Nash Motors
Leaving Bay Medical Center following a hospital call Sunday after church, a memory stirred me to cross MLK (77) at 6th Street and head toward the building directly in front of me. In the 1940s and 1950s it had been Rowell Motors, the Nash dealership, with two large front doors into the service garage, and a showroom. Jutting out in front surrounded with windows, the showroom was large enough for one car to be on display. It was the source of my Nash brochures every fall when new models were introduced.
The building seems basically intact except that at some point an additional jut-out was tacked on, extending what had been the showroom. White paint was peeling off the front of the building, revealing the sign from sixty and more years ago, Nash in its traditional script partially showing. No one with good sense would find this exciting, but it was exciting to me. Later I went back to take a picture, and the present owner of the building came out and talked with me. She knew it had been the Nash store, said the building needs a lot of work but they hope to open it as an auto repair shop.
Nash Motors had an interesting history that anyone can read on line. They had some memorable cars, including the bizarre Nash Airflyte, sometimes called the “Bathtub Nash.” It was a brand new design introduced for 1949 to replace their cars held over from before World War II. Though roomy and comfortable, the Nash Airflyte could be in the running for the homeliest American car of all time.
A highly touted feature of Nash advertising was that the car interior could be made up into a bed. That could only appeal to a teenage boy, what were they thinking? Another feature was a flow-through ventilation system that, in those days before air-conditioned cars, claimed interior comfort without having to open the windows and be wind-blown. It was not effective on a hot, muggy summer day; you still had to crank all the windows down. Another special Nash feature was unit construction, the car built as a welded unit instead of bolting the body to the chassis. Yet another feature before automatic transmissions was “overdrive” that gave the manual transmission a higher gear ratio above third gear, for improved gas mileage and quieter cruising. An intriguing feature of the overdrive was that it allowed manual shifting from first gear to second and from second to third without using the clutch, then shift into overdrive by lifting the foot from the accelerator pedal.
One day in 1948, my friend Parker excitedly told me that after long anticipation their brand new Nash had arrived. A two-tone green Ambassador Super with the trunk back, not the slope back (“roach back,” as we scorned it), it was a four-door sedan with what is now called “suicide doors.” Their family had the Nash several years and I may have driven it, not sure. Parker’s father, whom he called by his first name Harry, was a traveling salesman known to have a lead foot, and I do remember Harry driving a bunch of us Boy Scouts to a Scout Jamboree in Pensacola. Now that my mother is gone, the truth can be told: that was the fastest ride of my life except for my rides in Harry’s airplane. He had been a stunt pilot early in life, a barnstormer flying an open-cockpit biplane and climbing out to walk on the top wing while the plane was high in the sky.
Some years later Nash and Hudson combined as American Motors. A bit later the Nash and Hudson labels were dropped in favor of the name Rambler. AMC eventually ceased producing cars.
Linda and I had two Rambler station wagons early on, a pretty two-tone blue that was started by lifting the gearshift lever; next, our first air conditioned car, two-tone burgundy and pink with push buttons instead of a gear shift lever.
