The sight of this 1952 Chevy made me wonder what it was like for my mom to grow up around cars which look like this. It was made the same year she was born, so it was hard not to make the connection. I never associated my mother with such cars as these but rather thought of her more in line with the very lightly built, ultra-practical and frugally-conceived cars of the mid ’70s and early ’80s, so this Chevy made for quite an instructive basis of comparison. In the United States, this car embodied the hopes and dreams of my mother’s parents’ generation. What cars do you feel most typify the aesthetic context into which your own parents were born?
It’s not unlike car enthusiasts to consider historical events alongside the appearances of common, everyday objects. I imagine fashion designers do the same with clothes (“She saw The Challenger explode? I’ll bet her hair was crimped.”) while film buffs think of contemporary movies; continue and ad lib to suit given predilection. Vehicles, passenger jets, twentieth-century architecture and consumer electronics help me frame my view of modern history, with passenger cars obviously taking precedence. If I have children, a very big if, they’ll associate daddy coming home from the hospital with the 1978 Nova. What will your kids say about their parents?
Come to think of it, I never asked my mother just where she was born. I can’t imagine it was in a hospital as her family moved all through rural Iran in those years, but I imagine a midwife was involved. So more accurately, my mom didn’t come home from any hospital in any car; maybe I can track down the midwife and ask how she arrived at my grandparents’ home.
My Grandmother, Sybil with a Harley? Before they were ‘bad ass’ !
And going even further OT, a QANTAS airliner at their original hanger at Longreach, Qld.
My uncle, grandparents & a friend. I’ll stop now!
Both my parents were born in 1942. In the middle of WW2, in the rural southeast. I can’t exactly say how the average car looked like, but I’m pretty sure most of them had one horsepower.
My parents are war babies-’42 &’43. They started with a worn powder blue 1954 Cadillac Sedan de Ville (?) when they married in the early 60’s. Proved very reliable. Dad moved on to a 220D Benz when I was born in ’71. Then there was a SAAB, and a few MG’s and a ratty Jag XK in my childhood. Yet, there were Cutlasses and Malibus, too. This is where my strange taste in cars came from.
For Dad…Auburn, Ford V8 Coupé, 1936 Chevrolet Master series, Chrysler Imperial Airflow Coupé, Cord 810, Plymouth Special De Luxe, Pontiac Silver Streak, VW Kaefer, Opel Kadett, Düsenberg SJ Town Car, Hispano Suiza Pourtout, Horch 853, Adler Trumpf Junior, etc. And as those had been the last years of the passenger airships era I have to mention the Graf Zeppelin, Hindenburg and the Berlin Olympic Games, Spanish Civil War… Quite strange and exciting times. For Mum…Packard Clipper, Packard Super 8 Sedan, Chevrolet Fleetline, Bmw 335, Gmc 352 Military Truck, Mercedes 320, Kübelwagen, etc. and as that had been right in the middle of the WWII. I think it is unavoidable to mention the Jagdtiger, T-34, M-3 “Gen. Lee”, Sherman tanks… Not so funny year…
nothing.
none of my grandparents had cars. My Dad was the first in the whole bunch to get one, a year before I was born in 1966.
Since both my folks were born in the ’20’s the cars they grew up with were mostly depression era cars. I can remember my Grandpa saying he once owned a Star and a Terraplane. He also worked for a time at the Auburn factory in Connersville , Indiana.
My Dad’s first car was a ’31 Model A coupe. This was replaced with a ’34 Ford Tudor with a slightly modified ’36 Flathead. This was replaced by a ’38 Chevy coupe until he was drafted. He once told me ” Remember that ’40 Ford sedan your Grandpa owned when your were little? That was the fastest car in town when I was in high school”. He told me that when I was about 30. That made me laugh considering how he didn’t like me abusing his cars when I was in high school.
My first ride was in a ’37 Ford sedan that my Dad bought after the War. He was a Ford and Oldsmobile man for the rest of his life.
The car in the lead of the story looks a lot like my first car, a ’51 Chevy sedan. Of course that was 50 years ago and the car wasn’t quite as weathered.
Dad was born in East Ham London in 1926,Granddad was in the Merchant Navy and moved with Gran,elder brother Larry and sister Rose to Lowestoft before starting school.His first car was a Ford model Y given him by Uncle Larry after the war then a green Mk1 Ford Consul.
