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Wheeling In – Automotive History On Display
Today in my hometown we had our annual classic car show. These are often fun affairs, especially when, like this one, they are wide open to all makes and models, from the brass age to the present. Of course what gets the most attention are the rare vehicles, the sports cars, the supercars we slap as posters on our walls as teens, and the rarities, but shows like this bring out even the more humble affairs.
What is preserved? What is allowed to wear out, to be discarded and scrapped away? The everyday cars, the 4-door sedans, minivans, and SUVs that haul us around every day – these are the cars always least represented at these shows. We don’t preserve our ’87 Ford Taurus, driving it with care and keeping it garaged (and with ours it would have been a futile effort, that car was doing its best to commit suicide). So for me I was torn at this show – torn between some of the humbler offerings that somehow were preserved and maintained. The Ford Falcon, Kaiser Manhattan with the “swamp cooler” window A/C unit, and this Olds Holliday – these were my favorites. The Olds in particular grabbed me – look past its ’50s 2-tone, abundant chrome, and jet-fighter hood ornament. This is a car meant for driving, yes in comfort and style, but for everyday driving nonetheless. Look into the interior and admire the way the inside and outside designs tie so well together. She’s a beauty, and someone has held her together all this time.
My favorite Camaro.
A humble Kaiser Manhattan
Opel GT
Hard to believe that some of these have survived, loathed as they are by Mustang purists.
Isettas went from bargain economy runabouts to commanding $50k today.
Even fire engines showed up.
Some hot-rods are just wrong – a Pinto with side pipes?
An elegant Packard
A stock inline-6 Falcon, unmolested after all these years.
Don’t fear the Gremlin
Dodge sub-compact – I remember when these were everywhere.
The last of the Packards – a Silver Hawk
Someday these too will be sought-after collectibles. Nice to see one that hasn’t been abused.
A rarity from an extinguished marque. After Durant built General Motors, he was thrown out and tried starting his own company.
1920s style.
Late 30s Plymouth – now a hot rod.
Panther Pink!
Fire the booster rockets!
A fantastic post, Skipsul, another in a long line. Walking up to a pre-modern car is different than you expect; it’s taller and longer, and its curves are flatter. Unless it’s pre-1949 or so, in which case it’s so round it appears to be sectioned from a cylinder. The Fifties ones will always appeal to me because the bright colors reflected optimism and cheer for a generation of parents who’d seen the Depression and WWII.
These older cars also have superb visibility for the driver, something that is rarer and rarer on modern cars. The B and C pillars have gotten so thick that rear visibility is often nill even on compact cars, and forward visibility is tricky around the A pillars sometimes. The cabins of these older cars are light and airy, with lots of headroom. I think the favor so many have for SUVs is that these are the last of the modern cars where you aren’t squeezing into a safety cage. Sure the newer cars are safer by orders of magnitude when compared to their forebears, but comfort and light are lost.
Love the cool pictures, also I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that September’s Group Writing topic is Cars, anyone interested should sign up here:
http://ricochet.com/448890/group-writing-in-september-cars/
I’ll have to admit one of my guilty pleasures is watching the Mecum Auto Auctions on NBCSN. Beautiful vehicles and great narration on the history behind the different vehicles.
Very nice post. I start getting a little bored after about 30 – 45 minutes at those, unless something really catches my eye. My dad, however… born in ’37 he can stay all day, and sometimes does. It’s a generational thing, I think.
The only car I ever wanted to keep forever was my ’97 Thunderbird – the very last of the Superbirds. Unfortunately times were tough getting my kids through college and so I had to drive it, and wore it out.
Somewhere on my computer or on a USB stick I have a PDF document called When a Car Was a Car. If I knew how to post it, I would. There is a beautiful picture of a 1951 Buick LaSabre “concept car” and a photo of a 1954 Kaiser-Darrin. The Buick is among the most hideous cars I can imagine, but it is glorious. It’s a picture that shows a country at its peak, grand and unrestrained. No; I don’t want to return to the past, but I don’t want to forget it either.
