Was LaSalle the first muscle car?

In the middle of the roaring twenties, Alfred P. Sloan, CEO of General Motors is hard at work ensuring "The General" has a car in each and every price category potential buyers might want. But there's a problem, a few gaps have developed. Their product line started with entry-level Chevrolet, then Oakland, Oldsmobile, Buick and with Cadillac at the top.
When the gap widened between Chevy and Oakland, Alfred added a new brand in between, called Pontiac. Similarly, when the gap increased between Oldsmobile and Buick, there were two more models created: Viking and Marquette (don't feel bad if you've never heard of them, I hadn't either). Marquette was placed below Buick, but above Oldsmobile's Viking.
The car buying public found all these marques confusing. Sales of Viking cars was dismal and Marquette just a bit better – both were gone by 1930. Oakland was quickly overtaken by the more popular Pontiac and disappeared completely in 1933. Since Cadillac's prices had soared in the early 1920's, Sloan decided they needed a lower priced model to fill the gap to Buick. LaSalle debuted in 1927.

The dapper Harley Earl

LaSalle was built by Cadillac to its high standards, but with a difference. It was not a junior Cadillac, but a car that was more agile and stylish. LaSalle is considered by many to mark the beginning of American automotive styling.
Harley Earl (1893-1969) was working in his father's custom coach building shop, when his design skill was "discovered" by Lawrence P. Fisher, general manager of Cadillac. Fisher was so impressed with the young Earl's abilities he commissioned him to design the new LaSalle. The resulting car was a resounding success and as a result Earl became Head of Design at General Motors. The beginning of a thirty year career for Earl with GM.

LaSalles came with Cadillac's V8 under the hood.  
In 1928, its 303 cubic inch 90 degree V8 made 75 horsepower. (For comparison, the Ford Model A's engine produced 40 hp.) This engine made the LaSalle a fast car and its smaller than a Cadillac size made it nimble and sportier to drive.
On June 20, 1927 a LaSalle driven by Willard Rader and Gus Bell went 1,532 kilometres, averaging 153.2 km/h at the Milford Proving Grounds. Quite an achievement when compared the average speed of that year's Indianapolis 500 at 156.9 km/h.
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't putting a big engine in a small car sound familiar? Pontiac GTO, Ford Mustang, Chevy Camaro, Plymouth Barracuda to cite a few examples. Even the Allard, Sunbeam Tiger and the AC Cobra followed the same trail pioneered by the LaSalle.
With the coming of the Great Depression, LaSalle's role changed from that of a lesser companion to Cadillac to a means of keeping GM's luxury car division out of the red. Again, with the help of Earl's elegant styling touches, LaSalle weathered the depression. Sadly, when the economy started to pick up, there were new cars from other manufacturers that stepped on LaSalle's toes. The marque soldiered on but its sales were surmounted by the Packard One-Twenty and the Lincoln-Zephyr. GM wasn't sure what to do with the marque, as a result it slowly started to disappear, and by 1940 it was gone.

The Connection to the TV show "All In The Family"
Each episode began with Archie and Edith sitting at the piano murdering the show's theme song "Those Were The Days." There's one line of lyric that I could never quite decipher, it sounded something like, "Gee are oh lessel run gray." I happened to stumble upon the words to the song written out and the line is actually, "Gee our old LaSalle ran great! Here's a link: "Those Were The Days!"

In conclusion, here's my digital painting of a 1928 LaSalle coupe. It's based on a series of photos I took of a car at the Boyd Father's Day Car Show this year. At the time I was being thwarted by this fellow who seemed to get in the way every time I snapped a pic. When I started working on this image, I thought it would be more fun to keep him in the frame. Hence the title, "Takes More Than A Second Look." Click on the image to enlarge it.

ps Like Cadillac, the LaSalle brand name was based on that of a French explorer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.