Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i Hemmings Classic Car

Fords Near and Far 800-423-5525 • WWW.CALCARCOVER.COM  • $54.99 The postwar era was an age of exploration, as President Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 would create 41,000 miles of interconnected American roads. The Ford Motor Company had just the vehicles to take advantage of these sightseeing opportunities with its restyled 1958 lineup, which included the exciting new four-seat Thunderbird. This officially licensed sign (item TINFORCC), made in the U.S.A., celebrates the freedom of the road with Ford’s new 1958 cars. It measures 25 by 15 inches and features a powder-coated-baked image on pre-drilled and riveted metal, and comes ready to hang in your garage or den. Vintage Vega 800-558-2550 • WWW.CHEVYMALL.COM $22.95-$25.95, DEPENDING ON SIZE Chevrolet’s best-selling Seventies subcompact, the Vega, is a car that many remember, but not all do…

Alongside early ’60s 421 Super Duty Catalinas, Le Mans and Tempest station wagons with aluminum front ends, and, later, the Ram Air GTOs and Firebirds, there were a few rare Grand Prixs, too. While some of the rarest Grand Prixs that Pontiac ever built were the 421 Super Dutys — 16 in 1962 and just three for 1963—another that can be considered rare is the 1967 convertible. This one-year-only convertible was the only time that Pontiac ever offered a Grand Prix with a top that dropped. In all, just 5,856 convertibles were built out of the 42,981 Grand Prixs that rolled off the assembly line, making it a highly coveted Pontiac, especially among Grand Prix enthusiasts and collectors of uncommon automobiles. Another distinguishing feature of the 1967 Grand Prix is…

He had to be crazy. No sane person would float an automobile over the skyline of a major city, suspended from a hot-air balloon. Nor would anyone sketch a massive test track out of a farm field intended to appeal to an auto industry that barely existed yet. And surely, nobody rational would imagine seeing a shining city where only swamps of mangrove trees then grew wild. This, however, was no ordinary dreamer. Carl Graham Fisher, one of the wackiest promoters in American history, dreamed in three dimensions. He brought his visions to reality and usually, monumental success. This past May, an estimated 400,000 people witnessed the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. Where would they have been if Fisher had been persuaded that his track was a nutty idea?…

PACKARD RETURNS IN BOTH THE “38” AND 2-48 SERIES WITH SEVERAL BODY STYLES TO FIT your needs. New features include left-hand drive and an electric self-starter. Centralized control will give you mastery over your Packard with just your finger tips, and the silence, efficiency and motion of the perfected six-cylinder engine will guarantee you a pleasant journey. Available from $4,050 to $5,950. CADILLAC IS BACK WITH A SMOOTHER AND MORE GRACEFUL appearance. All bodies feature cowls, except for the coupes, and the engine’s stroke has been increased, giving the four-cylinder a new displacement of 365 cubic inches. Seven body styles are available, from the roadster accommodating two people to the four-door limousine which comfortably fits seven. Pricing begins at $1,975. WILLIAM DURANT HAS DECIDED TO discontinue the Little, but will…

It all started when we got an email from Gary Bricken, a trucking author and historian from Sandy Oaks,Texas, south of San Antonio. Back in the 1980s, Gary wrote for a trucking magazine named RPM, and became fascinated by both Russian and Mexican motor vehicles, especially the cargo-hauling category. Like most of us, Gary likes the oddball stuff. He once bought a Soviet-made Moskvitch sedan that had been stolen in Mexico and abandoned in San Diego, which he ended up selling to a guy from Burma, a story that made the pages of our own Special Interest Autos magazine. The Burmese guy was supposed to open a kiosk in San Francisco specializing in Russian-made goods, but ultimately, both he and the Moskvitch vanished. Around that same time, Gary decided to…

Smoky Mountain Hudsons SOUTHERN HUDSON OWNERS TAKE NOTE that the annual Hudson Heartland Gathering will be taking place at The Vacation Lodge in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, this October 27-30. All Hudson, Essex and Terraplane owners and enthusiasts are welcome to attend; swap meet spaces are still available. For room rates, registration and a full itinerary of this year’s Hudson happenings, contact the club at 865-567-2493 or email at smokymtnhudsons@gmail.com. Turkey Run Fun AFTER YOU TUCK AWAY THE LAST OF THAT pumpkin pie, those of you in the Florida area may want to swing by the Turkey Run car show held at Daytona Beach. This year’s event will take place November 24-27 at the Daytona International Speedway. The event features thousands of vintage, classic and muscle cars on display as well…

Denver Nuggets MECUM’S DENVER AUCTION CONCLUDED earlier in July with $11 million in sales and a sell-through rate of 66 percent. The top sale was an R-Code 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL, which crossed the block for $155,000, but there were a lot of older affordable American collector cars available as well. This 1948 Dodge Custom Coupe had a rebuilt engine, Fluid Drive three-speed manual transmission, restored interior and new paint. It found a new home for $12,500. Mecum has shows scheduled for November 2-5 in Dallas and November 17-19 in Anaheim. Visit www.mecum.com for more information. Motor City Results RM SOTHEBY’S FINISHED ITS MICHIGAN Auction with over $6.4 million in sales having crossed the block in Plymouth, Michigan; 80 percent of the cars found new homes. Nearly a quarter of…