This is a mid-to-late Fifties Opel Rekord, a subcompact made by General Motors in Germany, and sold through Buick dealers here in the US. They were a handsomer, subdued import that like the UKs Vauxhall, also a GM product, were designed partly or fully in accord with US car design themes, making them look a bit like theme park rides imitating “real” Fifties cars.
By the way: a nice thing about Ricochet is that everyone knows that not all gendered expressions of beauty are blatantly sexual. The “orange with a white top” look on the car and the woman is like a visual color rhyme. She’s perfectly “decent” by Fifties standards, covered-up by ours, but still striking and mysterious. Never let anyone get away with insulting the postwar years; even in struggling Europe, people admired and imitated even the smallest details of American tastes.
My favorite ever car. Got it the first year they were out, when they were still really rare and hard to get.
I couldn’t put gas in that car without talking to some gear head about his old Trans Am, just like the one from Smoky and the Bandit.
That Silver Hawk is a Studebaker from 1957.Packard and Studebaker didn’t merge until 1962 I think. Great post .
People wore hats.
No, they merged in 56/57, and the packard badge vanished in 58.
I want my ’97 Celica, in Fiesta Blue back. Wrecked years ago. I have found examples for sale on Autotrader and they are cheap, but all of them with 200k miles.
Yep. I had a 57 Studebaker silver hawk. My friend had a Golden Hawk. That was a neat car. The Packard Hawk was sort of ugly but had a hell of an engine. I also had an Avanti. It was ahead of it’s time. It was designed by The famous designer Raymond Loewy, the Frank L. Wright of industrial design.
I miss hood ornaments.
I miss being able to see the hood from inside the car.
I saw on Hemmings, maybe a year ago, a Packard Hawk complete with the supercharger. All original all around. And the seller *only* wanted $25k for it.
The catch? “Ran when parked”. Uh oh. When was it parked? 1972. According to the seller, the motor could no longer be turned over, mice had gotten to at least one of seats (probably the wiring too), the tires had long since dry-rotted, and the brakes had seized. The poor thing would have required a total strip-down, and while yes everything was original, just the labor to replace or restore what had rotted or frozen would likely have put the buyer back at least $30k in labor alone.
I wonder how many were made, and if any were sold.
I have to say too that I have mixed feelings on the hot-rods / resto mods out there. Sure, I can understand finding a good but neglected body (saw a ’56 Chevy body at a swap meet for $6k!) and dropping it onto a new frame with a new motor and turning it into a fast racer, and I can understand the artistry and effort that goes into chopping a top and frenching headlights, but at the same time these old cars are a limited commodity. If you find a working and mostly original old sedan or coup, maybe consider restoring it, because there are oodles of ‘rodded Kaisers, Chevies, Fords, and Plymouths out there, and their numbers are growing rapidly right now, but a dwindling supply of working examples of how they really were.
And it’s not like I’m a purist here. My ‘vette was in sorry shape when I got it, so a prime candidate for some modernization, but many of these rods started as already working cars.
Well that’s the deal with car restorations. Buy one for 10 put 20 into it and poof you have a 15,000 dollar car. Same with boats.
The Darrins sold only in the hundreds, I forget the exact number. Very innovative for the time, but also very costly to Kaiser at a time when Kaiser was in bad shape. Today they command in the high 5 figure range, sometimes more, but at the time they were something of a hail-Mary play. None made after 1953, and around ’55 / ’56 Kaiser-Willys merged with Hudson and Nash to form AMC and avoid bankruptcy doom for all 3.
Same with the hot rods too, only they’re buying for 20, putting 30 to 40 into it, for a car that will go for only 20 at the end.
Saw a Darrin at fun museum in the middle of South Dakota last year.
Weird, it’s not wanting to retrieve my Darrin photo from my library.
Picture of my Avanti
Let me try them at a viewable size:
Wow! looks sorta like our first family car in ’57…Christened the “Pink Elephant”
Oh it had a trunk in both front and back?
My Dad bought my sister a new Vauxhall while she was in college. It was literally a pile of rust after the third winter. The doors rotted from the body and the fenders were gone. It had to be towed to the junkyard.