Man, you guys bring back memories. Most of the stuff you guys had is right on. In 63 I had a 50 Merc nosed and decked. Goofy purple paint and woodpecker decals. Ran the stock flathead and then later put an Olds in it. Low to no bucks but it ran really nice. I had homemade cutouts on it. When I took it to the drags on the weekends the SHOE POLISH stayed on the window for the entire week. Drag stickers in the rear window. What a great time!!
1963 was the year I graduated from Artesia High School (So.Cal.). I had a '49 Ford Tudor and I had black rims no caps and what ever kind of white wall tire I could get my hands on, even Mickys (port-a-walls). The car was lowered and the stock paint looked like crap but cool! Flathead V8 with those chrome acorn nuts on the headbolts and one of those little chrome air cleaners on the carb. Sure wish I had a picture of that car!
I was 19 in '63 the attached pictures (note the dates) show the two cars I had (boy my wife to be and I were really skinny in them days). I paid $300.00 for the 56 Chev 4 door hardtop and put the spinners and white walls. I paid $125.00 for the 34 and put another $400.00 in it. Didn't have money to get it painted so I just left it in primer. NO I DON'T STILL HAVE THEM!!
I turned 16 in 1961. My first car,built my my Dad with little help from me was a 1940 Ford tudor that he bought for me in 1960 when I was 15. My Dad was a bodyman all his life. It was all restored and painted Buick Tahitian red. It ran deep dish chrome reversed wheels,baby moons and Firestone Deluxe Champion wide whites. The motor was a 348 tri-power Chev with a '39 transmission. It had a red and white rolled naughahyde interior and a white naughahyde headliner with red piping.I drove it to highschool and was as proud as a peacock. I was very fortunate that my Dad loved cars as much as I did. I don't have that car any longer but I still own 13 of my Dad's vintage Fords that he bought from 1959-1965, including my '34 Vicky (he bought it in 1959)that I've posted on here before.They've all been stored in a dry building since we bought them.Boy, I sure miss my Dad.......Mike
In 63 if I knew now what I didnt know than and had a truck like that I would sell it and start buying 32 stuff . But I was only 10 .
I was kid but old enough to where I would check out the hot rods being built and driven around the neighborhood. I remember the moon hubcaps and blackwalls or narrow whitewalls. I thought cars that had those were cool! (First chrome reverse wheels I saw were on a friends older brother's brand new red '67 GTX.) I remember that some "big kid" who worked up at the Mobil station was fixing up a 56 +/- Chevy pickup. It was painted a bright yellow, even the wheels. I think he left the rims bare. (I've slept at least twice since then and don't remember)
BTT. THis is some of the best reading. Lets keep em coming. Talk about embarassing, when I was 18 I had a 55 stude chapmion. Slowest car in town. I tried to cover it up with decals. I had a STP decal that must have been 2 foot across plastered across the trunk lid. I was trying to deal a buddy out of a 327 and four speed that was in a car he wrecked to put in it but somebody with money beat me to it.
16 yr old kids in the sixties usually didn't have enough spare change to buy things like torque thrust wheels. I mowed yards, but at $4 or $5 per yard, it was all I could do to save up the $200 I needed to buy the 61 Falcon I drove thru most of high school. And I was one of the lucky ones with a weekend job that paid the minimum wage of $1.15 per hour. This was in the late sixties (67-69). I spent my money on the finest accessories available from K-mart! That included a set of baby moons that went on black wheels with blackwall tires, a glasspack muffler, chrome exhaust tip, and a chrome air filter. I remember wanting a set of chrome reverse wheels, but they cost a ton of money, something like $9.95 each. I went to the local parts store and bought some of that transparent red ignition wire and a "hot" chrome coil, but the electrical noise killed my radio! Oh, and I eventually bought an FM converter that plugged into my AM tube radio antenna jack.
1963 Graduated High School, Had a 1958 Thunderbird Coupe white with a turquise & white interior,rims painted red with Baby Moon caps & a sun tach. Wish I had that car now.
