(Submitted by Car Lust Reader Karen K from New Haven)
"OH, CAMRY, MY CAMRY"
Bruises bashed into my head
From banging on the ceiling
Of my pirhouetting car
As it was sent a-reeling,
Into the woods
Down in the ditch,
I sort of had this feeling
That if I lived to tell the tale,
I’d spend some months a-healing.
It was "Morning in America," a time when men were real men, women were real women, and hair was real big. Ronald Reagan had just been sworn in for his second term after winning one of the most lopsided Presidential elections in American history. and the "national malaise" of just a few years before had been replaced by a mood of confident optimism. Technology was on the march: personal computers now had floppy drives and 12 MHz processors, fully-functional mobile phones were down to the size of a box of Girl Scout cookies, and used DeLoreans were being retrofitted with aftermarket flux capacitors. On the big screen, besides the one with the time machine, we had Out of Africa and Witness and The Breakfast Club and Rambo: First Blood Part II. On the small screen, you had The Cosby Show and Hill Street Blues and MacGyver.
On the radio was Springsteen, Madonna--this was way before Nirvana--there was U2, and Blondie, and music still on MTV. The cars then were old school, and you might think them uncool, but this post will be occupied with cars of Nineteen Eighty-Five.
There were probably more Larks at last Saturday's SDC Ohio Chapter meet than anything else (though the Hawks and Avantis were giving them a run for their money). That should come as no surprise.
The Lark was built in large numbers--for a Stude, at least. There were nearly 440,000 units sold from 1959 through 1963. While the 1964 cars (total production about 40,000 or so) were significantly restyled, and Studebaker de-emphasized the "Lark" name in its '64 model year advertising, the '64s are mechanically identical to the '59-'63 models, and Studebaker people still count them as Larks. (That's also true for the 1965-66 "Chevybakers.") They're relatively plentiful, relatively modern (12v electrical systems, etc.), relatively affordable--and NOS parts are available (a large stock was left over from the '63 and '64 model years when Studebaker closed its South Bend plant) for most things that might need attention in a restoration.
Plus, let's face it, they're cute little fellas!
Continue reading "Studebaker Week: An Exaltation* of Larks" »
(Car Lust contributor Virgil Exner, Jr. celebrated Studebaker Week by designing a few Studebakers of his own and sending us some high-resolution renderings. Click the pictures to enlarge them and read Mr. Exner's commentary. -- Ed.)
Continue reading "Studebaker Week: Studebakers for the 21st Century" »
If you've been following Car Lust for a while, you may have noticed that I have a thing for Studebakers. When I heard that the Ohio Chapter of the Studebaker Drivers Club would be having its annual meet in Tallmadge, not far from where I live, there was no question that I'd be going.
The people who put this event on bill it as the largest one-day Studebaker show in the world, and they're probably right. This was not merely a large gathering of Studebakers, this was total Studebaker overload. According to the lady at the registration table, there were 139 Studes and Packards signed in as of about 1:30 in the afternoon, and more kept arriving even after that.
I lost count of the Larks and Avantis, there were so many of them--enough that they'll be getting their own posts in the next couple of days. As for the rest, we'll start the tour after the jump.
Continue reading "Studebaker Week: SDC Ohio Chapter 2011 meet" »
If anybody remembers our Nation's Bicentennial Year, then they remember these limited edition cars. 1976 seemed to start out like most any other year, except we had "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour" to suffer through. "Charlie's Angels" gave us some great models to gaze at, and the cars weren't bad either.
But in 1974, a couple of years ahead of schedule and maybe to boost sales, Chevrolet sold a really nice trim package on their El Camino, Impala, Nova, and Vega models. Some dealers may have added this trim to other Chevy car and truck models as well.
The outsides were painted white with red and blue stripes, and sported "Spirit of America" emblems; the insides had white seats, red carpeting, and black dashboards. Looks like they had some nice wheels, too. They were not featured in the sales brochures that year, and getting detailed information on all of them is a bit tricky.
So let's just look at a few images of these cars:
Continue reading "All-American Week: The "Spirit of America" Chevrolets" »
Cars and trucks are generally thought of as a "guy" thing. Certainly there are lady race drivers and lady hot-rodders and many, many ladies who know their way around an engine bay as well as any man, but automobiles and auto repairs are nevertheless (stereo)typically masculine pursuits. There's a reason why NASCAR and Formula 1 and Barrett-Jackson auctions and monster truck rallies and the like are shown on Spike and the Speed Channel, but not Lifetime or the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Still, women make up half the population, and the marketing research people will tell you that in most families the wife has more influence over major purchasing decisions than her husband. (As Mom used to put it, Dad may have been the head of the household, but she was the neck, and she could point that head in any direction she wanted!) The bottom line is that if you're trying to sell big-ticket consumer goods--like, oh, I dunno, automobiles, maybe?--it's a no-brainer that you should aim at least some of your product design and your marketing pitch specifically at the ladies.
