Text by Patrick Bell.
Greetings to all. Join us today as we travel about looking at some fintastic fins! There is a lot to view from that intriguing styling phase of American cars so here we go!
Our first stop is at the air conditioned Fountain Motel with Mom and son posing likely for Dad. From the left is a ’56 Studebaker Commander 4 door sedan, ’55 Oldsmobile 88 Holiday Coupe, ’57 DeSoto Firesweep 4 door Sportsman with a New York plate, and a V8 powered ’57 Chevrolet Two-Ten or Bel Air Sport Sedan with possibly a Maryland plate. I don’t recognize the other two plates.
On to Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California, a good place to let the kids run loose. From the left a weathered looking ’39 Chevrolet Master De Luxe Sport Sedan, ’51 Cadillac sedan unsure of the series, ’58 Plymouth Belvedere 2 door hardtop that looks close to new, and a ’55 Buick Special 4 door sedan.
A roadside motel with a tall antenna for the TV’s and a Coke machine. Another likely Mom and son posing for Dad next to their ’56 Buick Special 4 door Riviera. To the left is a ’57 Plymouth Belvedere 4 door hardtop, and to the right a ’59 Ford Fairlane 500. This photo shows the extremes in the fin craze. From an across the board corporate standpoint the Chrysler Corporation was the most extreme while the Ford Motor Company was the most conservative.
Now we are most likely down south along the Gulf coast of Texas waiting for a ferry. In the lower right corner is a ’61 Valiant V-100 4 door sedan or wagon, ’57 Plymouth Belvedere 4 door sedan with a ’63 Texas plate and the whole family aboard, and a ’55 DeSoto Fireflite 4 door sedan. Beyond there I can’t see enough to ID the rest of them.
Here we are at another motel. There is not much for location clues, but it does have some interesting shutters with evergreen trees on them. Those may be a clue for someone. On the very left edge is the rear bumper extension and tailpipe of a ’54 or ’55 Cadillac. Heading to the right a ’58 Plymouth Savoy 4 door sedan, and a ’58 Pontiac Chieftain Safari wagon. There are three cars in the right group, a green over white ’57 Ford Custom Fordor barely visible, white ’56 DeSoto 2 door Sportsman, and a white over gold ’58 Chrysler Windsor 4 door sedan.
Chevrolet changed to bat wings for ’59 and ’60, and here we have three ’60 models. From the left a white V8 powered Impala Sport Sedan with a New Jersey plate, white over blue Biscayne 4 door sedan with an unusual white trunk lid and possibly a Massachusetts plate, and another matching all blue Biscayne on the center right edge. The one the people are leaning on is a ’58 Studebaker Commander Starlight Hardtop. To the left of the second blue Chevrolet is a white ’61 Mercury Meteor 800 or Monterey 4 door hardtop, and above the Mercury is a gray over blue or black ’52-’54 Ford Fordor. The folks posing look like they are enjoying themselves and may be in a beach town.
This looks like a community building of some sort, perhaps a church activity center. From the left we have a white ’59 or ’60 Studebaker Lark 4 door sedan, and a sharp looking V8 powered ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air 4 door sedan nicely dressed with the accessory fender guards (mounted on the bumper ends), fender stone shield, and sill molding. It is at least eleven years old in this photo and may have a California plate. Moving to the right a white ’59 Plymouth Custom Suburban, black over white ’66 or ’67 Ford Falcon Futura Sports Coupe trying to hide, white ’60 or ’61 Valiant 4 door sedan, white over brown ’60 or ’61 Rambler Classic sedan with a twisted bumper, white ’62-’64 Chevrolet Chevy II, orchid ’65 or ’66 full size Pontiac, green VW Type 1, and a blue roof line that looks like a ’66 full size Ford.
A stop for an orange juice or other related product on US Highway 301 in Citra, Florida. The business has been in operation for 88 years. On the left is a ’60 Comet 4 door sedan with a Florida plate from ’63 and a trailer hitch, and a ’60 Dodge Dart Seneca 4 door sedan. Neither one of the men look too excited to be there.
Now we will take about a two and a half hour drive south and west to Clearwater Beach and visit the Islander Motel complete with a pool and pier. Begining on the right side a white ’61 Mercury Monterey 4 door hardtop, white ’58 Oldsmobile Super 88 or Ninety-Eight 4 door sedan, blue over white ’57 DeSoto Firedome 4 door Sportsman, white over dark red ’61 Buick LeSabre 4 door hardtop, black ’62 Pontiac Catalina 2 door sedan, and a bronze ’60 Chevrolet Impala 4 door sedan. The Buick and Pontiac show the move away from fins in the early sixties, but the Mercury hadn’t completely let go of theirs as yet.
