Category: Cars

It was a curious situation in the days of our youth. Roads, as a rule, were narrower than today, particularly the state two-lane highways that connected small towns. Yet the cars that traveled them were HUGE compared to today’s models.

Yet, our parents maneuvered those massive hulks around the tight curves without a second thought. And the interiors of those automobiles contained enough cubic feet of space to allow a kid tremendous freedom to move around inside on long trips.

Automobiles started out small. The Model T and Model A were basically compact cars. But as the years wore on, BIG became the trend. By the late 1930’s, cars typically weighed over 3000 pounds. They were made of thick steel that took some serious force to dent, as well.

The cars that we rode around in circa 1966 had spacious bench seats, frequently covered with clear plastic. Riding up front and sitting between your parents was no challenge at all. There was plenty of room. By the previously mentioned year, there were likely seat belts that were shoved, unused, between the seat cushions. So your freedom of movement was completely unhindered. In fact, I remember repeatedly jumping from the front seat to the back while speeding down the Interstate at 70 mph.

The back seat was large enough for seven-year-old-me to stretch out and have a couple of inches of space between my body and the armrests. It was a sweet feeling to fall asleep and wake up to find that were were a hundred and fifty miles closer to our destination.

The trunks were huge, as well. There was plenty of room for a full-sized 15″ spare tire to reside beneath the trunk’s floor, and enough cubic footage was left for several full-sized suitcases to be stacked on top.

There was a tremendous amount of steel, plastic, rubber, and glass in each self-contained boat that traversed the roads of that era. They were even bigger in the 50’s. I recently sat in a 1953 Pontiac Coupe, and was astonished at the sheer size of the thing. The glove compartment alone was big enough to hold a twelve-pack. The back seat was as big as a twin bed. And, no doubt, it had probably been used for that very purpose a time or two over the last fifty years ;-).

Of course, the large size of the cars extended all the way to the rear deck, my preferred residing spot on those road trips of the Johnson era.

Cars generally stayed big through the 70’s, but began shrinking by the end of the decade. Today, it’s difficult to find a new vehicle that matches the wheelbase and weight of a typical 60’s car. In fact, I happily drive a Toyota Tercel the 25 miles I commute to work, enjoying the 35+ miles per gallon it provides. It weighs about half as much as that 54 Pontiac. My “full-size” car is a Toyota Camry that’s about the size of a 67 Chevelle, considered a small car in its time.

But we who remember JFK also recall a time when big cars were the norm, and our fathers managed to motor them down some pretty narrow highways at high rates of speed.

I was born in 1959, when fins were at their peak. From the massive vertical fins of the 59 Plymouth to the low sleek ones on the 59 Chevy, fins were everywhere in this era.

The thing about fins was that they were actually more common in my childhood years of the mid to late 60’s than the late 50’s. That’s because there were lots of late 40’s-early 50’s vintage cars on the road in 1959 whose rounded shapes were in direct contrast to the knife-edged fins that ran on either side of the trunk.

The 1960’s models saw fins shrink, but they were still there. So fins could be seen all over the highways when my mind started permanently filing things away in my memory banks about the time the Beatles stopped touring.

The Plymouth Fury was introduced in 1956. Not only did it come with some beautiful fins, it also hit 149 miles an hour at Daytona! This was one mean way to get around town.

Soon, fins were seen on Caddys, Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs, and everyone else who survived the automobile industry’s reduction years of the 50’s. The rounded look was gone, not to return until the 90’s.

My dad was partial to Plymouths. Their fins were gone by the time I started remembering individual cars about 1966. But I’m sure he must have owned finned vehicles before that. Later in life, he invested in a 1961 Caddy convertible that sat in the garage. That big monster had some nicely subdued fins. I can’t remember when he sold it, it must have happened after I left home.

Why were fins all the rage in the late 50’s-early 60’s? It was our parents’ rebellion against growing older. The WWII generation was now approaching their thirties and forties, and we all know what that does to you. So a sleeker, jet-age car did much to stave off the thought that you were getting to the age that you remembered your parents being!

The senior statesmen amongst us Baby Boomers may well have owned the beautifully finned cars in their youth. After all, a 56 Fury was quite affordable by the time 1964 had rolled around. And if the engine was in decent shape, it was also still extremely fast!

Of course, I was just a kid. My first car, a 1966 Falcon, was far from a finned speed machine. And practically everything I owned after that was either made in Japan or Germany. So, sadly, the finned era passed my by.

