My favorite bookstore is The Old Book Shop in Morristown N.J. Since junior high school I have shopped there many times to buy books and magazines on all kinds of subjects. When I was younger I bought back issues of magazines like Life and National Geographic–mainly for the old car ads! A typical Life magazine might contain 6 or 7 car ads, and at 50 cents per magazine, that was less than 10 cents per ad, which I thought was a pretty good deal. And Life generally had the most lavish, colorful ads of all! I have selected as an example this particular issue, November 18th 1957 because it shows Detroit’s apotheosis of fantasy and optimism contrasted with changing events that were not so rosy.
As the cover shows, the big story this week is the successful launch of the satellite Sputnik by the Soviet Union. This is a real scientific and public relations victory by America’s Cold War arch-rival, and it makes Americans feel uneasy. Is the U.S. not #1 in the Space Race? Are the Russians ahead of us in nuclear missile technology as well? Since Life is an American magazine, the main thrust of their coverage is not on Sputnik itself, but how America is planning an even bigger advance in space exploration to top the Soviets–going to the moon! And Wernher Von Braun is going to help us do that, now that he’s working for “our” side (since 1945).
The Soviets may have beat us on Sputnik, but looking at the ads in this issue, we’ve already got cars that look like they can rocket their passengers to the moon, Mars, and the galaxies beyond. We’ve also got push-button TVs, sexy models and actresses, and kids who have no cavities because they’ve been brushing with Crest! Judging from Life’s ads this week…everything’s fine! But under the surface, trouble is brewing. A sharp recession is about to hit which will drastically hurt new car sales. John Keats’ The Insolent Chariots, a book openly critical of Detroit’s chrome-laden dreamboats will be published in a few weeks. Foreign car sales will reach 10% of the market, and compacts will gain market share at the expense of the longer-lower-wider offerings of the Big Three. But as of 11/18/57 nobody knows that yet, and the ads triumphantly herald the coming New Golden Motoring Age!
“No mistaking it” is right! Especially that “Dynastar Grille”. But there’s more to this new car than looks: “The Buick [is] built with more aircraft principles than any other car in the world. . . . Once behind the wheel you’ll find a new kind of land travel. You’ll feel it in the bounceless, swayless, yet completely cushioned Miracle Ride . . . . You can even top that, with Buick’s Air-Poise Suspension . . . .You’ll feel it in the silence and smoothness and instantaneous action of the B-12000 engine [named for the 12,000 lbs. of thrust behind every piston stroke]. . . . You’ll feel it in deep satisfaction, in the steel-sinewed solidity that tells you that a new standard of durable Buick quality has been hammered into every inch of this car’s structure. So don’t wait. Go find out more about this bold and brilliant forerunner of a new era.” Then there’s the “incredible” Flight Pitch Dynaflow which “goes through a million switches of pitch with the pace and smoothness of a beam of light . . . and all you feel is smooth, soaring response.” 250,000 people were convinced. Buick was the fifth best selling car for 1958, although this was down significantly from previous years.
Wow, look at this–the dress, the mink stole, that rocket tail light (or is it a ray gun from a 1950s outer space sci-fi horror movie?)
Park Lane is a new top-of-the-line model, designed to compete with the Buick Roadmaster and the Chrysler New Yorker. It “will establish its owner as man of taste–a trend-setter with an eye for the exceptional things in life. . . . You command the most advanced engine on the road today–the entirely new 360 horsepower Cool-Power Marauder V-8 . . . . It’s road-smoothing length, width, and weight weave a spell of serenity that, until now, has only been associated with custom-built limousines.” Despite assurances that “soon you will see it in the driveways of many of the finest homes in your community”, sales were well below expectations with only 9,252 Park Lanes sold.
