'59 eyebrow Chevy

’59 eyebrow Chevy

Always a fool for GM cars, most of the 65 or 70 cars I have owned have been General Motors products.

Dates from early when my parents had Chevrolet cars, then 1948 when my father was shopping for a new car and my mother and I desperately wanted a 1948 Buick Super sedan from Nelson Chev-Buick. 

My father ended up buying a 1948 Dodge sedan from Karl Wiselogel, W&W Motors. Eight years later, my senior year at UFla, my parents gave it to me (in retrospect, probably in defense against the shaky 1947 Buick Special sedan that a friend and I had bought for $75 our junior year). Linda and I shared the Dodge that 1956-57 school year in Gainesville and then it was our first married-life car for honeymoon adventures in Rhode Island when I first went into the Navy. 

In spite of my GM lust, our first brand new car was a Ford because our friend Joe Parrott was working at Cook Ford.

Then living in Apalachicola many years later we were a Ford Family of Fine Cars again because the Ford dealer co-owners were parishioners and then when they sold out and retired I made friends with Richard, new owner of the Ford store. 

In our fourteen years in Apalachicola I bought a dozen or so new and used cars from the Ford dealership that was there. 

Anyway, a lifelong GM fan. Yesterday’s email brought a delightful package from Norm, Navy friend from forty years ago.

It has some 22 images of billboards that he said GM has put up in the Detroit area, advertising Chevrolet. 

There are various models, some of which I’ll share starting this morning.

At the top, that’s a 1959 Chevrolet taillight, which some derided as “eyebrows,” but it was a popular car. 

We didn’t own one because at the time we had a new 1959 Opel Rekord, our only orange car in 55 years of marriage.

Today if you buy a Chevy Impala, it’s a four door sedan, period

But the ’59 Chevy was available in quite a variety of body styles and series. One popular model was the El Camino, a pickup body on a sedan chassis. 

Top of the line was the Impala hardtop sedan, a body style with a flat top and slightly overhanging rear roofline, that Chevy shared that year (and 1960) with Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. The term "hardtop" meant that there was no pillar/post between the front and back door. 

In the Impala series GM offered sedans, convertible, station wagon. Strung through my blog post this morning are only 1959 Chevy images. Not to show prejudice, but red is my favorite color car.

Don’t know what it went for, but the white ’59 four-door hardtop with the fender skirts and continental kit was up for auction on Mecum, which folks like me enjoy watching on latenight TV.

Tom in +Time and still loving GM

Thanks for stirring the memories, Norm!