Our last photo is on the road somewhere after a light snow event. It is getting dark and the road looks on the sloppy side. Ahead is a V8 powered ’59 Plymouth Savoy or Belvedere 4 door sedan with a white over dark ’53 Chevrolet Bel Air further ahead and a black over white ’56 Chevrolet to its left.
Thanks for joining us and have a great week!
Fun pixs, lots of Mopar fins, having had ’58 DeSotos and Chryslers they’re my favorites!
ID’ing all the cars for us in advance lately kind of takes the fun out of it imo! But it’s easier for those of us who knew them when they were new, the young whippersnappers may need the help.
former ’58 Windson 4 dr hdtp, now sold to Sweden.
As I understand it Exner Mopars have an almost fanatical following in Scandinavia.
The fun way to do it now Randerson is to ID the cars in Rich’s pix in your mind first, and then scroll down to Patrick’s text and see how close you got.
I like the new format… Keep them coming!
As to ID’ing the tags in the lede photo, I think the Olds is sporting a Delaware tag, and the one on the left may very well be PA, as for the longest time they went back and forth between Yellow with Blue letters and then Blue with Yellow letters. The one on the far right is definitely a Maryland plate from the era****. Since there’s glare on what I suspect is a Pennsylvania tag, I can’t tell if the letters are blue or what. For all I know, it’s New Mexico! – But Occam’s Razor would support P, since the other cars are from the northeast region.
Kinda fun that the ’57 DeSoto with the NY plates has the tag ‘5757’… I thought that this coincidence only happens in Japan for T-87!
For reference, this guy has a lot of info on license plates from our region (and a few others too)…
https://www.ricksplates.com/
**** Upon further review of Rick’s site, that may NOT be a Maryland plate, as the timing of white letters on a black background doesn’t add up with a ’57 Chevy. Perhaps Virginia? We should ask Eric703! He’s good at this too. It sure looks like a Maryland plate though…
Just saw this after I posted about this shot below. I do think that’s a Maryland plate, but I’m suspecting it’s really the dark-green background of the 1958 plate, rather than black. Since Maryland plates were issued in April of the preceding year, this would have been valid during the summer of 1957.
The plate in this image doesn’t appear to show the “Maryland” text at the top, but I’m assuming it’s somehow obscured in the photo. Maryland’s unusual sequencing (i.e., AB-12-34) and the location in NJ make me suspect that it’s a Maryland plate.
Good catch on that ‘5757’ plate number, Rick. Apparently I was busy looking at the states and did not pay any attention to the numbers.
Agreed its funner when you want to guess at the cars. Doesn’t diminish the value of the images, though, but I thumb through them faster now…
Friday I was driving up Danville Blvd, between Danville and Alamo, after picking my son up after school. Lo and behold from a half mile away I saw the very obvious grille of a Nash driving down the opposite direction in a sea of Teslas and SUV’s. Wow, haven’t seen one in half a century maybe. Not your typical collector car for Danville. Point it out to my son who is face down in his cell phone and get a yeah. He’ll be lucky I get him a car when he turns 16 I can tell you that.
Regarding the white car in the final photo, I wonder if the guy behind the wheel is named Cavanaugh.
+1… Sure looks like his car!
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1959-plymouth-fury-chapter-5-a-backwards-look-at-the-forward-look/
You guys impress me with the identification of these cars! My kids are sometimes surprised by my ability to identify the year and make of the “strange cars” from my youth decades ago. But my own limited ability is NOTHING compared to the knowledge demonstrated here! Wow!
The first picture is of the Fountain Motel in Wildwood, New Jersey. Amazingly, the motel is still in business under the same name (the pool in the current picture at the bottom must have been added later).
Befitting the Jersey Shore, the license plates in that shot are all from surrounding states. From left to right: Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Maryland.
Picture #7 (w/ three Chevys) looks to have been taken in the same general area, and I’m wondering if that’s actually the same mom and son, just a few years older.
StreetView like to Fountain Motel location here:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5G7R3DeCqqiRNZjq6
I noticed the likeness of the son – and maybe the mother? – too.
But a bit of a comedown from a Firesweep to a Studebaker, unless the ’56 Studebaker on the far left in the first pic was the car that was actually theirs. 🙂
Looks like you’re correct about them being a Studebaker family! In searching the web, I found this picture of the same family at the same motel, and clearly the Studebaker is theirs.
Also, this shows that those two pictures (#1 and #7) were taken in exactly the same location because the top of one of the buildings shown in Picture #7 is visible here beyond the motel. Those buildings are all demolished now.
Good detective work, Eric and robadr. This must have been a favorite vacation spot for the Studebaker family.