“There’s nothing newer in the world than the ’58 Ford” the ad claims, and the big story is “The greatest adventure in motorcar history”. New Fords were driven around the globe where they “rolled beautifully, easily through the severest road test ever given a car.” They were acclaimed “from Buckingham Palace to the Taj Mahal” and they “showed camels how to cross deserts and elephants how to move through jungles.” “New Magic Circle steering makes parking a pleasure–turns traffic into child’s play.” “The ’58 Ford has broken a trail far beyond competition.” Then there’s the Slipstream Roof, the Honeycomb Grille, the Power-Dome Hood, and the Safety-Twin tail lights. Not to mention the new Interceptor V-8 engine “with Precision Fuel Induction” that, when teamed with Cruise-O-Matic drive gives 15% better gas mileage.
“Seldom in Cadillac history has there been an announcement as significant as the message you are now reading” (Hmmm! This sounds important!) “The finest and most advanced motorcar ever to bear the celebrated Cadillac name. Certainly one glance at its extraordinary grace and symmetry will tell you instantly that this is motordom’s masterpiece in styling. Its new sweep and stature, its remarkable new rear fender design (They made the fins bigger), its dazzling new grille and four-headlamp system, its tasteful use of chrome and color . . . all mark it as a singularly beautiful and majestic automotive creation.” “There is marvelous new balance and ease of handling . . . a spectacular new high performance engine” (Isn’t it the same 365 as last year?) “A completely new instrument panel design” (They moved the clock in front of the driver, where it’s easier to see but harder to remove from the dashboard when it inevitably will need repair). “It’s all new–it’s all wonderful–and it’s all waiting for you today in your authorized Cadillac dealer’s showroom.” Who could resist?
GM and Ford dominate the car ads this week; there is just this one ad from Chrysler Corporation. One page only, black and white, talking about how “The Forward Look” is still the greatest thing ever. In fact, “Our eye-catching dart shape . . . with its clean-flowing design . . . reduces steering correction in cross winds as much as 20%.” Bet you didn’t know that! Sales of Chrysler Corp. cars were down even more than their competitors in 1958–I think they needed bigger, splashier, more colorful ads in this issue in order to compete!
Back to GM. They had this whole series of fantasy ads showing GM cars levitating over the pavement without wheels, or soaring through outer space, with no hoods or engines even! The point is that GM’s exclusive Fisher Bodies are built to be quiet and solid. “The secret: Life-Span Build! A Fisher Body is put together as an integrally joined unit.” I suppose some readers might be fooled into believing that these GM cars had actual unitized construction, like the very solid Ramblers and Volkswagens. But they were still conventional body-on-frame designs, as before.
General Motors really went all out for this issue of Life. Another big, colorful two-page spread, showing cars from all five GM divisions. (They are christened “The Golden Five” as this is GM’s 50th [Golden] Anniversary.) “Each maintains its own personality…” Yes, but that will become less and less true, especially next year when all will share the same body shells, Chevrolet through Cadillac. And as new and glittery as these cars look, they will be completely obsolete by 1959, when everything is “All new all over again” with the wildest, most over-the-top styling GM has ever introduced. Those in turn will quickly become passe in 1961, with the coming of cleaner, more tailored, boxier designs pioneered by Harley Earl’s successor, Bill Mitchell, thus ending “The Golden Age of Gorp”.
More pages of interest in this same issue:
Believe it or not . . . there’s this truck, see. And instead of tires it has these air-filled, rubber pillows for wheels! This is a great scientific advance, especially because you can now run over pretty looking women, and it won’t even hurt them! As a matter of fact, she seems to be enjoying the experience!
Not only did Chrysler Corp. cars, Mercury, and Edsel have push buttons, but so did this General Electric TV with Electronic Self-Tuner. Just push a button to change channels! What’ll they think of next? Has anyone actually seen one of these? I would bet a greater percentage of 1958 cars survive today than 1958 television sets, since these TVs are totally obsolete since digital signals became standard.
Segregation is here to stay now that J. Lindsay Almond Jr. has been elected governor of Virginia.
George R. Price, a man of impeccable credentials, gives us “. . . a provocative warning of impending national disaster” caused by Russian blackmailing of the U.S. Today we have alleged “Russian Collusion” in the 2016 presidential election. Those sneaky Russians, they never quit!
