Born in 1893, Louie H. Ponnequin, a veteran of WWI, was fifty-five years old when he filed a patent in January 1948 for what appears to be the Clary Hubs. At the time, he was living in Hawaii, so it’s possible that being around the military bases there he saw a need for a simple free-spinning jeep hub. Though Arthur Warn invented his standard spinning hub cap a year earlier in 1947, there’s no evidence that Warn ever patented his “summer hub”.
The Clary Flange (a couple of these pics are seen in this thread, but I don’t know the original source):