Mum was born in 1924 in Arbroath Scotland and moved to Lowestoft with her parents and Uncle Will her younger brother when Granddad got a better job on the trawlers.Few working class people had cars then,most cars were British as anything else was very expensive.Cars had running boards,fender mounted spare wheels and starting handles.Mum’s first car was the green Consul which my bother,myself and sister came home from hospital in in 1955,57 & 59 respectively.I always asossciate her with green Fords.
My parents married in 1952 and moved near Lakenheath and both sets of Grandparents moved nearby shortly before my brother was born.
Pops was born in 1923 , his Father whom I never met , was a Civil Engineer and loved his big cars , I’ve seen a few photos of Pops and Uncle Bill here and there on Holiday in Grandfather’s various big old cars .
Pops loved his cars but was mechanically inept to a startling degree .
I remember the ’37 Bentley St. James Coupe , ’54 VW Kombi , Saabs , Peugots and even a Renault Reliance .
R.I.P. Pops .
-Nate
My parents grew up in England and Wales during the war. The typical car (Austins, Morrises, Hillmans etc) would have been put up on bricks for the duration, securely locked into a bijou garage.
One grandfather only ever bought Hillmans, the other, rather more dashing, had a series of Jags and Rovers that would all be collectors’ items today.
I’m very entertained by all the stories that have been posted here, and especially the sporadic comments of “they should have kept that one” or variants thereof.
This brings to mind a conversation I had with my father, on his deathbed (nothing dramatic, he was in the hospital for the last two weeks of his life, and only got ‘deathly ill’ in the last four days). The conversation had turned, as it often did, to old cars and his days at Motor Sales/Hallman’s Chevrolet. We’d returned to the story of his first professional car sale, a used 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, and I, as usual, wistfully commented about what a pity it was that he’d hadn’t bought it himself and stored it away.
I think I brought up that line of thought once too often, because I still remember his reply.
“Son, you’ve got to understand, that wasn’t a classic car. It was an old car. A used car. A unit that was taking up space and needed to be moved. Back in those days, nobody was saving antique cars. They were driving cars, period. Anybody who drove something that old did so because he was either too poor to get something better, or too cheap to spend the money. There was no collector car hobby back then, because we were working too hard just to put food on the table to worry about collecting toys.”
And that’s probably the best answer I’ve ever received about why antique cars are so far and few between.
You are spot on. I would also wager that folks of a certain age simply did not understand why one would keep old “junk”.
My maternal grandfather is 90; his father died in 1927. Shortly before his death, my great-grandfather purchased a new car. Nobody knows for sure and the few who are left didn’t pay attention as it was just a car (my grandfather still has an older sister living).
This new car sat in the shed, untouched, until the mid-1960s. At that time my great-grandmother tired of it and sold it for scrap. It was just old junk and she didn’t want any more trash around her house.
Times change, as do philosophies.
My dad was born on the farm in SW Saskatchewan in 1906. No cars in the family at that point in time!
When my parents were born in 1930’s Netherlands, cars looked like bicycles, and feet.
The D family didn’t get it’s first vehicle until the early 50’s after emigrating to Canada, my Dad’s first vehicle was a 38 Desoto in the late 50’s.
I have to come back to this 52 Chevy. I spent hours and hours in one of these in my early teen years. An uncle drove it daily and it was always outside and unlocked on weekends. I must have driven 40k pretend miles in it. It was parked on the road because it rained rust whenever you slammed the door and Uncle Bill didn’t want it on his driveway. I fully intended to buy it and restore it to its former glory when I turned 16. Unfortunately, 20+ years of northwest Ohio road salt did it in before I could do something stupid. I loved that car.
My father was born on a Virginia farm in 1908, so horses and mules figured in his early memories. I don’t know when Grandfather bought his first car, but when Dad finished high school in 1926, he went halves on an Indian motorcycle with his brother. The bike had killed its first owner, a lieutenant at Langley Army Air Field, but the Edwards brothers were bold and bought it anyhow. Sure enough, that Indian almost killed my father a few months later. When Dad knitted up, he bought his first motorcar, a 1923 Essex.
My mother was from West by-God Virginia, and came to Richmond at age fifteen, in 1931. She met my father through a mutual friend. Boy, she got very interested when she saw his car, a 1930 or ’31 Auburn sedan. Not that she was a gold digger, but Dad was a snappy dresser, too. That car had the dual ignition Lycoming straight eight, and would fly. It was, in fact, the car in which they eloped to Washington and were married on March 11, 1933, Dad’s twenty-fifth birthday. Depression? Bank failures? Who cared, they were in love.