“Tempting with the top on! Terrific with the top off!” (We’re talking about a lipstick case here, guys!) But even so, in the left photo she is wearing a top, and on the right she’s wearing . . . nothing. (Get it?) There’s some other interesting symbolism going on here too, which I will not comment on at this time.
Summary and Conclusion:
Looking back on all this 62 years later, what are we to make of it? The overly-hyped ads, like the cars themselves, seem quaint and even silly with their faux futurism, but I find them fascinating and beautiful just the same. The “important issues of the day” which people worried over and argued about are long gone. All of this makes me wonder, “What will people in the year 2081 think about our time?” What will they say about today’s cars, SUVs, trucks, and the advertisements for them? And, going further, people in 1957 could not have foreseen the Kennedy assassination, the disaster in Vietnam, hippies, acceptance of racial equality, government safety and emissions standards for cars, and other trends of the next decade (although they did predict the moon landings!) Nor could they see how the Cold War would end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So what is coming in our near future that we have absolutely no clue about today?
Excellent article. Thank you so much for sharing both magazine and thoughts.
I love reading old magazines like this one. They help understand how people thought at the time. Or at least how publishers wanted people to think at the time. And doubtlessly, what corporations wanted people to consume.
Great ad for Fisher body:
“The point is that GM’s exclusive Fisher Bodies are built to be quiet and solid. “The secret: Life-Span Build! A Fisher Body is put together as an integrally joined unit.” ”
Life-Span Build, means the car will last for its entire life span? It’s great to know that the quality is such that it will last as much as it will.
Ripley’s note “Soft airy pillows” look suspiciously like some kind of rubber baloon…so do tires.
As you say, Poindexter, who knows what can be said from us 62 years on? Even 15 years on. Let us think about 15. I, for one, have another appointment 62 years from now, a restful and peaceful one!
Good catch on Life-Span Build! Funny, kind of like lubed-for-life suspensions.
Interesting … I was just a week away from my first birthday, so I have no actual memories of that year, but longer/lower/wider, the space race and Sputnik (very worrisome to my first/second generation Russian [pre-Soviet] emigré parents), segregation and civil rights, and push-button tuning remained visible well into my childhood. And though the details have changed, some things … Russia, race relations, and multiple drive mode automatics … have not changed much in principle. No more Mercury, Plymouth/DeSoto/Imperial, Pontiac/Olds, or GE televisions though.
I was just a month or two past my first birthday on this publication date. No memories, and very few photographs available either. I was reading an old NatGeo today from 1988 and one article featured David Duke and his sick views. Some things never change completely or sufficiently at any rate.
I used to do the same thing. Circa 1990-91 my 5th grade teacher had a huge collection of old National Geographic magazines on the shelf, with the oldest ones dating from the 1950s. We were allowed to go read them after we’d finished our classwork, so I’d go seek out the oldest ones I could find just to look at the car ads.
One thing that really stood out to me even at that age was just how blatantly sexist some of the ads from that era were. I specifically remember a Ford ad from probably the mid to late 1950s that outright stated that the man of the house should have a stylish Thunderbird to impress the guys at the office, and the wife needs a practical station wagon to haul the kids around.
Yeah? You’re younger than me. Back then, that was “the normal way of life” and if there were any alternatives, they sure weren’t mentioned – in polite society at least. At least not in small town Pennsylvania. Oh, no doubt there were some weirdos out there, who else would be buying Renaults, or Skodas, or DKW’s? But for 90% of the (white) country, life was good, everybody knew their place, and the future was golden.
Interesting contrast between the enthusiasm and optimism portrayed by these ads, and yesterday’s CC review of the emotionless 2019 Detroit Auto Show. What struck me most about the Auto Show review was the lack of enthusiasm from the manufacturers. Looking at these ads 60 years after they were made, electronics and women’s beauty products still generate excitement, but cars? Not so much. Who would have guessed?
I loved the Fisher Body ad — never seen that before.
