1959 Ford Fairlane 500 Galaxie – “Thunderbird In Looks, Thunderbird In Luxury”

 

If you’re more familiar with cars of the 1960s and 1970s, seeing both “Fairlane” and “Galaxie” badges on the same car might be puzzling, but prior to 1961, the Fairlane was a trim series of the full-size Ford, with the Galaxie introduced during 1959 as a new top-of-the-line sub-series — a stylish flagship for one of Ford’s best postwar years. Let’s take a look at this yellow example Cory Behrens shot in Idaho Springs, Colorado, in December 2024.

 

Ford first introduced the Fairlane series for 1955. The name was derived from Fair Lane, the Dearborn estate of Henry and Clara Ford, which took its name in turn from the road in County Cork, Ireland, where Henry’s father had had his family estate. The Fairlane was initially the senior Ford trim level, displacing the previous Customline to the No. 2 slot, but for 1957, there was a still-glitzier Fairlane 500, priced $47 above the “standard” Fairlane.

This proved very successful, so Ford repeated the trick for 1959, adding the new Galaxie as the senior series. (In retrospect, this rapid debasement of successful names seems wasteful — as with many other resources, the supply of catchy, trademarkable model names has proven to be more limited than was generally assumed in the 1950s.)

 

Part of the reason Ford was so successful at moving buyers upmarket with these additional trim series was that each step represented a relatively small escalation in price. In 1959, a four-door Galaxie Town Sedan was just $52 more than a comparable Fairlane 500, which was $119 more than a regular Fairlane, which was $138 more than the low-end Custom 300 series. Going all the way from a six-cylinder Custom 300 two-door sedan ($2,219) to a V-8 Galaxie Town Victoria four-door hardtop ($2,772) might cause some sticker shock, but the multiple tiers let buyers make the journey upmarket in more palatable stages.

 

I was surprised to learn that Ford customers in 1959 tended to be more lavish than Chevrolet buyers with optional equipment. V-8 engines had been a Ford signature since 1932, of course, but Automotive Industries manufacturer survey data shows that a full-size 1959 Ford was also significantly more likely than a ’59 Chevrolet to have automatic transmission and other extra-cost options, like radio and power steering. Ford had little luck in this period trying to build up its middle-class brands — Edsel never worked, and the attempt to move Mercury upmarket while (temporarily) separating it from Lincoln was a disaster — but Ford customers seemed quite amenable to mid-priced models with Ford badges. It was a trend that would accelerate in the ’60s with the popularity of the LTD and the Country Squire station wagon, which found widespread acceptance even in some rather upscale neighborhoods.

 

I don’t know what powertrain this yellow 1959 Galaxie Town Sedan might have. Statistically, it probably has a V-8 and automatic — perhaps the 200-horsepower 292 cu. in. (4,778 cc) Y-block, the base V-8 for 1959, with the new two-speed Fordomatic, although the newer 332 cu. in. (5,436 cc) and 352 cu. in. (5,766 cc) engines were optional, along with the three-speed Cruise-O-Matic. You could also have overdrive with any engine except the 332; 5 percent of 1959 buyers ordered overdrive, at an extra cost of about $108.

 

What really distinguished the Galaxie from the Fairlane 500 was not the powertrain, but the roofline, which was adapted from the roofline of the four-seat Ford Thunderbird hardtop. Ford marketing trumpeted the Galaxie as “Thunderbird in looks … Thunderbird in luxury!”

 

Ford probably had Robert McNamara to thank for this feature, which McNamara (then the general manager of Ford Division) had loved when designers Joe Oros and Bill Boyer first proposed it in 1955 for a future four-seat Thunderbird. (The roof design was previewed on the 1957 Ford Skyliner retractable hardtop, which was conceived around the same time as the four-seat ‘Bird.)