I know my father was brought home in a 1929 Whippet in 1932 and his father stuck to Nash/AMC for the rest of his life. My mother would have made her first trip in a newish DeSoto since my maternal grandfather favored Chrysler products for a long time although the first car of his I remember was a 1969 Volvo 164, which suffered un-Volvo like reliability issues and was replaced with a pair of Oldsmobiles, in conjunction with a move from Brooklyn to the suburbs.
I came home in a 1964 Plymouth Valiant and both of our kids rode home in the same 1995 Ford Escort since we have spent more money on bicycles than cars in the last 15 years.
My dad’s first car in the late 50’s was a ’53 Plymouth with 6 cyl. It wasn’t as beat up looking as this Chevy, though, was clean looking in old slides.
By the time I started to notice cars around 1964-5, the most common ‘older’ ones on the streets were 55-57’s.
Dad was born in January, 1942, the month in which most of the 1942 “blackout” cars (all trim painted except for bumpers and windshield wipers) were built. Civilian car production ended in early February.
My late mother was born in November, 1945, right as the manufacturers were selling every new 1946 model car (which were all hurriedly rehashed 1942s) they could make. Some materials were still in short supply and many plants were still in the process of conversion back to civilian use. Waiting lists were long. The UAW went on strike against GM just a few days after she was born.
As for first cars, Dad’s was a ’55 Ford. Mom’s was a brand new 352-powered ’63 1/2 Galaxie 500 Sportsroof.
My parents were born in the late 1930s in China. They grew up in Taiwan and came to the USA as graduate students in the early 1960s. So they didn’t really have a car culture idea until they went to the US. What few vehicles were around in their childhood were probably military vehicles like trucks or Jeeps as they grew up during the WWII era.
One of their earliest cars was a 1958 Ford. Looked very nice in the old pictures but Dad said it was very unreliable and it soured him on Fords for a long time. He also had a 1950s era Ford as a second car. When I was born our primary car was a 1963 Chevy II with the 2 -speed Powerglide transmission. It was pretty reliable to the best of my knowledge – so that made our family a GM family for a long time – we got a 1970 Chevrolet wagon, a 1980 Buick Century sedan, and a 1993 Saturn SL sedan. Only went to a Ford Crown Vic in the 1990s as a company car – yeah, call it Panther Love.
Started getting into imported brands in the 1970s – a ’73 Volvo 144 sedan (influenced by a professor friend of theirs who had a late 1960s Volvo sedan – hah – the stereotyped academic Volvo owner), a 1983 Peugeot 505. Then there was a 1995 E36 BMW 3-series and a 2000 BMW E39 sedan (still around). Had a couple of VW Jettas, a 2003 wagon and currently a 2014 wagon.
One thing consistent – no Japanese models, to this day. Had something to do with my dad growing up in wartime China dodging Japanese air raids and being on the run from Japanese military campaigns.
Also, with few exceptions, they always bought new and kept the cars for 10 years or more.
My mom was born in 1920 and my dad, 1921. I don’t know what cars either’s family owned at the time. Both were the oldest child.
I do know what they drove when I came along in 1957: a light green ’52 Dodge 4-door, not unlike the version attached.
Around the time my mom and stepdad were born, cars generally looked like that 1949-52 Chevy in the pics.
My dad:
And my mom:
My dad’s first car was a ’49 Chevy Deluxe two door sedan, black. So, it looked a lot like the ’50 pictured in the lead photo.
He was born in ’30s Lithuania. I believe cars were pretty scarce there, and despite his family being relatively well off, I don’t believe they had one. He came to the States as a displaced person from the German British sector in ’49. He got is first car in ’57 or so as a slightly older college student.
My maternal grandparents were solid mid price buyers after WW II, so, I’ll guess they had a lower end ’38 – ’40 Buick or similar when the war started and my mom was born.
My Mom was born in 59, brought home from the hospital in a 57 Chevy Del Ray, I was born in 83 and brought home in a 70something Biscayne. My son was born in 2012and came home from the hospital in my 86 Parisienne. A GM tradition !