Hmmmm 1963 I was 9 and I don't recall that many suede cars. Well except what my dad called Jalopies (my generation called 'em beaters). But I like your ideas although I'm thinking that with the Americans either Pinners or black walls would rule. Never the less I like the your ideas for "your" truck, now just build it the way you want and let the chips fall where they may.
I was 15 in '63 and hurrying time along so I could get my license in '64. When I got my license,I was driving my fathers stick six 56 Chevy 4 door. I popped the hubcaps,painted the wheels black and the lugnuts white and washed the car every other day. That's all I could afford. I was a gas jockey part time and when I saved up enough $$ I bought a nice 57 Belair 2 dr.hardtop for an old timer. It was baby blue witha white top 283 powerglide. All I could afford was baby moon caps on the original wheels and white wall tires (used from the garage I worked at) and older kid gave me a set of glaspacks and I put them on. That was it. AND most of my friends were in the same boat, the rich kids were buying muscle cars and one had a roadster pick up that brokedown all the time, the vast majority of us drove early 50's Chevys and Fords about as stock as could be. It was the older guys who had the nice cars because they had real jobs.
1964 I was 16 living in ST. Augustine, Florida and had a 58 Yeoman wagon. I didn't know the value of it then, it was just a pass me down 2 door family wagon. 283 auto with white paint job. Since I worked at my Uncles Body Shop, after school and saturdays, I grabbed every paint sample he had that had a yellow color to it and mixed them all together. Wal-la I had me a Yellow submarine. After a few months I bought some Keystone spoked Mags, blackwalls out naturally. That car was almost as good as a Rambler with make-out seats, Parents hated to see me coming to pick up their daughter. Maybe it was because I always wore baggies (Bathing Suit), sandles, and had long hair (Surfer sytle not hippie, yet). It didn't matter, none of their daugthers were in danger of losing their virginity because none of them possesed it anymore. Me and the Yellow Sub just help them perfect some of their moves.
I was 15 in '63. I bought a 56 chevy 210 from an old guy in the neighborhood. My dad and I rebuilt the engine ( 265) and for my 16th birthday, my parents allowed me to spend some money I had been putting aside. I paid $105 dollars for a full flat vinyl interior including new windlacing. I bought the " Mickey Thompsons" from a friend for $25 a piece and a guy my Dad knew made the " reversed rims" for the back. It was so happening....and here is the pic. This was in Birmingham AL. I sold the car to a cop from east Birmingham. I would be ready to bet that the car is still down there somewhere.....with no rust at all !
1963 In 1963 I married my Starter Wife and was driving a 1958 Vette with WWW and chrome reverse rims. BB
It kills me to listen to young guys today talk about building period correct carslike in the late fifties and sixties. I was 18 in 1963 and will agreew most who posted that just having a car was a major accomplishment. To have a full on hot rod or custom was almost unheard of. Baby Moons or full disc moons, porto walls, scaventer pipes under the axle, primer was frowned upon, red or black wheels, maybe a small custom aftermarket air cleaner. That was pretty much the extent of it. If you had a few more bucks you went with a set of chrome reverse wheels. A few of us made up our own reverse wheels for the rear. There were a few cars in the school parking lot that had more, but daddy paid for those. I remember a couple of model A's and two 34 ford coupes and one guy had a full race (now there is a term that doesn't mean shit) '51 Merc. I had a 55 chevy 2 dr post and with the stock 265 2 bbl and three speed could whoop ass on the guy with the Full Race Merc. There was also one 58 Corvette with chrome reverse wheels and a few mild custom shoeboxes. Nosed, Decked (usually done with Bondo which cracked out in a year or so) and lowered. The preception today of what it was like seems to be different than I remember it. We all had dreams of what we would like to have done to our rides, but the reality was no bucks! So we scrounged the junk yards for stuff we could use to make our cars faster or more cool. To find a piece of used speed equipment of some kind in the junk yard was very fortunate . Dual exhaust, glasspack mufflers gave the allusion of power. Would I want to go back there and do it over again, Hell No! It's way better today, with the exception of cost of everything. As a junior in high school prior to the 55 Chevy 2 dr I had a '49 Ford Business Coupe with a 57 347" pontiac and 3-speed. Motor stock, I was pretty cool and attracted a lot of attention, can't tell you how difficult it was to install that drive train with only O/A and Arc Welder and no comerically available parts to do the swap. We just had to figure out how to do it ourselves and fabricate or adapt what we could. No 1-800 VISA Hot Rods back then.
