I suppose there weren’t as many as the four-wheeled variety, but “Thunderbird” once graced many a motel, hotel, lodge or casino. “Imperialist” sent me a vintage postcard of the Thunderbird in Las Vegas for some timely T-Bird Week filler, and I decided to search for a few more. This is probably the oldest one, of that once famous Las Vegas institution. That rare little ’51 Rambler hardtop really caught my eye.
This is the one imperialist sent. Looks to be from about 1956 or so. Looks like the clientele back then was a bit upscale. There’s a nice Jag XK in front of the Caddy.
One more from that establishment, since it has a Corvette in it so prominently. There’s also a Ford Anglia with a number on its side, followed by a Porsche Speedster. There must have been a competition of some sort in town.
This one is in Miami Beach. Notice how the cars back then were all about the same size, height and length, unless there was an odd-ball foreign car.
Now we’re in Lake Tahoe. Bonus points for the T-Bird in front.
This is in Oakland, CA., and there’s another name-appropriate car out front too.
Spokane, Wa. Love the sign hovering above this one. Anybody got any more?
North of the harbour bridge in Auckland was the Thunderbird Valley Inn I dont know if its still there but that was about all we got the cars werent built RHD so didnt get sold here new, many have arrived used and were converted though in later times this is unnecessary as they are considered collector cars and can be left original.
Love these old postcards. I am guessing that I would probably not want to stay in any of those Motels now (if any even exists). Hourly or Monthly rates? 🙂
Awesome! I’ve always loved looking at old postcards. It’s not always the cars that interest me, although it’s part of it, but the building and the scenery behind it that interests me. If you were to check out Seattle (where I’m from), for example, you’d expect to see the Space Needle, Mt. Rainier, etc. or more recently, Safeco Field and Century Link (the Clink) Field, where the Seattle Mariners and the Seattle Seahawks have their home games. 🙂
Thunderbird Hotel, San Mateo, CA (adjacent to SFO), 1964….
In the mid ’60s, the Thunderbird was renamed the Thunderbolt and in 1968 would make an appearance in one of the most CC-centric films ever made….Bullitt
The hotel still exists (in unrecognizably remodeled form) as the Aloft Hotel. Prior to that it was a Clarion for many years.
Still from the film. The yellow Porsche was the one driven by Jacqueline Bisset’s character….
Yes siree. It’s actually in Millbrae, CA but spitting distance of SFO.
You overlooked this Thunderbird. Or maybe you’d just rather forget.
What’s the word?…..
“… not quite like anything I’ve ever tasted.”
Nice.
Thunderbird!
In 1989 or 90, Mrs. JPC asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I replied that I wanted a new Thunderbird. This was what I got. I knew what it was, and avoided opening it for awhile, but my curiosity eventually got to me and I opened it and poured some. Horrid stuff.
Yeah, that stuff was nasty.Worse than Ripple or Boone`s Farm apple wine.In my late teens, my friends and I used to buy Night Train on a Saturday night, get good and plastered, wake up hung over on Sunday morning and swear we would never drink it again….until next week.For a short time, I had a job at a liquor store in Coney Island-looked like the South Side of Chicago under the `el. I worked alone until the owner came in. We woul open up at 10am, but the bums would come around early and by cheap wine that was kept in a refrigerator.I felt sorry for them, so I would let them wait outside and give them the wine they wanted. Thunderbird was the best seller with Night Train next.I probably shouldn`t have, but I did it anyway. Just heartbreaking to see them out so early on a cold morning.
At $1.00 a bottle back in the day, Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill was OK , but you needed more than one bottle… Ancient history, but ask me how I know.
Dare you to buy and drink a bottle now!
I`ll pass on that. Today, my tastes are for Hennessey or Heinekin Dark
First time I ever drank was a bottle of this. Yuk. Thunderbird Village Apartments are in the low rent district of my town.