Great identification, Rich! I have no problem with your skills. In fact, i admire them. I’d go for that ’55 Chevy sedan any day. Beautiful piece. It has tinted glass. I wonder if it is one of the rare ones with HVAC, the system that the “luxury divisions” of GM pooh=poohed.
Hi Thomas. Thanks for the compliments, I truly enjoy putting these together.
However, the text and car identification are courtesy of Patrick Bell.
Wow! Great job with this collection! The details you observed and shared!
Rich,
I’m in awe of your ability to ID these vintage cars from a mere snippet.
I grew up with cars of this vintage and can easily ID most of them when seeing the full car. I have nowhere near your eye for detail on the partial views.
It is funny how cars you knew as a child can still be instantly identifiable, decades later, just by a distant view of a hood, a roof line, or a particular piece of chrome trim.
It’s possibly more true of cars of the 50’s and 60’s when designs, trim details, and colour-ways changed noticeably every year, and a year is long enough in a child’s life for a full imprint. They become ‘faces’ you don’t forget.
Great assortment, fine expert IDs.
I’ll bet the owner of the SLANDER motel wishes he had chosen a different font or something for his signs. Too easy to read it the wrong way!
The huge styling contrast is noticeable in Picture 2 from the ’39 Chevrolet to the ’58 Plymouth.
I like the colors of the ’55 Chevy and the ’53 Nash in Picture 3 … same paint supplier, perhaps?
Looks like a little rust showing up on the ’57 Plymouth’s rear bumper in Picture 5 … the ’55 DeSoto is holding up quite well. The folks are waiting for either the Galveston to Port Bolivar or Corpus Christi to Port Aransas ferry’s, as there’s only two that I know of in Lone Star State.
I’m quite familiar with US 301 in Florida in Picture 9 as we used to run to the Sunshine State every two weeks when we operated our trucking business a few years ago. There was always several cars at the Orange Shop when we passed by.
And the ’57 DeSoto and ’58 Olds look somewhat dated as compared to the three ’60’s cars in Picture 10 … the styling changes are quite noticeable.
I remember Jungleland well as a little lad. It’s where we could see wild animals used in films and TV. That venue is long gone, but Thousand Oaks is now threatened by the severe L.A. wildfires.
I’ve wondered who the people were who bought 1958 Studebaker Commander and President hardtops, only 2,555 of the former, 1,171 of the latter. Seeing the family had a ’56 Champion or Commander sedan beforehand verifies the idea that a share of Studebaker sales then were brand loyalty repeat sales.
I think the ferry dock is the Galveston/Bolivar ferry; I remember waiting in those lines many times in my younger days. Probably the first few times I was in our family’s ’57 Chevy Bel Air Sport Sedan(4 door hardtop); this would have been in the late 60s. It was a 283/Powerglide car, and once when I was small, our family and.y Dad’s best friend from high school and his wife and son were in it,, coming home from a trip to Galveston, and there is a pin in the transmission that sheared off. That locks the car in High range, so we came home in traffic on the Gulf Freeway. Dad fixed the car the next day, with the part from the Chevy dealership. Apparently this is a very common malfunction on these transmissions….
I think the ’57 Chevy at the Fountain Motel is a Bel Air; IIRC the Two Ten models with V8s used a silver chrome V instead of the gold anodized version like the Bel Air (since that was the top of the line model till the Impala was introduced).
We also had one of those first generation Valiant 4 door sedans, in black. Thing was so homely it was almost cute…. Dad got it from a friend who didn’t know how to work on it. With the Slant Six it was very economical. He drove it to work for a while and liked how long a tank lasted vs. our Pontiac LeMans. Of course the Poncho thought it was a GTO and ran a bit better with the 350!
I used to see a house in SW Houston that must’ve been a Mopar family. They had a first generation Dodge Lancer in light metallic green (I’m guessing it was named Kermit) and always a Chrysler product of newer vintage and a Dodge pickup in the driveway as well.
It was good to see the cars in their natural states of decomposition. A problem for younger readers is the idea that cars faded, rusted and dented, as so few of classic cars in need of repair show up at car shows. Being from Chicago, cars were Swiss cheese within four to five years.
My late father was a professional photographer and all-around camera guy. He was very big on the Kodak Stereo Realist, which took two pictures at once. When processed, the two were mounted to a slide a few inches apart creating some depth-of-scene. Kodak made a hand-held viewer for these and the effect was startlingly real. I have hundreds of his slides and a great many include driving vacation shots, particularly a 1957 roundtrip
from Minnesota to San Diego in our ’57 Olds Fiesta wagon. If I ever get off my ass and investigate transforming the images digitally they’ll fit right in at CC.