Thanks for all the input and keep'em coming!!!!!!! I like all the ideas. I'm beginning to wonder if I have gone down the wrong road with my parts collecting, though! Steelies ot Torqthrusts? Shiny or Suede? WWW, w/w, or Black? Pinstripes or no? 'Bout decided to go 4bbl w/ the caddi filter housing. I'll prpbably keep the six deuce for my next project (a cut down truck cab on a fabbed frame). Whacha thinkin'?
It's tough to get period correct. For the 50's and 60's you've got to think junkyards with no bucks and no billet. Minimum wage was $1.10 an hour. Get some of the early magazines. They had a lot of influence. Basically, in 1963 a lot of us didn't have squat to work with.
In '63 I was a few years away from driving Dad's '56 Chevy pickup, but when I did get it the first thing I did was take that that damn stock rack out of the box (stock rack: for hauling livestock). Then it was a set of baby moons instead of the painted dog dish caps and some "Thunder Valley Dragways" decals in the windows. My dad would only put recapped snow tires on the back so I mastered the fine art of powerbraking a 6 cylinder 3 speed to smoke the tires off of it. Poor Dad couldn't understand why "those damn recaps" wouldn't last 10,000 miles. Finally I used the old pickup to pull my engineless '57 Chevy 2 door sedan around town on a towbar after I had stripped it to look like a gasser until I got it running again. The thngs you do as a teenager to look "cool" just make me laugh today.
In '63 I was 17, a junior in HS, and bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie in Jacksonville. That money went for clothes, dates and college fund. I was lucky to get to use the family '57 Chevy post or worse, my Dad's 59 Plym 4 door pos. How humiliating. I had bought a $100 '30 Model A coupe, which was in the backyard, and a junkyard 265 Chevy that needed a rebuild. Didn't know jack about either one of them, so not much progress was made on my pitiful income. I mostly dreamed over a Hot Rod Magazine, R&C, or Rodding & Restyling down at the drugstore. What a wannabe There were only a couple of cars at school that WEREN'T parents' cars, and hardly any pickups. Maybe 20 student cars on the lot, unlike today Only a few senior kids had their own wheels. The coolest car, however, was a 40 Ford coupe owned by a senior. Metallic blue, white T&R interior, chrome wheels with baby moons and a 283 Chev. Never did know how he paid for it, other than he was in the trades program and had a "real" job after school. He belonged to the "Slicks" car club, which carried a parental death sentence if you even mentioned it. He contrasted totally with the guy with the 51 Plymouth 4 dr., painted with green house paint and big yellow polka dots. But Tony, the guy with the Plym, could fart on cue, so that was pretty cool, except with the girls. Unfortunately, there was some shit starting to happen over in some shithole country we had never heard of, so that pretty much captured our attention, especially the seniors. Then November 22nd and Dallas came. I was goofing off in typing class when the announcement was made. So much for 1963. In my circle, you would have painted that truck with a brush, put some Western Auto or Sears seat covers on it, some stolen wheel covers on the Krystal side, and hoped that you had gas money for the weekend, IF it was still running.
Just always remember that those old little magazines are the ones we were reading. They aren't a true representation of the real world. Most of them were state of the art for that time. Just as we ogle over the high buck cars in todays magazines, those cars back then were the pick of the litter by the magazine people too. There were gold chainers and wannabe's back then too. I think I collected every brand of hot rod magazine of that era when they were new. There weren't very many cars like that on the streets of suburban Wash. D.C. in 1963.