As early as seventy or eighty years ago, a few manufacturers (for instance, Chrysler, Jordan, Auburn, and Duesenberg) picked up on this fact and made sales pitches directly to women, a practice which is now so common that we don't even notice it. Also, every so often, cars will get customized in a deliberately girly fashion as a way of attracting attention--examples include the limited edition Barbie-themed New Beetles sold in Mexico in 2007, the pastel pink "career cars" which Mary Kay Cosmetics leases out to its top-producing sellers, and those unfortunate Smart Fortwos that have been tragically accessorized with a Hello Kitty vehicle wrap.
There was also, once upon a time, a car which came factory feminized straight off the Detroit assembly line. It was designed and built, as the sales brochure put it, "by appointment to Her Majesty the American Woman," and it made the Mary Kay career car look like a tomboy by comparison. Today, Car Lust will be getting in touch with its feminine side with a look at the frilliest, curliest, girly-girl's girliest creation ever to burn gasoline, the 1955-56 Dodge La Femme.
I was westbound on I-64 in Charleston, West Virginia on a Sunday afternoon when I spotted an early-60s Ford Fairlane 500 sedan cruising at about 55 or 60 in the right lane. I was driving at the time, so The Missus took the photo below.
The Fairlane looked like a good candidate for a restoration. There were no clouds of oil smoke or carbon crud billowing out of the tailpipe, so there's probably no major issues with the engine, at least. The car appeared to be sitting level on its suspension, though maybe a tad low, and was tracking straight down the lane. The paint was weathered and the bumpers have surface rust and need a good re-chroming, but there were no noticable dents, mismatched panels, or large primer-gray expanses of plastic filler. There's a little rust-through at the bottom of the front quarter behind the wheel well, where most cars have a moisture trap, but nothing that a competent body shop or a talented hobbyist couldn't patch. Some of the side trim is missing, but again, nothing that can't be addressed if you know what you're doing.
I started to wonder: is this a project car? Was this a test drive, or a "shakedown cruise" after a mechanical restoration, with the body work and paint to follow? Or, unlikely as it may be, is this someone's daily driver?
Surely, in the space of nearly 50 years, it's been someone's daily driver, probably several someones' daily driver. How many times was it traded in or re-sold in the years since left the dealership under the command of its original purchaser? Did it go on epic summer car trips to distant places and see strange and wondrous things, or did it spend its entire life in the hills and "hollers" of West Virginia? It may have been the car that some 16-year old took his driver's test in, the car that brought the baby home from the hospital or took the oldest boy to the induction center when his number came up. Maybe it sat out a decade in Aunt Lurlene's garage, after she got up in years and couldn't get around so well. Maybe it ran the backroads at night with a trunk full of moonshine, or carried a young couple on their honeymoon. Maybe it did all of these things. You can imagine a hundred stories about a car like that, and most of them would be true.
Here's hoping the restoration goes well, and the car gets another fifty years of adventures.
--Cookie the Dog's Owner
Don't let its humble looks fool you. America's Ford Falcon started out as a late 1950s economy car, then became America's most-loved 1960s pony car, morphed into a compact and sporty coupé/sedan for the 70s, and finally retired in garish style in the early 1980s. Except for one small exception.
And along the way, the Falcon was a two-door coupé, a four-door sedan, a convertible, a station wagon, a van, and, oh yeah, a Ford Ranchero.
This versatile compact (Not sub-compact, as was the Pinto) platform began life as Ford's answer to the small import cars that were trickling their way into America in the late 1950s. The VW Beetle, Toyotas, Datsuns, and a few British cars more than hinted at sensibility and thrift. This was a novel idea on American roads at the time, as most 1950s and 60s cars were getting longer, lower, and wider.
But the 1950s' Suez Crisis got a lot of people thinking, especially in Europe. The thought of petrol-miserly cars caught on quickly over there and has remained to this day. That happens over here only when gas prices go up. Then they go back down, and we go back to where we were.
When I was in grade school, one of the most popular shows on TV was Hawaii Five-O. The series followed the exploits of a fictional major-crimes unit of the equally-fictional Hawaii State Police as they protected their island paradise from con artists, drug dealers, jewel thieves, serial killers, kidnappers, smugglers, renegade hippies (it was the 1960s, after all), miscellaneous mobsters, and shadowy international criminal masterminds. Its famous opening title sequence was the best advertising the Hawaii Tourism Authority ever got: lovingly photographed clips of beaches and Boeings, hotels and hula dancers, creatively strung together in synchronization with the theme tune; an MTV music video a decade before there was an MTV.
Though at heart it was just another late-60s cop show with all the usual charming cop-show cliches, Five-O made good use of its Hawaiian setting. Instead of relying on stock footage and "California doubling" to fake being in Hawaii, Five-O actually filmed in the islands, used local residents as actors, and even had some characters speaking in Hawaiian dialect. This gave it genuine Hawaiian flavor (and a generous helping of genuine Hawaiian eye candy) that caught viewers' fancy, and it went on to be one of the longest-running crime dramas in television history. Its rousing theme music and memorable catchphrases ("Book 'em, Danno!" "Be here. Aloha.") became permanent pop culture memes, instantly recognizable even to those born too late to have ever seen Five-O in prime time.
Today we'll be looking at some of the most prominent, and yet underappreciated, regular characters in the show: the big black Mercury sedans driven by protagonist Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord).