You make a good point, but the comparison may be hard based on how current car shows are more about dealers moving inventory rather than OEMs catching the public’s interest with show cars and innovations in technology that usually was engineering snake oil at the shows of the 1950s.
Actually, advertising has stayed about the same, other than print media has been replaced by digital and television ads. The hype is the same: some random feature that does about the same as everyone else does, and the idea that buying this particular vehicle will enhance your “lifestyle” and win you the envy of your friends and neighbors.
What’s missing (and you can probably blame the Japanese for this):
When dad had the dealership, I was the envy of my classmates in school because, by either the end of September or beginning of October, on a Sunday after church dad would take me down to the dealership and I’d get to see next years cars, hidden in the upstairs rooms and basement of the building. They’d stay there, hidden, until the release date. Usually the last week of October.
The showroom would get cleaned out of the current year’s models, all outside windows would be papered over, and on the day before the reveal, the new models would be moved into the showroom. All done within the building, no car was driven outside. On moving day, the dealership essentially shut down, no customers came into the building, other than the service department. And the doors between service and showroom were locked. Anyone that wanted to close a deal on a current model did so in the used car office across the street.
0800 on reveal day, the paper was taken down (usually a Wednesday), and there would probably be 40-50 people waiting outside to see the new cars.
Couple this with no internet, virtually no spy photography in the months previous, car magazines printing teaser drawings of what the new cars would look like (which were invariably wrong) in the 3-4 months before, and you had one hell of an anticipation building up. That’s what made it so special.
In July ’65, I got the real special treat: Dad took me with him to the Pittsburgh Zone reveal where the dealers got to see the new cars. The big surprise was getting to see the restyled ’66 Chey II (Nova) that year.
Unfortunately, dad was gone from the dealership before the ’66 reveal, and I never really followed how things were done after that. When I say the Japanese ruined that, it’s because they didn’t believe in that kind of buildup. When Toyota or Datsun had a new model to introduce, they just did it, no matter what time of the year, and Detroit followed shortly.
That turned new car introduction from an event into a commodity. Now you have things like GM teasing the ’05 Camaro for how many years before it finally was released? By which time we were sick of all the teasing.
For decades, Japanese manufacturers had a practice of building two generations of a given model simultaneously; the new model would be Japan-only for its’ first year, the old model would continue for export until they were sure all the kinks were worked out of the new one.
That meant that any mag with a Tokyo correspondent (read: Japanese freelancer who could write in English) could have pictures of the full production model seen on the street in private hands, months before the US reveal.
Thanks for sharing this walk back into the past. I remember white-washed dealer windows and the excitement of new car intros. As a kid I used to live for the day my copy of Motor Trend with the new car preview sketches would arrive. Our RR mailman would see me lingering near the roadside mailbox anticipating his arrival. And the first new cars in the neighborhood – everyone would come out of their houses to see them!
My first car show with my Dad was in the fall of 1960 at age 10. I brought home a huge bag of brochures, double copies of each one. I would save one perfect set and cut up the others for the scrapbooks of car pictures and ads I put together. Different era, for sure.
I’ve attended the LA Auto Show for decades. Every year it seems to be less crowded despite substantial representation from automakers from around the world. The internet certainly has had a lot to do with providing so much information, photos, videos way before the show opens. I don’t see most of these auto shows being around much longer. I enjoy the internet automotive world immensely – new content every day – so no complaints.
In my hometown, the railroad tracks ran right through the center of town. By the 1970s, passenger rail service had been discontinued, but freight trains still rumbled through town.
In mid-August, it was not uncommon to see the cars for the next model year on the train. The train tracks bordered a public park…I remember standing there on summer evenings, watching the train rumble by, loaded with brand-new cars for the next model year.
