hey guys, finaly getting some information put together on my research paper about the cars and car culture of the early 1950s more specificly 50-55 , i have a page number limit anyways, i was wondering if any of you that were rodding around back then would want to help me out. what i would like is if i could get some personal coments, just a short page or so on what is was all like, the culture,clothes,and of course the cars. itd be great if i could get some one from the east coast, midwest and the west coast for some comparison. thanks for all the help so far if you have anything to contribute i just post or pm me and i will get back to you. i supose just emailing me any information would be the way to go to avoid pilling up random stuff on the board. unless some one realy wants to read about all this then i spose post away. anyways thanx again tim
<font color="red">Sorry, I was only 4 years old and the only motoring I did was in a pedal car. Sure wish I still had the pedal car </font>
I was delivering papers on my rodded bike. You know the type that was popular in 52, crashbars, horns and a general gook wagon look. Heck, this was Brooklyn baby, even 12 yr old kids on bikes had to look like rodders! East Coasters still go for the skirts, lake pipes, louvers and connie kit look on 50's cars. And the channeled style on the early stuff. Sure beats 20" wheels, painted bumpers and other "progressive"***** thats some call customs today.
I also was 4 years old in '52 and lived in Federal housing, commonly called "The Projects" in San Pedro CA. Hadn't started kindergarten yet so I played with toys, slid down the ice plant on on the hill in front of the duplex on a card board box. Peddled the Murray dump truck, and sometimes on Saturday morning there would be a stolen car at the bottom of the revine that the local gang kids had stolen, stripped the engine out of and pushed down the hill from Western Ave. above. So my "Big Brother" and I would go play in it and try to get stuff off it like door knobs and lock knobs. But radios were usually gone already. We used to catch bugs and put them in jars. One day my Mom caught us poking a really big bug with popsicle sticks. She hadn't seen one like it before so she put a mayonaise jar over it and scooped it up and capped it and waited for Dad to get home to tell her if it was safe for us to play with, but he got rid of that pretty scorpion and we never saw it again. Dad usta work a lot then because he was saving up to buy a house. He managed two gas stations at the same time and pretty much pulled double shifts for a while, but he was determined to save up the $500 he had to have to get the new house. I could tell when he got home even if I was in bed because I could smell the 90wt gear oil and carburetor cleaner cologne he wore. I miss him. We would drive the 40 Pontiac 2dr sedan over to Long Beach every Sunday to see how the progress was coming on the house. Some times Dad wiuld sit me on his lap and let me steer. At the house I remember making up my own game walking between the two by fours before the plasterers came and made those little dark rooms out of it. We finally got to move in, in November of '53. That's Dad on the left, with his younger brother in '54.
In 1952 we were very much into blinding-white T-shirts, maintained by moms engaged in an unspoken competition. Stove-piped Levis were alternated with pegged black chinos, and footear was either penny loafers or enginner boots with the former and navy-blue suedes or white bucks with the latter. Levi jackets, letter sweaters and jackets, and car club jackets were preferred outerwear with tanker jackets beginning to make inroads into youthful wardrobes. Dayglo socks and shoelaces were early unisex favorites, and pink and heliotrope were popular accent colors for skinny suede belts and shirt trim. DAs and flattops were standard hairwear for many guys, while most chicks were either poney-tailed or poodle-cut. Full-circle skirts, buoyed by a few layers of crinolines for sock hops, were standard wear, but I never saw one with appliqued poodles and other cuddly critters. Other than Sadie Hawkins day when they'd come to school in pedal pushers, chicks wore skirts or dresses -- no slacks or Levis or any other such trouser. Saddle oxfords and penny loafers were standard school footwear for chicks, and angora sweaters and cotton blouses and shirtwaists provided upper cover, accented with neck scarves. Fifty-two was my transition year, when I bought a used and much-modified Mustang motorcycle which I could ride when I had my learner's driving permit at 15-1/2. I had a couple of interesting Fords that my pals and I had been wrenching on, including the sweet -- and infamous -- '34 Fordor we attempted to convert to a phaeton or convertible sedan. Important lesson was learned about body engineering, at the cost of a near-perfect old Ford. This was also the year I bought the only '40 Ford I've owned, a low-miles deLuxe coupe. Fifty-two was the year I helped my good pal Tony Hollar -- a year older then me -- replace the four-inch shackles under the rear of his '39 Merc coupe with eight-inchers to really get it down. More important than the effort expended making Tony's Merc look super cool, it provided an enduring lesson in the potential dangers involved when working on large lumps of hardware. Fifty-two was the year my bestest pal Bill Williams began building the AV8 roadster that set me on a good and righteous hot-rodding path that would carry all the way to the present. Fifty-two was a very good year . . .