 

In a 1984 interview with David Crippen of The Henry Ford, designer Gene Bordinat called the production 1958 Thunderbird “quite boraxy,” explaining:

It had a lot [of design] — schlocky — but it had a very formal roof on it. Well, this is typical of the way the uninitiated view a car. McNamara would say, “Well, that looks pretty formal.” Formal, your ass, it looked just — I mean — it looked commercial, but it had a big spear on the side and a hook coming down onto the spear and double headlights on it and a great big bumper grille … I mean, you know, it was really an adventure — but with a formal roof. And, it’s interesting, it had more to look at.

Whatever Bordinat thought of it, McNamara’s judgment in this regard was right on target. The 1958–1960 Thunderbird quickly established itself as a true prestige car in image as well as price (it cost about as much as a Buick Invicta). Applying its distinctive roofline to the standard car for 1959 was a huge hit: Ford sold 464,336 Galaxies for 1959, compared to just 79,011 Fairlane 500s and 97,789 Fairlanes. The 1959 shape is still very fondly remembered; in the Standard Catalog of American Cars 1946–1975, editor John Smith called it “one of the best looking cars ever to come out of Dearborn.”

 

I think part of what made the Galaxie formal roof successful was that it looked equally good in both pillared and pillarless Victoria forms. With some cars of this era, the pillared sedans were definitely the poor relation when it came to styling, but the bright window frames of the four-door Town Sedan seem to fit right in with the overall theme, giving up little to the hardtops in glamour. The Town Sedan was the bestseller of the Galaxie series, accounting for 39.4 percent of production, followed by the two-door Club Victoria hardtop, which accounted for 26.2 percent.

 

Of course, the true glamour leader of the Galaxie line was the 1959 Skyliner retractable hardtop. The Skyliner remains a show-stopper even today, but the “retrac” was expensive ($646 more than a V-8 Town Sedan), and Ford sold only 12,915 of them this year.

 

In previous years, the Fairlane and Fairlane 500 had been larger than the entry-level Custom 300, stretching 5 inches longer overall on a 2-inch-longer wheelbase. For 1959, Ford consolidated on the longer wheelbase, so all 1959 Ford cars except the Thunderbird were 208 inches long on a 118-inch wheelbase. These were big cars, and buyers seemed to like them that way. Likewise, while these Fords look rather jukebox-y to modern eyes (few American cars of 1959 didn’t), they were more down to earth than a ’59 Chevrolet or ’59 Plymouth, and contemporary buyers liked that too.

Ironically, the 1959 Galaxie proved far more successful than Ford had anticipated. During its development, Ford designers had gotten a surreptitious early glimpse of the 1959 Chevrolet, which caused a wave of panic internally. James O. Wright, who had succeeded McNamara as head of Ford Division in 1957, feared the 1959 Ford would be dead in the water against the swoopy bat-winged Chevrolet, and ordered a hasty and expensive full redesign for 1960, based on an advanced design project called Quicksilver.

 

It was the wrong call: The 1959 Ford was an outstanding seller, coming very close to unseating Chevrolet for the coveted No. 1 spot in sales — 1,462,140 to 1,481,080 for the model year — with a domestic market share of 26.3 percent. Ford actually beat Chevrolet in 1959 calendar year production. The redesigned 1960 line didn’t go over nearly as well: While total 1960 Ford passenger car sales nearly equaled 1959, thanks to the introduction of the Falcon, Ford lost 2.3 percentage points of market share.

 

(Incidentally, unlike more recent decades, which have seen Ford become almost exclusively a truck company, passenger cars were still Ford’s bread and butter in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this era, the AMA didn’t track truck and bus sales by model year as they did for cars, but Ford built 331,348 trucks and buses in calendar 1959 and 339,239 in 1960.)

 

Given their popularity at the time, surviving ’59 Fords have become fairly thin on the ground, and with the exception of the highly collectible Skyliner, if you spot one, it may not be in very presentable shape. (The yellow Town Sedan Cory spotted in Colorado would need a lot of rust repair to be ready for car show duty.) This is a common paradox of mass-market goods: When there are so many of something, they may not seem worth saving, or worth noticing at all — until one day you turn around and realize you haven’t seen one in an awfully long time, and all that’s left are old photos and memories.

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