most of the Johnny come latelys & ratrodders have no sense or appreciation of how they got here, just the way it is........
I guess it does take balls to drive around in a car that ugly. I am an absolute freak for hot rod and kustom history... that's still an ugly car. Yes there were other cars like this in history. They were the point when most people realized that things had gone too far down the "I'm just gonna do as much shit to this car as I possibly can regardless of how it looks" road. Traditional...yes. Ugly...definitely. So, is the '67 Galaxie I saw last season on the East Coast cool because its Continental kit with the scary painting of the owner's wife on it made it over the top? How about the dozen or so East Coast cars I've seen with (literally) sun roofs in the hood so you can see the engne? Don't even get me started on the double "conti" kits. Woof!
This is the Barris Parisienne mentioned earlier, from Cadillac Database The copy reads: "One of the most beautiful, chauffeur-driven customs to come out of the Barris shop is this Parisienne Cadillac, originally a '54 Eldorado. Bulky mass of the body has been decreased by taking metal out of the side all around ('sectioning'). Length has been increased by extended rear fenders, and the car has been neatly continentalized with the rear tire molded into the rear deck. Top is de ville type, half removable. Barris started out by building customs for himself without any body or fender experience. Luckily, he was taught many tricks of the trade by the late Harry Westergard, an early customizer with considerable talent in his own right.
before I set my butt in the drivers seat of that thing, I would eat a "Shit" pie first. Its butt ugly.
Didn't say all East Coast customs were beautiful.... Not talking bout ugly fresh built cars.. Plenty of them in the hot rod world,too.. Ahhhhhh,the old East vs. West argument... Just appreciate the amount of work that went into that car for a minute... Guess it's not permissable to break the "rules" Some of the modern day "customs" I see look like the cars my grandmother drove... Little bit too "safe",following all the "rules" Boring.. No imagination...or no balls
Is the front lower valance missing or is it just me? For all the time and work that went into it, the poor thing looks like one guy designed the front ,and someone who didnt like him, designed the back I saw pictures of this car in old magazines and thought the front end looked incomplete then too. Okay, sure,its a old custom surviver from the sixties but its STILL ugly.At least all those "pastel" cars from the eightys with all the "graphics" can be repainted. R.R.
I like it. The rear fins and rear body sculpturing are really wild and space age, very cool. The chopped landau roof with the removable front section is cool too, very 50's Barris style. The craftsmanship was obviously there, considering it has most of it's original paint and all it's trim still intact after all those years. I'm not real fond of the frontend, but apparently there was an earlier version of it with a more mild frontend. So it would be cool to restore it to that configuration with the milder frontend. The custom interior and the three carb Lincoln motor are cool too. This is what late 50's and early 60's showcars really looked like. I would like to see more super-wild customs like this get built now. You gotta take some chances, a shaved off 50's car with a 350 and a Camaro stub in it with wide whites on repopped steel wheels can be an easy, comfortable custom but it's not going to drum up big attention 40 years from now like this thing does.
...what's the old saying, "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers"? There's really nothing nice to say about that front end... but, it serves its purpose, that hopefully being as a warning.
I can appreicate the time and effort it took to tranform the Ford into that, but it's definitely not my cup of tea. At least he had the metal skills to do it, all I've got are computer hacking skills, bow staff skills............. Nik
I don't appreciate a damn thing about it. You "traditionalists" kill me. If some poor S.O.B. signed into the HAMB with a new custom that looked like that, you guys would rip him a new asshole. Fuck. There was UGLY shit built back then too. There were RAT RODS built back then as well..... It still don't make ugly right. hahaha.
I dunno...the thing just doesn't........flow. Rules be damned....It looks like it was built by committee....or the design team that brought us the platypus. Glenn
I'm also with chopmerc and williebill. That genuine kustom perfectly reflects the aesthetic frame of mind of the 50's. That frame of mind was dominated by the "boomerang" graphic, which still exists today in the form of the retro coffee table, and the coming of the jet age in aircraft. I have to admit, that photo doesn't do the car justice. Looks pretty killer to me in this one.
I think the pic that Mikes51 posted is actually a picture of a clone built by Joe Sulpy. Does look nice in the pic though. I stand by my comment. Restore it to the earlier version with the milder '54 frontend and it'd be cool. The fins and rear tube bumper is cool as shit, so is the drivetrain and interior.
....sorry forgot one letter. http://www.joesulpys.com/index2.htm Takes allot of talent even to make sumtin' that makes waves. JT
Crap batman, its got a make offer box.Wonder if he would pay someone to haul it off? Someone could make a 50s batman movie.
Maybe to you. Remember ladies and gents, this is 2006. But what virtually everyione here is misssing, and what williebill and CHOPMERC are trying to say is that IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EARLY 60s, this thing was in. Sort of like how I look at my parent's wedding photos and ask "wtf were you thinking wearing that?". They looked cool then. Sort of like these rockasilly faggots will look back at their huge silly pompadours and social d tattoos in 5 years and wonder what they were thinking after they lose interest in the hobby as they load their kids into their new Ford Windstar. A Toyotaa Camry is conservatively styled in the context of 2006, but in '62...whoa, you'd have blown people's minds. Context, context, context
Yeah, And I can remember the FORD PROBE when it first came out. WOoooweee I thought it was futuristic. I prefer wild 60's stuff like the "Boothill Express". At least that stuff doesn't take itself seriously.
Not my taste, but I'd own it (not for 65,000$!). It IS a solid piece of custom car history. Very East Coast, and actually a bit more stylish than some of the other Eastern cars built in the era. Referencing Hychko, the Bernardo brothers up in Conn., Tony Abato, Bruskavidge, Les Dunham, and others. If you lived here in the 50's and 60's you'd appreciate the car more. It was a natural progression of the trends at the time. There wasn't an exact moment when customs began looking overdone, baroque or overly flamboyant. It was a slow evolution of styles that brought us that way. This car is at the exteme end of that styling phase. In the "rodding world" it's peer would be the "little deuce coupe" of Chili Catallo. Way overdone, not very clean styling, but stylish in it's own right. To put it in another context, I am a fan of clean, simple styling, I like House of Norway furniture. Very plain and simple. When my GF brings me to a furniture store that has Italian or French gothic styled furniture, I get nauseous. How could anyone like that overblown, complicated, gaudy stuff? Lots of people do. personal taste. I still know guys, old timers, who remember seeing that car in the day. They still appreciate that type of car, and often use bits of that type of styling on their cars today. And some of it looks good. Too much of a 'good' thing???? The rear end reminds me a bit of the Bailon Merc that Sterling Ashby owned. He also did a Tbird with similar styling...tubular grill that pulled in at the center of the car. If I remember correctly, you guys were drooling over those cars!
The Jalopy Journal