But if you remember JFK, I’ll bet you also remember outrageously huge cars festooned with fins that made them look more like space ships that mere mundane automobiles.

Leaded gasoline was born in 1921. GM researchers had been testing fuel blends since 1916, trying to stop engine knock. The problem was early, non-uniform detonation of fuels in the engine cylinder. Left unchecked, it could quickly ruin an engine.

So lead was added to the mixture at the refinery, knock problem solved.

Lead poisoning has been known to medical science since 100 BCE, when Greek writings described it.

Somehow, the harmful effects of spewing lead vapor into the atmosphere eluded the GM engineers. So leaded gasoline became the standard, and untold billions of gallons were burned over the years.

That process began to be reversed in 1975, when new vehicles were mandated to burn gasoline that didn’t contain lead. That year, unleaded gasoline showed up at the neighborhood gas station.

If you put leaded gas into a car that had a catalytic converter (which all unleaded vehicles possessed), it would quickly be rendered ineffective. You would be spraying pure pollutants into the atmosphere. That was bad.

So unleaded cars came with narrowed-down filler necks. Likewise, unleaded gas nozzles were narrower than their leaded-dispensing counterparts. So, the theory was, you would never put leaded gas into your vehicle by mistake.

Wrong.

First of all, a populace that didn’t like the idea of paying more for a fuel that had an ingredient LEFT OUT, and they rebelled. The most obvious solution was to rout out the restricted filler neck with a chisel or the like. Ugly, but effective. You could quickly bid adieu to your catalytic converter with a couple of fill ups of leaded gas.

Another device that was sold in numbers of thousands was a little neck-down sleeve that would fit onto the end of a leaded gas nozzle. It would allow the leaded fuel to be dispensed into an unleaded tank.

Either way, a very large number of cars that would ostensibly burn cleaner were not given the chance, because of unleaded fuel’s two or three cents-per-gallon higher cost.

Hey, don’t blame ME. I had a 1973 Toyota Celica in those days. The manufacturer actually recommended burning unleaded, so I did!

However, the bypassers soon noted degraded performance of mileage and power from their doctored vehicles, so within a couple more years, everyone was burning unleaded as directed.

Leaded gas finally pretty much disappeared from the US market in 1986. It was still available for a time for off-road use, but low demand caused it to vanish. A 1994 study showed that US blood-lead levels declined by 78 percent from 1978 to 1991.

Today, the familiar “Contains lead” signs are collectors’ items. So are the neck-down “emergency” fill up aids. But we, and our kids and grandkids, have one less thing to worry about as our bodies walk around with much less lead in them than before.

The year was 1970. The place was sleepy Bentonville, Arkansas, population 5,000 or so. I must have been sitting in our 1965 Chevy pickup which my father had purchased shortly after moving us from our house on a city block in Miami, Oklahoma to a 250-acre farm located 15 miles from Bentonville.

Ten years old, I had recently started paying attention to fast cars, thanks to getting into the brand-new phenomenon known as Mattel Hot Wheels. Thus, I was able to spot and differentiate the subtle differences between a Camaro and a Firebird, or the more obvious ones between a Barracuda and a Cougar.

But that day, so long ago, my ten-year-old jaw dropped. There, cruising up highway 71 in front of a big empty field that would one day hold a Wal-Mart Supercenter, was an unearthly-looking wonderful lime-green Plymouth Superbird.

There were a plethora of fast cars produced during Detroit’s muscle car era. Many of them concealed their horsepower under the ruse of a standard-looking vehicle, the better to avoid frequent stops by the law. But then there was the Superbird: a hedonistic thumb to the nose at conventionality. What an amazing machine for a ten-year-old kid to see tooling through the streets of a small town.

The Superbird came about because of Richard Petty and NASCAR. In 1970, NASCAR vehicles were basically souped-up versions of cars you could buy from your local dealers. Petty had begun driving a Road Runner with a streamlined nose and a big spoiler that aided greatly in keeping the rear wheels on the pavement.

NASCAR’s rule was that at least one car be built for each manufacturer’s dealership. That meant that 1,920 Superbirds were created in 1970. And one resident of little Bentonville, Arkansas purchased one. I saw that car many times over the next year or so. Seriously cool stuff.

Petty tore up the track with the Superbird, so much so that NASCAR changed their rules. Aerodynamically enhanced cars like the Superbird would have to run on smaller engines than Petty’s 426 Hemi he used in 1970. They just weren’t fair to the other boxier cars.