By almost any definition, the B.S. Cunningham Company of West Palm Beach, Florida, built a mere handful of automobiles — and that includes race cars as well as road cars. With a hand-built chassis that made the voyage from Florida to Italy to be fitted with a body, and back again for finishing, each Cunningham C-3 was truly custom and not quite 100 percent identical to the ones before it or after it. Given that Briggs Cunningham’s intention was always to build just enough cars to homologate his dedicated race cars, it should surprise no one that mass-production techniques were never part of the plan. The C-3 blended voluptuous Italian lines with the unabashed bravado of American V-8 power, creating a fast and luxurious GT car that looked in place…

“When I first began this project in 2006, a friend of mine told me, ‘You’ll never take it for a ride after it’s completed; it will look too nice.’ I remember telling him that I had purchased the Pontiac to drive it, not stand and look at it from the outside,” says André Fitzback, reflecting on the restoration of his 1953 Pontiac Pathfinder De Luxe. The response shouldn’t have been a surprise. Since purchasing the car — a product of GM of Canada and one of only 5,512 examples made — in 1995, André made it his mission to enjoy it thoroughly. At the time of its acquisition, the Pontiac was showing 53,800 miles on its odometer, and during the next 11 years, the Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, resident had driven it…

SURE, THERE’S A WHOLE INDUSTRY surrounding do-it-yourself performance that Vic Edelbrock Sr. helped to fashion. And yes, it created a whole new American lifestyle, wherein any number of driveway-based “engineers” bolted up stuff that gave them a rumbling, rocking exhaust note. But you can draw a straight line from what Edelbrock and his contemporaries accomplished to the factory-built American performance automobile of the 1960s, right up to today. More than most men of vision, Edelbrock transformed how Americans viewed their old cars, and what they could do with them. The automotive world has never, and will never, be the same. Otis Victor Edelbrock Sr. was born in 1913 in Eudora, Kansas, the son of a man who staked out land on the harsh, sizzling prairie as a pioneering farmer. His…

IN 1956, WHEN I WAS A sophomore in college, I had a 1955 Buick Special hardtop coupe. It was burgundy with a white roof and white under the side spear. One day while reading Hot Rod magazine I noticed a classified ad for five almost-new Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels from a 1953 Skylark. The seller was located about 140 miles away in Albany, New York, so my roommate and I travelled to the eastern part of New York state to buy them; I paid $265 for the set. It was necessary to put tubes in the tubeless tires in order to keep the tires inflated on the wheels. In addition, they were difficult to keep balanced; however, the wire wheels looked spectacular on my car, with its wide whitewall tires. I…

Motivated in part by the success of Ford’s four-seat 1958 Thunderbird, automakers were diligently developing competitive models for the budding personal/luxury car market. During that process, Pontiac had competed with Buick and Oldsmobile for General Motors’ approval to produce an all-new model based on GM design chief Bill Mitchell’s and designer Ned Nickles’ XP-715 concept. Buick’s proposal won, and the E-body Riviera would be produced for the 1963 model year. Consequently, Pontiac continued to advance its own entry into that market. Adding upscale styling elements to the shorter 120-inch-wheelbase B-body Catalina, along with bucket seats, console, 389-cu.in. four-barrel V-8 and a deeper-geared rear axle ratio, the Grand Prix was born, and introduced a year ahead of the Riviera. Along with the established Thunderbird, the Wide-Track Grand Prix would still have…

The 24 Hours of Le Mans was long an “international” race mainly in the sense that its fields comprised competition cars from different European countries driven by drivers from different European countries. Geographical distance and political differences meant that U.S. drivers and cars tended to remain in U.S. events. Before World War II, when U.S. racing cars appeared at Le Mans, it was often with European drivers behind the wheel. Conversely, when U.S. drivers competed at Le Mans, it was often in European machinery. After his friend Miles Collier tackled the 1939 Le Mans in an MG, Briggs Cunningham was determined to take on the crown jewel of European racing with American drivers in American cars. For years, Cunningham’s buddies in the Auto Racing Club of America (ARCA) replaced small-displacement,…

Some of the more advanced automobiles ever offered to the American public were produced in an idealistically designed factory in a beautiful rural section of Michigan, far from the crowded streets and tainted air of Detroit. The people who built these cars lived in one of the first planned communities of the modern age, a sort of “workers’ utopia” that was designed and built specifically for these laborers. All of it — car, factory and town — was the brainchild of a single man named Childe Harold Wills. Even if Wills had never created his namesake automobile, he would still have earned an honored place in American history. As one of Henry Ford’s earliest protégés he helped in the design and production of all the early Ford models from the…

THE NEW GENERAL MOTORS Corporation’s Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac assembly plant in Arlington, Texas, began production in January of 1954. I moved to Arlington on March 3rd, and two days later I was hired and immediately assigned to the trim department in the assembly plant. Small guys like me were put in the this department because they had to get in and out of the cars, and did much of the actual work in the small interior space. The cars traveled down the assembly line with the headliner attached. My job with the cars that had been fitted with cloth headliners involved using very sharp scissors and a small brush. Getting into the car, I would trim off excess headliner material, cut the hole for the dome lamp and then brush off any…

At Chevrolet, truck nameplates have come and gone — from lightweights like the El Camino and S-10 to the hulking Bruin and Bison. But the Suburban has stood the test of time for more than eight decades. Suburbans have served, and still serve, as family cars, police patrol vehicles, limousines, emergency response rigs, school buses and more. Search “presidential motorcade,” on the web, and in the images that turn up you’ll see a fleet of black Suburbans surrounding the Leader of the Free World’s Cadillac limousine, aka “the Beast.” These are Secret Service vehicles specially outfitted for various jobs, including one that can launch smoke grenades and jam communication signals to thwart a guided missile attack as well as provide cover for a speedy getaway. But whether it’s a matter…