Like much of this summer, it was uncomfortably hot and humid yesterday, but I'd gotten the idea of going into my head and decided to brave the heat. We drove to the Endicott Estate in Dedham, which is the home of the Bay State Antique Auto Club and the site of the annual show.
A lot of the motivation for going to car shows is the presence of less common vehicles that I'm unlikely to see in any other context. Muscle cars like GTOs and Road Runners are common enough sights; I'm always more interested in seeing more of what people used as everyday transportation 40 or 50 years ago. The best thing about old cars, to me, is seeing them cared for and enjoyed.
I remembered my camera, which is more versatile than my phone's camera. I am not an especially good photographer, but I can handle aiming at a car and pushing the shutter, and in most cases I was able to fit the whole car in the frame and avoid shots with people walking in front of my chosen subjects.
I took this shot for a couple of reasons: it's a 1957 Pontiac, and Pontiac no longer exists. It's also one of the earliest four-door hardtops, a body style that no longer exists (except rarely in Japan) and that has always been of my favorites. The color is really nice, too.
A 1966 Pontiac (also a four-door hardtop) happened to be parked next to it, which makes for a nice look at how far styling evolved over just nine model years.
The Nomad was a sporty two-door wagon offered by Chevrolet from 1955 to '57. (Pontiac had its own version, called the Safari, that's even rarer.) It's probably the most interesting to me of the '55-57 Chevys, which are among the most commonly seen classic cars. (I had the Hot Wheels version of this, in red.) I was also drawn to take this photo by the coral color, which was popular for cars in the Fifties. It's often seen in a two-tone combination with black, gray, or ivory.
That's a 1959 Chrysler 300E, a lavishly-appointed (for the time), expensive, high-performance "banker's hot rod" built in very small numbers. The 300's design managed to stay relatively clean and restrained while Chrysler (and all the other American manufacturers) got weirder and weirder in the late '50s. The 1960 version of this car is one of my all-time favorite vintage cars (so much so that I have a die-cast scale model of one), and I was hoping there might be an example of that year at this show, but this was the only 300 in attendance.
This 1959 Oldsmobile Super 88 shows what I meant above about weird, and this is its good side. Still, there's something about the batshit exuberance of cars like this one that I can't help but love.
Just three model years later, this Pontiac Bonneville (a corporate cousin of Olds) looks much more restrained and dignified. I didn't realize I'd taken pics of so many Pontiacs, but they had some of the best designs of the '50s and '60s, until GM bloat set in.)
But not everyone got that memo... this is a 1963 Imperial Crown, which was Chrysler's answer to Cadillac and Lincoln. The following year the Imperial would get a very tasteful redesign, though one heavily influenced by the 1961 Lincoln Continental (in fact, the same man was responsible for both designs).
Now here's something you are unlikely to see many more of, a 1964 Studebaker Avanti. Studebaker was one of the second-tier car companies struggling to hang on in the face of the product onslaught from bigger car companies, and the Avanti was an attempt to build something like a four-passenger Corvette, a gutsy move for a company on the verge of collapse (Studebaker would cease building cars in 1966). I'm pretty sure those wheels are not original to the car (they look like Buick road wheels, even if the center caps say Avanti), but they look pretty good on this car.
I'll have more car show pix tomorrow...
