Old Cars and Old Men (1950-2020)

In 1956, we lived on the main drag of the south Bronx, 138^th Street between Brook and Cypress Avenues. I was four years old. From the fire escape, I’d call out the names of cars that drove by. “Ford. Chevy. Dodge. Kaiser.” The cars and colors were so vivid, distinctive and beautiful that even a little kid could tell them apart. That’s one reason why they called it the Fabulous Fifties. America was car crazy, even the little kids. Even inner city kids.

As new cars went, I had favorites, and over time, they turned out to be nearly everyone’s favorites. 1956 and beyond Corvettes, the timeless 1953-’55 Studebakers, the two-seater ’55--‘57 Thunderbird, in fact just about any ’55-’56-’57 Ford, Chevrolet or Plymouth. For decades to come, the design of many items of American life were influenced by the colorful, exuberant looks of that era, from chrome diners, to plastic portable radios, to neon signs and electric guitars.

The old car hobby barely started before the War. Occasionally, in a Thirties newspaper you’d see an item about old Fossil Jones, who’d fire up his Stanley Steamer for the Fourth of July parade. Few cars were considered precious or historic antiques back then. Car bodies were mostly framed in wood until the mid-Thirties, and most cars didn’t last nearly as long as today’s do. In many cases, their engines and chassis were finished off by WWII scrap metal drives.

In the postwar era, automobile hobbyists split into three overlapping groups: collectors, who to varying degrees kept their old cars as-is; hot rodders, who concentrated on hopping up engine performance; and customizers, who mostly cared about a car’s looks.

The term “custom car” originally meant a special one-of-a-kind car, hand made just for the personal tastes of a rich buyer. After the war it came to mean a regular car whose appearance was altered to make it one-of-a-kind. It frequently involved a lowered stance as well as removing the chrome trim and filling in its mounting holes to apply an exotic paint job. “Candy colors” were thin transparent layers of super-saturated colors sprayed on over a silvery base undercoat. Customs often had futuristic, “car show” touches like TV sets flamboyantly positioned in the dashboard where a radio normally went.

In the beginning, keeping an old car on the road was anything but a pretentious hobby. It took some mechanical finesse. Men really knew how to do things in those days. On the farm, they were used to repairing heavy equipment, even doing their own welding, as well as melting and pouring babbitt metal for bearings. In the Midwest, ancient jalopies sold for $10 or $20, giving sixteen-year-old boys their first experience of car ownership. Even in the south Bronx, in Harlem and neighborhoods all over Brooklyn, every Saturday morning with decent weather saw hundreds of car owners doing incredibly ambitious repairs and spray can repaints of their cherished “rides”, right there at the curb. What they knew about fixing engines, they learned in the Army. What they learned about hot wiring an ignition, they learned in the streets. My generation, the baby boomers, overlapped with and learned from that so-called Silent Generation, a car-crazy bunch.

As kids and teenagers, boomers got to witness some of Detroit’s last truly popular styling breakthroughs, the pony car, muscle car, and personal luxury coupe. In the Sixties, car designers began to incorporate “custom” style. Pontiac rose to its greatest sales with long, dechromed flanks, rear wheel skirts, turbine-influenced wheel covers, and hood scoops. By putting the V-8 from their biggest sedan, the Bonneville, into the engine compartment of the compact Tempest, they created the GTO, the first muscle car.

As a group, the boomers’ biggest contribution to the collector car scene has been wielding a checkbook, not an acetylene cutting torch. More and more old car owners were well-to-do investors, attorneys, and doctors, not hard-core, old fashioned “car guys”. Gradually they were joined by well compensated tech people who understood a few things about engineering. As this upper-middle-class group came to sheer demographic dominance of the hobby towards the end of the last century, it changed car collecting.

To be sure, there’s always been a class divide in collecting old cars. The Concours at Pebble Beach was never for the casual, mom-and-pop collector. People who buy and sell immaculate Duesenberg SSJs, Mercedes SSKs, Cords, Pierce-Arrows and 300 SLR racers live in a different world than most of us. There are specialty publications devoted to world-class Classics. They’ll have climate-controlled storage and an attentive year-round staff to maintain them. Any of those cars could be a proud display at the entrance to an automobile museum.

But personally, I’ve always been interested in mainstream cars, ones I could have bought new or used. The heart of American car collecting is little different from what it was forty years ago: mass market brands made from 1950 through 1980. The older ones have either mostly vanished or become fragile museum pieces, too precious or slow to drive in the streets; the younger cars include some technically or historically interesting cars, but with few exceptions they don’t have the pop culture sex appeal of a 1959 Cadillac’s tailfins.

If the looks of cars became duller, more lookalike, it wasn’t directly because of Federal meddling, but because aerodynamics dictated it. The wind tunnel became the prim, scolding master of Detroit’s stylists. Customers demanded better than 7 miles a gallon, and their insurance companies demanded greater collision protection.

Boomers had a decent sense of automotive history, and their competitive bidding drove a race to the top in car restoration quality. They paid for frame-off restorations of cars that made them more perfectly powered, painted, and assembled than any straight-out-of-the-factory car that ever existed. Judges at car shows awarded or subtracted points based on trivia like the quality of the grease pencil marks on the firewall of the engine compartment, used by line workers to confirm which accessories needed to be added.

This extreme, more-perfect-than-perfect attitude spurred an equally extreme counter-reaction, a zeal for car preservation in their original condition, carried to fanatical lengths. With few exceptions in fiberglass or aluminum, modern cars have always been made of thin sheet steel, sadly subject to what our friends in the UK call “the tinworm”—rust. As Neil Young once said, Rust Never Sleeps. I’ve seen a carefully staged auction photo of a rusted chassis and four rotted wooden wheels, with shreds of cord and flecks of rubber where the tires used to be. The socially approved line seems to be, don’t touch the car no matter how bad it looks; that is, unless you’re prepared to pay for fully abandoning that prized originality altogether, with a full restoration.