This crossed my mind also. Drank half a bottle at a bachelor party I hosted in 1995. The guy who partook of the other half didn’t fare so well. Memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Reading the thread, I wondered when the wine would pop up. In the ’80s I worked for a couple of years in a liquor store associated with a respected and popular family owned grocery chain. Thunderbird was known in the trade as as a “fortified” wine, alcohol about double that of most conventional wines. At the time I recognized it as a clear and quite dated way to get drunk faster on cheap wine. It was bottom shelf (literally) stuff, and I recall we stocked Night Train and Wild Irish along with it. It was a poor seller at our location in the ‘burbs. We young college folks preferred our cheap beer, and big nights were Southern Comfort, Jagermeister, or schnapps, probably a side effect of the then popular Fuzzy Navel peach schnapps drink. DeKuyper was the popular cost effective Schnapps brand.
Love the pop architecture in the various postcards. Bizarre as this sounds, the vintage masoleum at our Catholic cemetery looks a lot like some of these hotels.
I thought that Thunderbird wine would make an appearance here sooner or later. Whenever my family got together with my aunt’s family (Mom’s sister), down here where they lived in Rancho Mirage (adjacent to the Thunderbird Country Club) in the 50’s, my dad and my aunt would would guzzle Thunderbird together. I remember sniffing the bottle, awful stuff. My mom hated it.
Not a postcard but a picture of the sign at the Thunderbird Beach Resort, Treasure Island, Florida – it shines as bright as ever and this classic Florida beach hotel is still very much alive and open for business!
That last bird flying over the hotel in Spokane is really something. I think it was at CC that I read how the Thunderbird car was named after the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, CA, that opened in 1951.
Here is what it says on their web site:
“Thunderbird Country Club also has a sentimental and proprietary interest in another vehicle. Ernest Breech, a Thunderbird member, was chairman of Ford Motor Company. He was deeply involved in the creation of a new sports car to compete with the recently released Chevrolet Corvette. Breech asked the Club’s permission to name the new model with its sleek and sporty design after the Club. Permission was granted.
And in 1955 the first Ford Thunderbird rolled off the assembly line!”
I’ve stayed at that very motel in Spokane a number of times back when. I suspect that sign was added to the photo, I don’t recall it being there in the ’70s or early ’80s. The last time I stayed there about 15 years ago it was looking pretty shopworn, and a sign company was removing the “Best Western” sign as I was checking out. It was a fairly early checkout, since we were woken up by the Spokane PD kicking the door to the unit next door in.
The place passed it’s “best before” date in about 1978, but it may be there yet.
And here’s the Thunderbird Restaurant, east of Zion National Park in Utah.
I’m pretty sure I ate there in 69 while on a road trip with my parents. It’s attached to the Best Western Thunderbird Lodge, in Mt Carmel Junction, UT (yes, east of Zion NP). I was doing the trip planning (Dad was glad not having that hassle in the runup to vacation, and I had his confidence that I wouldn’t choose extravagant places to stay), and four nights in Mt Carmel Junction gave us reasonably easy access to Zion, Bryce Canyon, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon. There was nothing memorable about either the motel or the restaurant, so I suppose they were okay. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the restaurant was about the only place to get dinner in Mt Carmel Junction.
BTW, I’m loving the Thunderbird nostalgia this week.
Great walk/drive down memory lane. Could be lovin me some Sambo pancakes; are we even allow to say Sambo anymore?
Thanks for pointing out the Sambos…. brings back the memories… definitely VERY “un-PC”. I remember the figurines that you could buy at the register and chuckle/cringe.
We ate at that Sambo’s a lot. Yea it was racist, but as a kid I didn’t really know or care.
I had to look it up.
This is the first thing I think of….
I also thought of the same thing. Thunderbirds are go! 😉
Found this while researching my stuff. I thinks its a squarebird next to one of TB2’s pods
Not a squarebird to my eyes. Not sure exactly what it is, because it’s a model and lacking in perfect scale. Chrysler? ’65 Impala? Or?
Phew. Lucky I didn’t write up that ‘Ford Thunderbirds that appeared in the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds TV Series’ story.
Looks like another squarebird did a cameo appearance in the same episode along with a Buick Riviera.
http://lester.demon.nl/superm/technology/sfx/tbirds/models2.html
Love the 54 Olds Starfire and the 55 DeSoto in the second photo. Three from last, yes a T-Bird but also a 59 Olds 98!