It’s been a habit of mine since I was a boy to go through old Life Magazines. Thanks to Google Books, every week I read issues from 70, 60 & 50 years ago from that week. I saw this particular issue a couple of years ago. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading the January 10, 1949 edition when I saw the following article about MG owners here in the States:
https://books.google.com/books?id=hkoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA63&dq=Life+Magazine&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q=Life%20Magazine&f=false
One random way to get a read on the present would be to look in the driveway of the Life magazine addressee. In 2018 they appear to be driving a GMC Safari minivan and, I think, a Dodge Charger. This was likely not the automotive future fantasized about in 1958, but maybe cars don’t play as large a part in our current fantasy world as they did then. Then again, Tesla may be about to shake things up. Ask Alexa.
Buying old magazines has been a long time hobby of mine, too, primarily for the car ads but there are often other items of interest. I’ve gotten Life, of course, NG, Look, Motor Trend, Sports Illustrated and even Playboy. Playboy had great car ads during the musclecar era, except no GM cars because GM wouldn’t lower themselves to be seen in such a prurient publication.
Good concept for an article!
The high beams that I looked at in Playboy weren’t in the car ads.
Nor did you read Playboy “for the articles,” as the joke went!
Life magazine was American Pravda a pure propaganda rag, funny to look back on, the adverts from way back are the same you are buying the best thing in the world no matter what you choose it is simply the best, and sometimes it was often it wasnt Chevy promising your new car will still be intact to trade in next year when the next best thing is released,
I can remember a book from my childhood called, “You will go to the moon” then years later seeing Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in glorious black and white on TV, he went according to the TV pictures I havent yet,
The cold war game is being played out again, its funny to watch the ancient propaganda get brushed off and recycled, a bit like the retro designs tried on cars it will be interesting to see how long the spin doctors can keep it going for.
“. . . a pure propaganda rag.” You may be right about that. I was always amused by this cover from March 24th 1958. It compares two high school boys–one Russian, one American. The Russian boy (Alexei) looks mean and sinister; the American boy (Stephen) looks bright and wholesome.
Is this media bias?
One of the observations people from other countries make about Americans is that many of us smile a lot. So that cover may be accurate.
Well, it’s easy to look back and ignore the realities of life in the Soviet Union vs. life in the US during that time, but little Alexei really did have a bad deal. He was denied basic freedoms, thought, religion, movement, politics. Wrong actions in those areas could land him in a cold hard place.
Was Life mag propaganda in the traditional sense of showing a false, state sponsored and approved, version of reality to deceive and mask what was really happening? I don’t think so. The lifestyles shown in Life were really being lived, and while it was sugar sweet for sure, they occasionally delved into the darker sides of American post war life.
LIFE didn’t hesitate to cover stories such as the civil rights movement. Given that its claim to fame was its photojournalism, the articles were always accompanied with sometimes graphic photos.
The magazine even featured photos that would probably not be run today. In a September 1960 issue story on auto safety, it featured a graphic photo of a car accident that ended up killing several young men in Vermont.
Their car (can’t tell what make by the photo – the accident was that bad) went off the road and hit a large tree at high speed. No one was wearing safety belts, and one can imagine what happened in the absence of strong door looks and crush-resistance roofs. Yet the magazine ran a photo of the accident scene, complete with several bodies strewn about the mangled car.
So, you’re correct. LIFE did a lot more than serve up a sugarcoated version of American life.
Volkswagen saw these very ads and their impression was that all the US manufacturers were selling an impossible dream of chrome, sex and power wrapped in a body with an engine no different than the year before. They saw ad proposal after ad proposal about how sexy the VW Bug was and painting of them at speed and they were not impressed. Then DDB came along and said “And now for something completely different!” and they got the account.
VW began to educate the consumer about how their cars were engineered and constructed and how the strictest quality check would sideline a VW to be fixed while any US manufacturer would have loaded onto the truck to the dealer posthaste!
And, thanks to those ads, a VW was the one ‘furrin’ car a respectable American could buy and not be thought of as too weird.
And as American as Wernher von Braun.
It helped that the cars were actually reliable (ask a Renault Dauphine or Austin America owner about the importance of reliability) and could handle speeds on American interstate highways.
Back in the late 70s I would buy these at used bookstores and carefully slice the car ads from them for my collection. All of which is available online now, as it turns out, so I have not looked at the actual paper ads in years.