That’s long been a rueful truth about car collecting: you buy a survivor at a decent price, say $25,000, and spend another $35,000 on it, hoping to enjoy it for decades and then sell it some day for $40,000. It’s not that it’s not possible to make money at it, sometimes a great deal of money; it’s that most people, like most gamblers, will not.

It doesn’t have to be as expensive as that. There are “dead spots” in the car collecting timeline. There’s less buyer interest in cars from the early Twenties, the late Forties and early Fifties, and the mid-to-late Seventies.

For the lowest prices of all, a rule of thumb that’s been true for a long time: the graph of car depreciation is bathtub-shaped. The cheapest used cars are almost always about 10 to 20 years old. After that point, the few remaining cars tend to be either already stacked for parts in a junkyard, or in the process of being restored.

A present-day example: Santa Monica’s The Church on Pearl is walking distance from here. “God’s Pearl” has its own auto racing Biblical verse. It puts on occasional neighborhood car shows in its small parking lot. One owner of a Seventies convertible told me how he’d bought the car from an elderly parishioner for $4,000 and then paid for Earl Scheib’s fanciest body prep and paint work. It sure wasn’t $49.95, as Earl used to boast, but after dropping about $3,000 at Scheib’s, this guy drove away with what could be decades of open topped family fun. At $7,000 total, he wasn’t going to win Pebble Beach, but he clearly wouldn’t have cared. It shows that it’s still possible to be a micro-Jay Leno, owning a presentable, half century old collectible car on a budget.

BTW, over the years, Leno has taken a lot of heat from Greens: “Why should anyone own 200 cars?” Well, why should anyone’s music collection have 200 songs? Why should museums have 200 paintings? He’s ensuring that an interesting chunk of popular history will still be around, probably for at least a half century after he’s gone. After that, it’s up to the unpredictable interests and tastes of the late 21^st century.

Jay Leno is 72, two years older than me. At this age, let’s be honest; anything durable that you buy is likely to be owned by someone else someday. And that gets at a troubling fact about the old car hobby: it’s slowly dying off, along with what seems like a final generation or two of old-timey, car-loving men.

Oh, there’ll always be some. The lucky, frugal one-car collector at The Church on Pearl is an example, but he was about fifty, a typical age to be involved in the hobby. There are fewer and fewer younger men, and today, women taking their places at car shows. Like listening to old radio shows, building a record collection, and bowling, activities that seemed like durable fun became narrower minority interests. Has that happened to old cars? Sometimes, it’s beginning to seem like it.

But you never know. On this site there’s a 22-year-old conservative intellectual (hello, @kirkianwanderer; how was the kimchi?) who loves to listen to sardonic radio comic Fred Allen, who ceased to be a public figure about the time I learned to talk. Could the spirit of the old time, old car guys survive and re-emerge in a younger generation?

It just might. Streaming shows about cars and car restoration are popular, even among people who’ve never used a socket wrench. The South never abandoned their love of auto racing. A “Deuce coupe”—a customized 1932 Ford with a big chromed V-8—still turns heads wherever it goes.

For years, the Hollywood Teamsters union local 399 has put on a summertime car show at a large public park in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles’ less fashionable northern half. 399 supervises the construction and operation of special vehicles for the movies, some of which were on display, like the “Christian Bale Batmobile”, which even up close still looks like an enormous metal insect. There was a Fifties-era musician’s tour bus that had been used in biopic segments of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline and Chuck Berry. L.A. customizers like Dean Jeffries, Ed Roth, and George Barris created specialty cars for Batman, The Munsters and The Monkees.

The show always attracts a big crowd, mostly a family crowd. Many were there because they were members and friends of the members of the union. Their personally-owned collector cars were on display, rows and rows of them next to the studio cars, a parallel show on the same field. By and large, they were Detroit creations raised to the highest level. Many were the same classics I recognized as a kid: popular 1955 to 1957 cars, including T-Birds and Corvettes. Later cars were also popular, like Ford Mustangs and Plymouth Barracudas. But there was also a rich assortment of less popular, more affordable but equally flashy brands; De Sotos, Dodges, Oldsmobiles, and Mercurys. It was like being back in time.

If this was once just an old white man’s hobby, it isn’t anymore. Not every ethnic group is as enthusiastic about car culture to the same degree. Black customizers and collectors certainly exist, but I suspect they’d be far more numerous in Memphis, Atlanta, and Mobile than in California’s San Fernando Valley. Here, the majority of the cars on display were owned by Latinos.

Old guys have always liked the chariots of their younger years. I was drawn towards an immaculate 1973 Olds Cutlass that was restored and driven by a friendly man in his mid-forties. He told me that it was a “restomod”; the outside looked like it had just rolled out of a Nixon-era showroom, but the engine, transmission, steering and brakes were modern. He and two of his brothers did the work themselves.

The whole family came along to cheer on Dad’s car. His wife was cooking tapas on an outdoor grill, and kindly offered me some. They had two grown kids and two that were still in high school. The oldest daughter brought her two toddlers. The oldest son was in Army uniform. Before he went in the service, he said proudly, he helped his father paint the car.

This could have been my family, anybody’s family at a car show fifty or sixty years ago. The guy twisting the wrench was named Odierno instead of O’Malley, but the spirit was still the same. I was witnessing the results of a natural process of creating car buffs—and of building Americans. That 1973 Oldsmobile has a future after all.