Those Were The Days

Red ribbon in the typewriter and no time to change it this morning. No matter, this can be brief. 

Knowing my obsession with cars, my brother and sister each forwarded to me an email  about a Pontiac that General Motors built for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York. It was eye-catching and an enormous hit at the GM display because the “skin,” the covering that normally would be steel, was a brand new material, Plexiglass. 

The email is titled “1939 Pontiac Ghost Car commands $308,000 at auction,” and has an article about the car and several revealing photographs inside and outside.

Along with gratitude at my siblings' thoughtfulness, my second thought was fascination. Car bodies are routinely plastic, fiberglass nowadays, but not seventy years ago. My first sight of a car with a plastic body was Spring 1954 at a GM technology show on the University of Florida campus. It was a 1954 Corvette. Today both of our GM cars make extensive use of fiberglass in the body. 

My first thought was that whoever wrote the article doesn’t know much about cars, and certainly doesn’t know Pontiacs. 

That plexiglass car is a 1940 Pontiac, not a 1939 Pontiac. Nowadays a new car model is unveiled and will be in production five or six years, with perhaps the only changes being a few new color selections. But every autumn in those days, the automobile manufacturers unveiled new models with changed body-styles for the new year ahead. 

It may have been a waste somehow, a marketing gimmick, yes, though essential for keeping pace with the competition, but it created great anticipation and excitement for some folks. Or maybe it was just me.

The good old days.

Tom