Back then in High School anyone driving a pickup truck of the 40's or 50's usually was off the farm and they weren't fixed up. Usually just the farm beater. Ford cars were the norm, mostly 49-56. Chevy's were popular. 16 year old kids didn't have mags or white walls. I had a 46 ford 4-door with grey primer, because I couldn't afford to have it painted. 14 inch Lincoln wheels painted black and used wide whitewalls someone had traded in at the dealership where I worked after school and on weekends. Had a stock interior. Most kids didn't have a car. I also had a 56 chev 4-door hardtop before that which was also painted grey primer and I left the stock white for the 2-tone effect. Mexican blankets didn't exist in our area. Speed equipment was pretty much unheard of. Some of the richer kids had some nice stock 55-56 fords or 55-58 chevs. Pat.
My dad ran a small independent garage and got hold of a lot of trades. Before I bought my first car, he gave me this one to work on and play with. Made $.95/hour at that time and spent it all (except for clothes) fixing this one.
Now mind you this is coming from an Ohio boy... It may have been mentioned but I hate to break it to you. In 1963 you did not see any trucks on the road that had any of those "hot rod" items. The only pickups you seen were owned by the farmers who's sons didn't have anything else to drive. These pickups were nothing but work trucks period.
I might as well join in. I was 16 in 1963 and bought a '54 Chevy 2-door sedan for $50. I had a summer job working for a water well driller and I used that money to buy a Hurst 3-speed floor shift conversion. Other than that I added a little chrome air cleaner on the stock one-barrel carb, and a set of baby moons on black stock wheels. Oh yea, the crowning touch was the STP decals in the rear quarter windows that came stapled inside Hot Rod and Car Craft magazines in those days. It was a real pos that had a worn out front end, squeaky busings, and it burned oil, but I was one of only about a dozen or so guys in my high school class that had their own car. So it was cool. The only place we ever saw a set of mag wheels, multiple carbs, or candy paint in those days was in the magazines. There was a rich kid in my high school that a gorgeous black 1960 Impala with a tri-power 348, but everybody else was driving junk that took every dollar we could earn just to keep running.
1963 was 17 years before I was even conceived, but this thread has been one of the best reads I've seen on here in a while. It's great to hear about what things were really like, and actually gave me a few ideas. Thanks
People say that primer wasn't the norm, well in 1958 I bought a 1/25 scale '58 Impala (I was 13 years old) and over the next couple years I kustomized it. It was painted in black (use to call it dark hot rod gray) primer and I entered it in a local toy store model car contest. I didn't win but I got "Honorable Mention" but that's not the point. I built it to look like what the fad was at that time in the Paramount/Holydale area of So. Cal. in the late 50's early 60's. By 1963 more guys were putting paint on rather than primer. Like I said my '49 Shoebox had crappy stock paint, it was black in color so you didn't really know if it was paint or primer. Primer spots were real popular for a while too.
Must mean you didn't have one huh. Just like the first car, you didn't realize how bad it was until after you already had it for a while. Second one was usually better. At least Bob's and mine are.
In my area 63 was just about the end of the raked style. That style being baby moons with skinny whites, and scavenger pipes. The most radical looking car in the neighborhood was a 49 ford coupe with radiused back wheel wells, real low in the front using volkswagen tires. The door handles were shaved. After opening the wing you reached inside to open the door. But under the hood was just a flat 6! Looked good with the chrome acorn nuts on the head though. As you can see by this 64 photo, the gasser style was starting to replace the raked cars. Like everyone else said, you had no money. Here you see in the photo painting your rims white with spray can, then painting your blackwall tires shiny got you some style. Probably was just a stock 6 under that hood. I heard in another city guys actually ran only chrome rims on one side of the car. Since they could only afford 2 of them expensive rims. Just put them on the side facing the drive -in on main street. A few blocks over from where I lived was a guy that did alot of pinstriping (teardrops mainly then). People brought cars over to his place for striping only on cars that had new paint. It was the finishing touch for the long awaited completed custom paint job. Pinstriping on a primered car just didn't happen.
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