The August and September issues were usually the worst for car ads, but the rest were pretty good. I especially remember those floating Fisher bodies. I probably bought this issue as I remember all of these. It was fascinating to dip myself into the world as it existed in this era.
Actually, with some specific exceptions, auto sales had been on a slow downward trend since the record-breaking year of 1955. Most brands (GM brands especially) were down every year after 1955 and through 1958. So while 1957 had a few bright spots (Ford and Ply-Dodge-DeSoto-Imperial) most of the industry was down from 1956. Which had been down from 1955. And 1958 would, of course, be a full-blown disaster year.
Some economists claimed that the record sales year of 1955 had “borrowed” sales from 1956 and 1957. It didn’t help that a fair number of buyers took loans with longer terms, and lenders were extending loans to people with less-than-stellar credit.
The new 1957 Mopars and Ford spurred sales for one year, but by 1958, the chickens had come home to roost. A nasty recession that began in the summer of 1957 didn’t help. At the time, more than a few people blamed Detroit for the recession, saying that the overblown, gas-guzzling offerings for 1958 had prompted a “buyers’ strike,” thus throwing the economy into a tailspin. Some pundits even indirectly blamed cars for the Soviets initially beating us in the space race. The claim was that Americans were worried about tailfins and horsepower, while the Soviets were worried about rockets and satellites.
The two domestic cars that recorded significant sales increases for 1958 were two very different cars – the Rambler and the Ford Thunderbird. One was fairly economical, easy to park and sensible in size. The other was a new type of “dreamboat.”
I think that in the future people will wonder how we survived without smart phones surgically attached to our faces. They will also find it incredulous that there were no laws mandating us to have social media accounts. They will look at non-self driving cars as antiquated, the same way people of today look at a horse and buggy
Haha, I wondered if anyone else would make that connection. “Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down. That’s not my department – says Werner Von Braun.”
I aim at the stars (but sometimes I hit London)
Pretty sneaky of Ford to use the phrase “Precision Fuel Induction”- sounds sort of like “Fuel Injection” which Chevy had for ’58 and Ford didn’t.
The Ford ad campaign is interesting, as the 1957 model was criticized for sloppy build quality and a flimsy body. The hood scoop, roof grooves and recessed deck lid featured on the 1958 model were specifically added to strengthen those body panels.
One wonders if the “Proved Around the World” theme was designed to address this issue in an indirect way.
‘Proved Around the World’ – yet we never got these models in Australia.
What a fascinating read, Pointdexter
I’ve really appreciated the ads and the commentary on the cars and the society of the time.
In my childhood I spent so much time reading old italian car magazines in search of those garish and blatant fins and chrome. And yet, inexplicably, these cars still look beautiful to me.
“Magnificence unlimited” but “prices start just above the lowest”: That Mercury ad says it all!
Bruno, what you say is similar to what happened to me.
American cars here were so thin on the ground that the little chrome that, say, a ’57 Chevrolet one-fifty had was a lot anyway. I suppose that the long post-war period Italy had to endure, had more Fiat 600s than Chevies of any model. Here in Montevideo, save for Impalas and Fairlane 500s (from the late ’50s I mean), you’d say “’58 Buick” and there was a lone example.
Then again, it probably depended on the city. I guess Rome had its nice share of foreign cars, with all the embassies and the Vatican.
Rafael, sorry to say that US cars have always been a rarity here.
For instance in 1956 less than 200 of them were imported. Blame the size, tariffs, road taxes and possibly the most expensive gas prices in the world.
Italy was recovering from II WW and the little 600 was our Ford T.
American cars gained some popularity (Studebaker and Nash among the others) in the tiny luxury car market right after II WW when those were miles ahead compared to what we had here.
Then european manufacturers caught up and all it was left was the excess and the social stigma of driving a big and thirsty automobile.
They tried a comeback later on, when Falcons and the F85 / Skylark duo were introduced to the market but it obviously didn’t work.