In 52 I was 1 year old and*****in on a bottle. Damn that really turned into an expensive long lasting habit!---FEDER
Evidently, Doc and I have parallel lives, or at least we did for a while. In '52, I was 4 and cruised my Murray pedal car but mine was a red fire engine. I lived in Eureka, Ca. Social events included riding stick horseees [made out of real sticks and tree branches] with my little sister, cruising my pedal car on our wooden floored carport and taking long naps. Dress was customarily jeans with rolled up cuffs and colored t-shirts with cute little tennis shoes and ALWAYS a baseball cap. A rag in the back pocket was not unusual.
well, man, my grandpa was a rodder of sorts around 1949-1950 or so. he had a 39 ford that was pretty hot. lowered a bit, original look though, with a hot 49 merc flatty in it and i think lincoln rear end. got a pic of it if you want.
I was 8 in '52. Divided my time between toy cars, my hand me down pedal car and my bike. We each chose a toy car from the pile and the first thing we said..."Mine's lowered, skirts and duals." That made it a hot rod to us. We had no clue what 2-deuces or a cam was. I used Mickey Mantle's rookie card in the spokes for that motor sound but a balloon made it sound like it had Smittys. We didn't know what Smittys were we just liked the sounds. My hand me down hot rod had some frame issues so Dad made a plywood belly pan. It worked great and lowered it just like a real hot rod. I couldn't decide...flames or scallops so I flamed one side and scalloped the other with model car paint. Still have the pedal car. Anyone recognize it?
Wasn't born 'til '54. Don't remember much before about '57 or '58 when my folks moved to Frisco. But my dad did modify my pedal car, and my trike. No help huh? How much time ya got? I'll see if my sis has any pics from the early 50s if ya want.
Born in the Bronx NY, in 1946, lived on Davidson Ave till we moved to Yonkers when I was 6. Dad had a 49 Ford and his friend had a 49 Merc , they used to race I am told. Love them shoeboxes, STEVE
I turned 12 in '52. My car was a hand-me-down Soapbox Derby racer, and I had a subscription to Hop Up magazine. I drew a lot of customs by tracing cars from dealer catalogs, chopping and lowering them by moving the paper around. Still have the magazines and the drawings!
I was four and living in Hamburg, Germany. On the automotive front, I lurked in the back seat of our '48 Ford (still have it!) with the Dachshund, listening to the mighty flathead pulling us past the wretched collection of bubble cars, three-wheel deliveries, and ex-Wehrmacht scrap the surviving Germans drove. Occasionally, I watched my Father change the oil, learning my first bits of flathead lore. The first word I could read was "Esso", from a huge illuminated sign overlooking the ruins. Somewhere around this time, a friend of my Mother's, visiting us from the US, brought me the toy my parents blame for my present state of ruin: A plastic hotrod with pistons that moved up and down in the clear plastic engine. I lost that, but now have another...
I first noticed car magazines around 1950 or 1951. I was ten or eleven years old, and had a paper route for the Toledo newspaper, The Blade. As luck would have it, there was a drug store situated toward the end of my route. On collection days, with a pocket full of too many dollar bills and too much change, I made a habit of stopping for a root beer and an inspection of the latest comic books. At some point each month, when I had read all the comics, my attention would wander to the magazines. The car magazines eventually became a bigger obsession than the comics. By 1952, I'd become a fan of Tom McCahills columns in Mechanix Illustrated. Uncle Tom never minced words or overlooked flaws in his monthly reviews of the latest cars. One of his much-later road tests, for example, compared the latest Ford Torino to a land-locked tuna*****ing air. Uncle Toms column became one of the first things I looked for each month. Im pretty sure that it was his report on the Fordillacs that convinced me there was nothing faster or better on the road. The original (1949-1951) Fordillacs were built by Bill Frick and his partner, Phil Walters. They ran Frick-Tappett Motors in New York, and sold brand-new Fords with equally new Cadillac engines replacing the flatheads. These Cadillacs were the high-tech big-blocks of their day 331 cubic inches of throbbing overhead-valve V8. After selling a Fordillac to Briggs Cunningham, Frick and Walters were also hired to run the legendary Cunningham Car Company that campaigned so successfully in sports car racing. Uncle Tom wrote a glowing report on the Fordillacs, with no mention of tunas or air*****ing. The Fordillacs, as I remember, were held up as what the Big 3 in Detroit should be aiming for. After the McCahill article, I began noticing articles in other magazines about these magnificent machines, and the picture of a shoebox with the Fordillac chrome script on its flank soon became imprinted on my psyche as the ultimate automotive statement. It wasnt too long before other car books ones from the West Coast began showing up at the drug store. ****les like Hot Rod, Hop Up, Honk! and Rod & Custom introduced me to a host of other hybrids. There were homemade Fordillacs as well as Fordmobiles and Fordslers (with Oldsmobile and Chrysler engines), Studillacs and Chevmobiles as well. The beauty of these machines was that you didnt have to buy a new car to have them you could****emble them yourself in your own garage. To a wide-eyed newsboy of twelve or thirteen, who believed it was as easy as the magazines said, this opened the door to a wonderful world of possibilities. Little did that newsboy realize he was stepping onto the slippery slope of a fifty-year addiction to cars of all kinds stock or modified, hot rods, customs, sports cars, muscle cars, pony cars, -- anything with four wheels that looked like fun. And through it all, the image of those original Shoeboxes from Bill Frick remained imprinted somewhere on my mind as the first example of the ultimate road machine.
