Jerry Michael, still presenting himself as Liz Carmichael, maintained throughout his trial that the Dale’s production had been sabotaged by the Detroit auto industry because manufacturers were threatened by the cheaper and more fuel-efficient vehicle. The jury was not swayed, convicting him, on January 24, 1977, of twenty-eight counts relating to conspiracy, grand theft, and fraud, along with three counts of violating the provisions of the California Corporations Code, and of the counterfeiting charges. A television company paid Michael’s $50,000 bail in exchange for the rights to his story, as he awaited sentencing.

Of the ten other former Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation employees who were indicted, four were also convicted while two other executives had pled guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. The charges against the four other people were dropped.

Jerry Michael, AKA Liz Carmichael, Is Convicted

 

In March, Jerry Michael was fined $30,000 and sentenced to two-to-twenty years in prison. He remained free on bail while appealing his conviction, during which time he ran a flower vending operation in Los Angeles after separating from Vivian.

After Michael’s appeal was rejected in 1980, he, still functioning as Liz Carmichael, again disappeared, along with his five children who had chosen to go with him.

The (Car)michael Clan Hits The Road Again 

 

Michael, or Carmichael, stayed hidden for nearly a decade, proving to be a hard fugitive to track because it was not known if he was living as a male or a female. Because he had most recently been masquerading as a woman, it seemed he would be harder to recognize as a man.

 

Computer-Aged Images:

Left: Jerry Michael Right: Liz Carmichael

 

The fugitive, however, was still presenting himself as a woman when he was arrested on April 19, 1989, following his profile on Unsolved Mysteries. He was using the name Kathryn Elizabeth Johnson and working as a flower vendor in Bastrop, Texas, thirty miles southeast of Austin, and living with one of his now adult children in a small town twenty-five miles southwest of Bastrop. The town’s name: Dale.

Lady Liz’ Luck Runs Out

 

Upon his return to California, the most anticipated part of Jerry Michael’s sentencing occurred after he was given a one-to-ten-year term. His lawyer said his client was about half-way toward becoming a woman, and although Michael said he had stopped taking female hormones roughly five years ago, he contended the several years he had taken them had chemically made him a woman.

Despite the Los Angeles Superior Court recognizing Jerry Dean Michael as a woman, he was ordered to do his time in a men’s prison, from which he was released after serving eighteen months.

Recognized As A Maam

But Still Sent To A Man’s Prison

 

Still dressing as a woman, Jerry Michael resumed running a roadside flower shop business in Austin. The marketer of the Dale car reached the end of his (and her) odd and twisted road in February 2004, dying of cancer at age sixty-six.

I could not find any source stating if he had completed his sex change.

The Dale’s Daddy (Or Mommy) Dies

 

The investigation of the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation was expedited after its Promotion Manager, William Miller, was shot to death in his office on January 22, 1975. Another employee, salesman Jack Oliver, was convicted of the killing. The men, described as Liz Carmichael’s “bodyguards,” had been cellmates at California’s San Quentin State Prison; Miller had been convicted of assault and rape.

The investigation into Miller’s murder revealed he had been contracted to murder California Corporations Department Investigator William Montgomery, who was leading the agency’s probe of the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation. An argument is believed to have ensued between Miller and Oliver over the manner in which Montgomery was to be slain resulting in Oliver killing Miller instead.

The murder was not related to the phony production of the Dale and nothing was found suggesting Liz Carmichael had any involvement in William Miller’s murder or on the contract to murder William Montgomery, who was not harmed.

The slain William Miller’s middle name was Dale.

Here A Dale, There A Dale

 

Among the journalists who investigated Liz Carmichael and the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation were Pete Noyes and Dick Carlson, who at the time were reporters with Los Angeles’ KABC-TV.

Carlson, the father of former FOX News Commentator Tucker Carlson, also outed tennis player Renee Richards (aka Richard Raskin), as a transgender woman.

The Tale Of The Dale

Drew Extensive Media Coverage

 

Upset that her husband was advancing toward becoming a woman, Vivian Michael had left him in 1968 and surrendered care of their four children to him, but she later returned and they had one more child.

Purporting to be her boss’ sister-in-law, Vivian had been “Liz Carmichael’s” secretary at the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation, and she was among the employees who had been indicted. The charges against her, however, were dismissed when California Superior Court Judge Harold Ackerman ruled the evidence relating to her was insufficient for prosecution.

Following her separation from Jerry Michael (Liz Carmichael) during his 1976 trial, Vivian again left him, this time for good, filing for dissolution of the marriage. She later remarried (to a man who stayed a man) and some reports state she died of cancer sometime thereafter.

Vivian Michael

 

The Dale, the ill-fated automobile that was supposed to challenge those made by Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, was named for engineer Dale Clifft.

In 1973, twelve years a fugitive following his arrest for counterfeiting, Jerry Michael, by then re-invented as Liz Carmichael, was working at the United States Marketing Institute (USMI), a marketing development company in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles. After meeting Clifft in June 1974, he left USMI to form the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation and begin production of the Dale.

Clifft designed and built The Dale prototype as Carmichael marketed the vehicle. Clifft said he was promised $4,000 along with royalties from the car’s sales, but was paid only $1,001 by Carmichael. After another check for $2,000 bounced, they butted heads, and Clifft left the company before Carmichael’s shenanigans were learned.

Dale Clifft was cleared of involvement in the fraud of his namesake automobile. He later formed the Dale Development Company and received several patents for his engineering work. He died at age forty-nine in 1981, a year after his former business partner Liz Carmichael went on the lam.

Dale Clifft

 

Dale Clifft had earlier built a three-wheeled all-weather car from motorcycle parts that he called the Commutercycle. He had no formal training in automobile design and had constructed the vehicle as a tinkering project intended only for his use to cruise Los Angeles.

Dale Clifft’s Commutercyle

 

Two additional three-wheeled automobiles were championed by Liz Carmichael to complement the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation’s flagship car: the five-passenger Revelle station wagon and the eight-seat combination car/station wagon Vanagen. The Revelle was slated to be priced at $2,500; the Vanagen at $2,850.

Both vehicles were reputed to have the same two-cylinder engine as the Dale, but no such cars are believed to have been produced.

 

The Theoretical Trio Of Space-Age Vehicles

 

The Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation did not come close to making it to the twenty-first century. The company went bankrupt in 1978 after only four years due to the Fail of The Dale.

Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation Logo

 

Of the three Dale automobile prototypes, one is housed at Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, while another is displayed at the Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed in Lincoln, Nebraska.

 

The Dale On Display:

In Los Angeles . . .  

 

. . . And In Lincoln, Nebraska

 

The third Dale, the one able to briefly run on its own power, was held as evidence by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office until 1987, when it was purchased at an auction by classic car collector Barry Maiten of Los Angeles, who also has a collection of Dale paraphernalia and literature.

The dormant Dale sits in Maiten’s private museum, though he says he plans to at some point restore it.

Barry Maiten

The Only Private Owner Of A Dale

 

SOURCES:

• Austin American-Statesman
• Corpus Christi Caller-Times
• Fort Lauderdale News
• Com
• Los Angeles Times
• Mental Floss
• Odessa American
• Orange Leader (Orange, Texas)
• San Francisco Examiner
• Unsolved Mysteries