Admittedly, Chrysler-Jeep proved to be the more Europe oriented and a few product sold well here, but that’s all save for a few loyalists and a niche interest for special cars like the Mustang.
Tesla is having quite an impact on the market but ironically no one thinks it’s an american car.
So, we american cars fans had to rely on tourists coming to Italy and of course internationally oriented towns like Rome or Florence had their fair share of american cars.
I’ve just scanned a GM ad from an old QUATTRORUOTE magazine dating from 1956.
Quite conservative as you may see, nothing so flashy to hurt those wealthy prospective customers.
Probably, Mad Men and Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” had yet to come to Italy.
I don’t remember ever seeing the GE push button TV tuner, but do remember the Zenith Space Command remote. Used sound, the original “clicker”. Sometimes, dropping pots or pans in the kitchen changed TV channels in the living room.
That GE TV also had a remote of sorts. It was basically a one-button control attached to the TV by a cord. Pushing the button ran a motor that turned the tuner knob. Want to change the volume? Gotta get off the couch.
TV? where i grew up we didnt get any signal untill 64 then it was one channel only no remote required.
I used to frequent Morristown to visit our company head office – AlliedSignal – Honeywell ON Columbia Drive when it was housed there. Beautiful town.
Those ads were all Epic in nature – announcing the next greatest thing ever invented. Great read all of them.
As a footnote, she needs to be careful where that lipstick ends up. Look what happened to her top!
There were a bunch of Life magazines in my grandmas basment. We sold them at a yard sale a couple of years ago.
1958 televisions are indeed rare but there are still nostalgic hobbyists who restore them to operation. Like a 1958 car, they require some careful diagnosis and resourceful parts scrounging for a successful final result. Programming in the USA…except in some remote areas, too sparsely populated to justify UHF digital broadcasting, and where analog television broadcasting is still allowed…is by conversion from modern sources to VHF channels 3 or 4 using integral converters in playback units. With the wealth of black-and-white television shows and movies widely available on DVD, and advertising that can be downloaded fron YouTube, “Suddenly it’s nineteen-fifty-whatever!”
All they have to do is tune in to their local MeTV station with a digital to analog converter. So many shows from the 50s and early 60s in glorious black and white! Perry Mason. Wagon Train,Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, 12 O’Clock High, Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip…
Thanks for posting this Life edition. I was 15 days old on the date of this issue (born on the day Sputnik went up), so I connect strongly with it. It is enlightening to get a glimpse of the world, the culture, the politics and even the vast menu of cars at the time I entered the world. Gazing at those ads, showing off the color, chrome and, of course, the fins, I can imagine easily why I’ve been car-crazy as far back as my memory takes me.
Ohhhh, 57-58-59 are my absolute favourite years for cars. That was a joyful, exuberant, confident, overdecorated, fun time, and the cars were absolutely stunning. I would be happy to see a museum just with every make of every car made in those three years. I’d buy the Mercury for the taillight alone, never mind what the rest of the car was like. Who can say that for any car since? Nowadays cars change so little from year to year, but the 54 chevy of just three years before looked so little like the 57 and the 62 looked so little like the 59. Everything before was drab and everything afterwards was drab in comparison.
Of course, cars are better in almost every way today and there’s an essay in which P.J. O’rourke tries to take a ’56 Buick some ridiculous distance in the early ’80’s, with no luck. I bet I could remember every taillight on every 57-58-59 car had I grown up then, but I cannot remember the taillights on my pacifica or John’s Audi q5.
That P.J. O’Rourke article is in a 1978 issue of Car and Driver. (I believe it’s the February issue – I have it at home.)
He and his friend took the Buick from Florida to California. They made it, despite battling constant vapor lock and other troubles along the way. When they arrived in California, the car’s reverse gear went out a few blocks from the new owner’s house!
While Big 3 were promoting the 58 models, they were hard at work on the new 59’s and 60’s, which would un-do the 58 ‘trends”.
Great read. Your first sentence stopped me in my tracks. I’ve been going to the Old Book Shop since around 1986.