"Car 641...come in Car 641. We've got rabble rousers down at the soda fountain, over..."
Isn't eBay amazing? All one has to do is put in a search string of "1959" to come up with a wild array of products from back in the day. The picture to the right is one such item; I got it a few years ago doing a simple year search. There were no markings anywhere on the 8x10, and the photographer is unknown. The photo depicts mechanics at a local garage in Leawood, Kansas standing next to the local prowler Biscayne, which has presumably been in for repairs. Crossed flags and a "V" on the hood indicates the 348 cubic inch V8 for power. If you look closely to the right there is a `59 El Camino hiding just inside the garage door. It's hard to determine if this is a police maintenance garage or if it's the Chevy dealer. Seems unusual that these guys would be lined up to get photographed with a car that came in all the time, so it's more likely that it's the dealer's garage we're looking at.
The license plate under the nasty dent
on the front bumper says "Kansas Centennial 1961" so we can determine that the picture is from the early 1960s. Knowing these bumpers, I'd have to say the "incident" that caused it was no small matter. These things are extremely sturdy and tough to bend. I once uprooted a cement post with the front bumper on my `60 Buick (similar to this car) when I was 15 and learning to drive. It did little or no damage to the Buick.
Now take a look at the line down the middle of the bumper; for those in the know this is called the "two-piece" bumper, which denotes a car built somewhere other than California. "One-piece" front bumpers were put on all cars built in Los Angeles; I've never heard the true reason behind it, other than the rumor that it was for purely aesthetic reasons - the one-piece front and rear bumpers look far cleaner than the two-piece front and three-piece rear bumpers that were on all other cars. Given Leawood's proximity to Kansas City, the Chevy plant there probably built this car.
Some of the men are smoking, and although they look like my parents some are lik
ely younger in this photo than I am now. Notice there isn't a single t-shirt wearin' mechanic among them. This was the button-up and slacks generation, accented
by a pack of Lucky Strikes and Thursday night bowling. The big pod thing on the fender was called "The Growler," which we all know now as The Siren. It sounds like a cross between a big bird and an air raid warning from the Cold War. Nothing like the Flip-N-Blip psycho sirens we here now; The Growler was purposeful and simple.
This is still one of my favorite pictures involving `59 Chevys. A copy of this picture was also donated to the Johnson County KS Museum for their collection.
The license plate under the nasty dent
on the front bumper says "Kansas Centennial 1961" so we can determine that the picture is from the early 1960s. Knowing these bumpers, I'd have to say the "incident" that caused it was no small matter. These things are extremely sturdy and tough to bend. I once uprooted a cement post with the front bumper on my `60 Buick (similar to this car) when I was 15 and learning to drive. It did little or no damage to the Buick.Now take a look at the line down the middle of the bumper; for those in the know this is called the "two-piece" bumper, which denotes a car built somewhere other than California. "One-piece" front bumpers were put on all cars built in Los Angeles; I've never heard the true reason behind it, other than the rumor that it was for purely aesthetic reasons - the one-piece front and rear bumpers look far cleaner than the two-piece front and three-piece rear bumpers that were on all other cars. Given Leawood's proximity to Kansas City, the Chevy plant there probably built this car.
Some of the men are smoking, and although they look like my parents some are lik
ely younger in this photo than I am now. Notice there isn't a single t-shirt wearin' mechanic among them. This was the button-up and slacks generation, accented
by a pack of Lucky Strikes and Thursday night bowling. The big pod thing on the fender was called "The Growler," which we all know now as The Siren. It sounds like a cross between a big bird and an air raid warning from the Cold War. Nothing like the Flip-N-Blip psycho sirens we here now; The Growler was purposeful and simple.This is still one of my favorite pictures involving `59 Chevys. A copy of this picture was also donated to the Johnson County KS Museum for their collection.
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