There also is the Thunderbird Graduate School of Global Management:
http://www.thunderbird.edu
I wonder if that’s John Sebastian from The Lovin’ Spoonful.
Got the same thought, did a quick bio. No way it could have been.
Sebastian was born in 1944, did his first recorded gigs in Greenwich Village in 1964, formed the Loving Spoonful in 1965. That post card has to be at least ten years earlier.
It could have been his father, also named John. He was a musician also.
Glad you could use the material, Paul. I especially like the “buffett” dinner advertised in the third pic from the top. I hope their food was better than their spelling.
Maybe that’s where frugal Warren used to eat.
Nothing says Americana like night spelled N-I-T-E!
Thanx for the pictures ! .
-Nate
We had a Thunderbird Motor Inn in Portland, too. It was in Jantzen Beach (the Jantzen of swimsuit fame), on an island in the Columbia River at the I-5 crossing. Recently burned down.
I see a Corvair, a mid-sixties Mopar wagon and a coupe, VW Squareback and several big sixties Chevys.
Can’t locate the postcard I have somewhere but in 1961 or 1962 I stayed at the Thunderbird on Sepulveda Blvd. in El Segundo, CA – just south of the entrance to LAX. Shortly thereafter it became the Hacienda.
Then there is the Thunderbird School of Global Management, well known for international business studies, in Glendale, Arizona.
– ranchero –
There seemed to be a disjoint in time, as the Lovin’ Spoofull’s John Sebastian couldn’t have been more than 10 years old when this pic was taken. I did some sleuthing and found the John Sebastian on the sign is his father, John, Sr. He was a very famous classical harmonica player in the ’40s and ’50s.
Here’s a cut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eiV_XZUa1g
The Headliner, James Melton was a rock star of car collecting in the early ’50s. He had been a popular singer with a warm, approachable face in the ’20s and ’30s but his career waned when his tenor voice became unstylish, so he remade himself as an opera singer. In the ’50s he did radio and played clubs like the Thunderbird. In 1955, my car-crazy dad took us to his “Autorama”, in Florida, one of the first antique car museums in the country. I still have a few slides I will try to post. There’s a book called “Bright Wheels Rolling” that Dad bought at the museum, which I still have, and was written by Melton, “as told to” Ken Purdy, recognized as the first great automotive writer. It is a beautiful auto history (my apologies if there’s already a post on it in CC, as I haven’t checked.). Melton had only a few years to live after this post card was shot; he died of pneumonia at age 57 in 1961.
Nice Barko, thanks
In the summer of ’87 my extended family stayed at the Thunderbird Motel in Lake George, NY. I don’t have a picture but my mom’s ’86 Plymouth Horizon (which overheated in the resort traffic!) and my aunts’ and uncles’ 1983 Ford Escort, 1985 Olds Firenza, 1986 Chevy Spectrum and 1982 Crown Vic (Aunt Sue was always a bit weird…) would’ve been in it.
Interesting tie-in. There is a Thunderbird Motel in Yass, NSW, which is a small town of approx 6,000 located about 3 hours down the Hume Highway that runs Sydney-Melbourne. It is just north of the national capital Canberra.
I have stayed in Yass before, once around 30 years ago and again 4-5 years ago – both mornings were literally freezing (ice on cars) although neither stay was in winter.
My Valiant Regal broke a waterpump shaft just out of Yass theres no wrecking yard there, I found a local with some wrecks and bought waterpump and radiator for 2 slabs of Tooheys, good deal actually only off the road 2 days I was on my way to Wangaratta for work.
Very cool! These are like a glimpse into a bygone era. All that neon signage is pretty sweet too!
From a trip to Redding, CA. Two such signs, and the rooms are actually decent, too.
If you love the old postcards, James Lileks has a lot on his site. A great time waster.
Between Virginia and Massachusetts, we’ve always had those “Ye Olde” type motels. Give me a Thunderbird neon sign any day over the faux columns and scraggly box hedges.
I’ll try that again …
Obviously, I cannot manage to post pictures via an iPhone … here’s a third try!
There’s another Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, GA, still around today with its vintage sign intact. It has survived by reinventing itself as a “hip retro” hotel and also by being the cheapest place to stay on the periphery of the historic district.