My dad was born in 1935 and his father was a Chrysler man so I’m sure he came home in a 1930’s Chrysler sedan. My mother was born in 1937, I have no idea what kind of car she would have had her first ride in, but, her father had “odd” tastes in cars. Austins in the ’50’s, Studebakers and AMC’s. My ride home was in a 1959 Studebaker Lark, given to my parents by my grandfather. I remember that car, it was black with a red plaid interior, wish I had it now.
I wrote earlier about my Dad’s cars but forgot something interesting about my Mom. During WWII her two older brothers were in the Navy. My uncle Doyle had always driven flashy cars. In fact he did for the rest of his life. His last two cars when he died in 1987 were a ’65 Mustang fastback and a ’71 T Bird.
Anyway, while he was away during the War he left my Mom his 1940 Buick convertible to drive. She had just gotten her license. She said that she really enjoyed having it .
My father was born in 1932 in Karachi, then part of British India. There’s a photo somewhere of the Chevrolet sedan they had when he was a child.
My mother was born in 1936, south of London. I don’t know what car my grandparents would have had then, but I know that before she was married my grandmother drove a bullnose Morris Cowley touring car – she said that she had it resprayed red (very unusual at that time) after an accident, so it was known locally as the Red Peril.
My father was born in 1915 and mother in 1933.My grandfather allowed my father to drive his new 1927 Buick tourer and in 1930 the new Buick tourer.In 1948 my father bought a new black Buick four door sedan,an expensive rarity for someone so young in Tasmania.Approx 1951 my father started dating my mother and went to visit her in the nearby country town,as he stopped outside her house the postman arrived on his pushbike,took the mail inside and said “there is a man outside with a car half a mile long”.When my father was 69yo he married a 29yo woman,so my stepmother was one year older than me!At the wedding reception I told my two sisters the Sophie Tucker joke.Ernie tells Soph that today is his 80th birthday and he has just married a 20yo girl.Soph congratulates Ernie but then says “when I am 80 I am going to marry myself a 20yo boy and let me tell you 20 goes into 80 a lot more times than 80 goes into 20”.
My parents were born in the teens. Grandpa had the first motorcycle in Iowa, which grandma hated. they had a LaSalle which grandpa put in heat and windows. Dads family were farmers back east and they had model T’s and A’s. Dad became a Lincoln salesman during the depression and picked my mom up at her soriety house in a different Lincoln every date.
Oddly enough Perry cars like that 52 Chev were common when I was born I went home in a 54 EIP Vauxhall Velox which is styled like a 3/4 size 52 Chevy that was in 58 and the E ended production in 57.
1954 Velox was a solid and reliable car.I bought this original and mint Velox in 1975 from its one owner,an elderly man,for the price he asked, $120.
The one owner 1950,60,000 mile Velox bought in 1973 for $140.
The same as when I was born. Literally.
Surprised how many entries feature parents born just before WWI, same years my parents were born. Lately it has struck me that CC is a younger person’s forum. Interesting to see so many geezers chiming in.
Neither of my parents owned their own car until 1946, when I was 6 years old. They bought a beat up 1935 Plymouth 2 door sedan in that year and paid $400 for the thing, a reflection of the seller’s market just after the War when people were desperate to own a car. Not long after, brand new Plymouths went for $1200-1500. (Decades later I bought many a good used car for less than $400, a reflection of the fantasy world we were living in when the $ was king and the rest of the world bought our goods and absorbed our inflation. College was nearly free, housing was cheap, doctors made house calls, foreign travel cost pennies and gas [at times] was 11 cents a gallon. Blind efforts to keep these good times rolling since then have only been possible with trillions of debt, grossly inflated assets, outsourced production, migrant labor and a far-flung military machine).
BUT I DIGRESS.The Plymouth was followed by a hand-me-down ’38 Pontiac via my grandfather, then a ’48 Pontiac, then a ’51 Dodge. In 1961 I proudly presented my mother with a brand new Morris Minor. This, it turned out later was not really her cup of tea, but she hung on for a few years perhaps in an effort to be polite. In ’67 she bought herself a brand new Dodge Dart. Much later, my brother bought her a brand new Civic (’86 or so) but once again this failed to tickle her fancy. (Some people just don’t like small cars). The Dart was it. That was her all time favorite.
They came with either one or two horse power. 🙂
I am _LOVING_ all the comments and photographs .
FWIW , a 4 cylinder 1932 Ford was a ‘B’ Model , ‘A’s were from 1928 ~ 1931 .
-Nate