#1950s
You Tell 'em- I Can't: 82 Years of Ward's "Ever-Ready" Motor Record Book
While nosing around in yesterday’s ’64 Valiant wagon Junkyard Find, I spotted this little brown book on the floor beneath the rifled-by-tow-truck-driver glovebox. It looked ancient, far older than even the 48-year-old car in which I found it… but it turns out that you can still buy the Ward’s “Ever-Ready” Motor Record Book.
Junkyard Find: Customized Nightmare 1958 Ford
Everyone likes a nicely customized, lowrider-style 50s Detroit bomb, but sometimes the execution isn’t so great. Such is the case with this late-50s Ford— I’m going to say it’s a ’58— that I spotted in a Denver junkyard.
Junkyard Find: 1950 Pontiac Chieftain With Flathead Cadillac V8 Power
Here’s a car that, were it to roll onto the grounds of any Billetproof show, would cause a vast wave of inked-up Lemmy Kilmister and Tura Satana lookalikes to drop to their knees in captive-bolt-to-the-dome-grade stunned worship. But that almost certainly won’t happen, because this fine example of how-they-done-it-way-back-then backyard customization is Crusher bound!
Down On The Mile High Street: 1953 Chevrolet 210 Sedan
I’ve been on a Junkyard Find roll lately, but I haven’t forgotten the old/interesting cars that are still among the living. Here’s a nearly-60-year-old Chevy that lives— more accurately, thrives— on the street near downtown Denver.
Road Trips: Cruising Oakland In a 40-Year-Old 1951 Chevy
I’ve been scanning a lot of my old 35mm negatives and slides for the ongoing 1965 Impala Hell Project series (using a time-slows-to-crawl 1999-vintage SCSI film scanner), and I ran across this series of panoramic black-and-white photos that I shot in the early 1990s.
What Kind of Person Would Sell a Communist Car?
At the height of the Second Red Scare, a Southern California man named Willy Witkins imported and sold East German Wartburgs and Škodas. The hate mail came rolling in.
Down On The Junkyard: Time Stops At Ancient Colorado Yard
Most of my junkyard-prowling experience has taken place at the modern-day self-service yards, where the inventory turns over fast, prices are standardized, and 90% of the cars on the yard tend to be 15 to 20 years old. Now that I’m in a constant search for parts for a 45-year-old Dodge van, I’ve been venturing out to the more traditional wrecking yards, where you haggle for every part and the inventory sits for decades while each and every salable part gets picked. A couple weeks back, I went on a quest for A100 parts at a breathtakingly vintage junkyard located about halfway between Denver and Cheyenne.
Junkyard Find: 1952 Buick Super
During my recent trip to California, I stopped by one of the biggest self-service wrecking yards in the San Francisco Bay area, a steel-company-owned yard that turns over its inventory of many hundreds of cars and trucks about every two months. If you see a car in this yard, you can be sure that its steel will be on a China-bound container ship within eight weeks. Such is the case with this 59-year-old Buick sedan.
So Much Better Than Vinyl Car Wraps
German advertisers of the 1950s turned the Volkswagen Transporter into some of the best rolling marketing art ever.
Junkyard Find: 1958 Edsel Villager
How cool does a junkyard car have to be before we acknowledge that it’s just too far gone to return to street duty? A first-year Edsel wagon? Very, very cool. This one, however, appears to have been baking/freezing in a Great Plains field for a few decades, and there isn’t a whole lot of Edsel-ness left. Still, such cars allow us to contemplate Ford’s Edsel Nightmare.
Junkyard Find: 1959 Austin-Healey Sprite
As I write this, I’m sitting on the floor of the bag-claim area at the Houston airport, waiting for my LeMons accomplices to arrive from California, with Pantera cranking in my headphones in order to get myself in the proper Texas frame of mind. Yes, races on consecutive weekends; it’s like being in a traveling rock-n-roll band, only with the smell of burning brakes/engines/wiring instead of groupies and limos. With low-budget racing in mind, let’s contemplate a battered little racer that won’t be seeing a track, ever again.
Down On The Mile High Street: 1951 Chevrolet Pickup
This truck has been parked a block from my house since I moved to Denver in June, but early-1950s GMC and Chevy trucks are sort of like fire hydrants or street signs to me— they’ve been around so long that they just seem like standard street accessories, and I tend to overlook them. Finally, I went over and got some shots of this great-looking survivor.
Book Review: Sports Car Racing In Camera, 1950-59 by Paul Parker
A proper coffee-table car book ought to be heavy on the grainy action photos, light on the words, and include photographs of Škoda 1101 Sports and Renault 4CVs at Le Mans. Sports Car Racing In Camera, 1950-59 qualifies for inclusion in even the most crowded coffee-table real estate.
Rollin' Norwegian Style In the Troll Sportcupe
Norway’s automotive industry never got quite as large as neighbor Sweden’s (to put it mildly), but Norwegians can still puff up their chests with pride when they see a Troll Sportcupe cruise by.
Shorty Shoebox-amino Astounds, Confounds
Not many of us wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “I think I’m going to shorten and narrow a ’57 Chevy wagon, give it a truck bed, and install a 427 with a 5-speed!”
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