My dad was NEGATIVE SIX and my mom was NEGATIVE FIVE. I was negative twenty-seven and my daughter was negative fifty-one. In negative years, we were pretty old back then. Ed
I still have those Popular Mechanics as well as Motor Trend and many rod books going back to 53. Some zines are even older as I used to pick up whole year collections tossed at the curb for trash pickup. Even at 11-12 I couldnt resist trash pickin'. Before cars I used to build bikes from dump and roadside parts and sell to other kids, in later years my sons did the same. Wish I had pix from those 50's years but most got tossed or lost during my Navy days and other moves.
yeah i figured most of ya would have ben negative years old, but thought it worth a shot. im writing my paper on 1950 to "mid fiftys" so i would supose thatd be 1955. i supose i could use any information from any of you guys that want to volunter information and have it listen in my paper and you in biblieography an ect. i managed to find 4 or 5 books that havehelp a bit but i need sources at the minimum and i can use interveiws and ect. from person to person stuff. so i figured that HAMB would be the place to go thanx tim
I was one year old...hanging out in my Dads Merc dealership..dreaming of the day I could own one ...I actually do remember the 1955 Mercs...one of my earliest recollections.
That would have put me in the 3rd grade(the first year I got kicked out of school:for kicking a teacher who was trying to get me to write with my right hand and slapped me too many times with an 18-inch ruler across the knuckles).My interests then lay mostly in drawing pictures of airplanes and spaceships(I was a huge Buck Rogers fan and no he was not Mr.Rogers' father!)but I did draw a few cars. I was raised by my grandparents(long story)and my grandfather was the one who eventually inspired me to go with all things automotive. He was born in 1876 and in his lifetime he not only got to see electricity become popular,he got to see the first automobiles and airplanes created and even got to see a man go into space!(he died in 1965). He worked as a machinist for General Electric for a lot of his life and prior to that worked on automobiles and was one of the first to hold a chauffeur's license(#6)in Massachusetts.He had a big business for a time installing self-starters(electric)in Model T Fords to supplant the dangerous hand cranks. One of my earliest memories is sitting in the dining room of his house with him in his favorite rocking chair telling stories of the cars he worked on and the men who owned them.Vehicles with exotic names such as Darracq and Panhard-Levassor(there were many early French cars)and Pope-Hartford and Pope-Toledo and Stevens-Duryea(he had one of those GIVEN to him by a man he worked for in appreciation of his work!)and American Underslung(the FIRST lowrider).He would sit and talk for hours about them and I would try and imagine what it was like to be back in that time. He drove a 1934 Ford 2-door sedan at the time and I can remember driving fom our house in Saugus Mass to a summer cottage he had built for my grandmother in Amesbury Mass.Even though the car was nearly 20 years old then it was in pristine condition(until I put a dent in the rear fender backing it in and out of the garage when he was out with one of his friends.My posterior still smarts from that!)and we would drive up to the cottage for the summer(or at least a month)and it would seem to take forever.Today you can make the trip in 25 minutes. I remember one trip we had a flat tire and the car came to a stop on the road next to a sign dividing two towns;the front half of the car was in Georgetown and the rear half in Groveland.He thought it was funny and took a picture of it.I still have that pic somewhere around. He sold the 34 when I was 11 and I was crushed because by then I had discovered Rod & Custom and Hot Rod and Motor Trend(a great mag then)and was looking forward to the day I would get the sedan and make a "rod" out of it.His next car was a 48 Studebaker(what a letdown!)and then a 52 Stude.By then I had bought my first car;a 1933 Hudson coupe(actually a body and frame)for the princely sum of $5.00!It was a club car that the Road Rebels(a local club)had given up on. It never did make the road but it started me on the road that I won't get off until they plant me next to it! safariknut
I was two in '52, a tad young to be doing much car stuff, other than pedal cars. But here I am in '56.....I had the rockerbilly (tm) cuffs and boots thing down though I just couldn't convince mom that I needed some tattoos.
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