1970 was the only year that the Superbird was built. It was available in three different engine configurations: a 440 with a four-barrel carb, the same engine with three two-barrel carbs, or the ultimate: the same 426 Hemi that Petty raced.

The mystified effect that the car had on me wasn’t shared by the general public. It was considered ugly and overly extreme by the masses. The aerodynamic enhancements were of no use during quarter-mile runs. In fact, their added weight caused Superbirds to get smoked by conventional Road Runners on the strip.

But the nosecone and spoiler weren’t meant for pedestrian short drag races. At 90 MPH, they cut drag, and also kept the car solidly attached to the road. At 150 MPH, it would have been difficult to control the machine without them.

Yes, the car would easily hit 150 MPH right off of the dealer’s lot. Its estimated stock maximum speed was 180. Holy crap.

This was the Detroit of the freewheeling days before energy crises, oil embargoes, and gas that cost more than 40 cents a gallon.

The price of the car was a reasonable $4,000. That compared favorably to other hot muscle cars of the era. But the public just couldn’t get past the look. Thus, many sat unsold, and were even converted to more conventional-looking Road Runners in order to get them off the lots.

The result is that today, original Superbirds can easily fetch high six-figure prices. Less than a thousand Hemi-equipped models were sold, obviously they reign as king. But any Superbird is worth gold.

So that anonymous Superbird owner I spotted so many years ago and I have something in common: we both appreciate the unconventional.

Automobile styling changed radically during the twenty years that followed WWII’s end. Cars were big rolling boxes in 1945. By 1965, they had gotten smaller, sleeker, and faster. And one design in particular proved itself to be timeless, selling in huge numbers over thirty years after its introduction.

The Ford Mustang was the result of an in-house design contest sponsored by division manager Lee Iacoca. The winning design was the work of David Ash and John Oros.

The Mustang itself was released against a wave of opposition within Ford’s ranks. Squabbling and in-fighting almost doomed what is arguably the most successful model of car ever released.

In 1961, engineers Herb Misch and Roy Lunn designed a two seat mid-engine convertible that weighed a mere 1500 pounds and got 30 miles to the gallon while posting a respectable 10 second zero-to-sixty time.

Sports car fans both outside and inside Ford’s organization eagerly licked their chops at the idea of such a European-thinking design rolling out of Ford’s factories. But Lee Iaccoca saw a money pit instead.

But he did see the need of a compact, sporty, albeit FOUR seat car. So he took the design of Ash and Oros and built it on existing tooling. The Mustang that was released had a reworked Falcon frame. The suspension and drivetrain came from altered parts from both the Falcon and Fairlane. But there’s no doubt that NOBODY would mix up the small, clean, slick style of the Mustang with its ancestors.

Some high-ranking powers within Ford opposed the car. But Iaccoca prevailed. And 22,000 models were sold the day it was released in 1964 (but it was a 1965 model). Within two years, a million Mustangs were on the road. The silence of the opposers was deafening.

Soon, Mustangs were seen all over television, too, and not just in Ford commercials. For instance, what Baby Boomer doesn’t remember the “Like father, like son” antismoking commercial? The car also frequently showed up in movies and TV series of the decade.

In 1965, Ford cut a deal with former Formula One driver-turned-designer Carrol Shelby to produce the Shelby Mustang, a heavily customized, expensive vehicle that was a smash hit. The engine was a modified Windsor 289, and a few models had trunk-mounted batteries. They are highly prized collectibles today.

Shelby continued customizing Mustangs until the 1970 model year. Ford and Shelby cut a deal with Hertz to produce a gold-striped Shelby that customers could rent, and that would be sold to the public after retirement. They too were a success for all involved. The only problem was that a few enterprising customers would rent the car for a weekend and spend the time in their garages swapping the Shelby motor for a standard 289. So if you get a chance to buy one, caveat emptor.

Mustangs endured bad design changes, continuing to sell well even during the Mustang II era, when purists say the car hit its artistic nadir. But sales slowed through the 80’s, and there was talk of redesigning the car as a front-wheel drive. The Mustang faithful wrote letters of protest in droves, and the redesign became the Ford Probe instead.

Today’s Mustang looks a lot like its 60’s ancestors. Even Carrol Shelby is back to customizing them, and Hertz is also renting their own models! So, in the automotive sense, in the case of a great design, what goes around sometimes does indeed come around.