History skinny whites..the sky is falling!!!

sometimes in 57 or 58 i noticed a few caddys running round with these strange looking tires..they were missing part of the whitewall..or so i thought at the time...then in 1960 chevrolet started putting these things on a little known car called the corvair..it won't last i told myself...but 2 years later,i saw 2 new impalas line up on a dragstrip both sporting these skinny assed stripes for whitewalls..the world was never quite the same after that..ha ha.or so i thought.
what was your first impression of the change from www's to the skinnys? did your world turn or was you even around back then?

 

i would have been one of the stubborn assholes that refused to give up his wide whites regardless of what the "trend" was,,,,,,,ive seen countless threads saying people "should" be running skinny whites....ive just never liked them,,,,,,i even LOVE the way a wide white looks on a radir or chrome reverse.........

 

i forgot to add,i was probably 12 years old before i never heard the word tire.they were called casings where i grew up.

 

I was into the skinnies back in the day...I thought the wide whites branded you an old fart. I had the skinnies on my '57 Chevy hardtop, my '63 Corvair Spyder, my 62 Lark convertible & my '63 Impala convertible. Now, I wouldn't have anything but wide whites or blackwalls. My hot rod has wide whites & my daily '66 Chevy truck has them (even though the skinnies were correct for that year). I guess that's because I'm an old fart now. Ha!

 

they both have their place.. like on a 62' impala for example, nothing bigger than a 1" whitewall.. but on a 62' caddy.. a 3" whitewall looks good. my 2cents.
Anthony

 

Never ran narrow white walls at anytime, they just don't look right. My '67 GTO did have 1/4 inch red lines, but then that's a muscle car thing. I like WWW that are 3 inches or wider and black looks good on the right car. The tire I don't like are the ones with the big ass white lettering. ..........WWW forever...............

CRUISER

 

I like 'em both.

It all depends on the style that is thrown at a car.

 

i was fishing for reaction,not preference...ahem..

 

As much as people hate to admit it, skinnys are period correct. If you had a set in the late 50's early 60's you were the sh*%! I run 1.5 inch whitewalls on my 57 hardtop with '59 Plymouth hubcaps, another period correct thing that no one knows anything about these days. I like to stick to what the look was back in the day and not what all the rat rod queers think is cool today, they don't know the first thing about period correct. And by the way, I'm 24 and not 64.

 

I was born in 1967, so obviously that ship sailed long before I was born. But I can tell you that the first time I saw wide whites I just about flipped! Kind of like your reaction, only in reverse.
Even as a kid I thought they were beautiful. In 1983 in high school I got my hands on a really mint '54 Pontiac that still had old wide whites on it. It broke my heart to replace them with skinny whites, but I had no money for the wides. (I could be wrong, but I swear in the early '80s you could still buy them through the Sears catalog?? They were close to $400. The skinny whites were $100 bubble balanced and installed. No contest, on a $600 car!)
So what I'm saying is to my eyes skinny whites never looked right on anything older than 1959, even when that was just about all you saw.

 

as a kid in the 60s I kinda leaned towards the skinny's...hell even the model kits had them....and my favorite were the twin skinnys,never been a fatwhites fan........

 

I just picked these up this fall. The tires are brand new from about 1969. Not weatherchecked at all, and still have the "tits" on them! I've since bought new washers, lugnuts and a set of NOS "ET Super" center caps for them!
I really wish they were REDLINES!

 

still nice...ever think about a red permanent marker???

 

gee,tell us how you really feel.

 

Mine are dirty in this pic. This was taken the day I lowered the front.
I have seen some '61'-'63's with the Wide Whites,just doesn't look "right" to me

 

I bought my first "driver" from my parents when it was only a couple of years old. It had come from the factory with wide whites...perhaps the last year that they were used on GM cars...but by the time I got the car they were out of fashion.

I couldn't wait to update the car with the new style 1" narrow white wall tires! I worked all summer at one job to pay for the car, and several weeks at a second job to pay for the narrow white walls, even though the wide whites were still perfectly good.

In those days having the very latest gear was in vogue. Old style was just, well, old. The photo was the day I bought it from my folks...

 

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Here's my '61 in '65 @ Great Lakes Dragaway in late October, I'm guessing. The tires are fresh Atlas Plycron Cushionaires from the Enco Station I worked at... probably 2 1/2" whites?

This was the typical whitewall we sold at that time.

 

hey,he's 24 not 64

 

dang krooser..were you ever the handsome lad...

 

Can you say "punk"?

 

hoodlum..is that like punk??

 

Hoodlums got arrested...punks could run faster!

 

4 inch WWW - period or not I like them.

 

Pontiac Club De Mer Motorama show car had inchwalls in 1955 ... El Dorado Broughams from 1957 on had them as factory equipment ...

 

Those were gone by the early 50's... my dad's new '54 Customline had 3"...

 

heres what I think of when I hear widewhites on mid fiftys and newer cars

 

holy sheeet,that's beautiful man..oh my gawd....


not!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I'm 63 and my brain is fried, but I remember "Royal Masters"..........thin whites with an unusual sidewall, like a ripple pattern. Does anyone remember those or are my drug days catching up with me?

 

depends....and i use that word loosely..on the drugs.