57 58 59 Chevy

Some remember the days when Detroit (there was nobody else) had an annual style changeover, with new models introduced in showrooms every fall. Not unlike birds migrating south by instinct, I would know when to start walking out into the front yard early evenings to look for spotlights in the night sky.

Knowing where each car dealer was here in Panama City, it was often possible to tell which dealership was announcing by where the spotlight was. Rowell Nash, Nelson Chevrolet, Cook Ford, W&W Dodge Plymouth or Sala Desoto Plymouth, Lloyd Pontiac Cadillac. &c. The Hudson showroom down on West Sixth Street nearly as far out as the BayLine depot. The Kaiser Frazer dealership was way out W. Hwy 98 in Little Dothan (just a block west of where Buddy Gandy’s Seafood is now) and their spotlight would be dimmer, I’d have to walk down across the street by Massalina Bayou to see it. Butterflies would fill my stomach until I could get to the showroom to walk around and sit in and salivate and lust and get a folder to spread open and thumbtack to my bedroom wall.

Comes to mind this morning what now seems to be the mindless waste of the marketing approach of the annual model changeovers. But GM, Ford and Chrysler were in hot competition with each other, and nobody dared offer an obsolete model. That actually was what eventually put Nash, Hudson and Packard out of business, being unable to afford the cost of keeping up to date and sharply competitive.

The most distinctive example of drastic annual change in my memory is the 1957 - 1958 - 1959 Chevrolet. It went across the board with the other GM products too, but a flip through Chevy pics shows.

The 1957 was the culmination of a three-year offering of a body style (though each year ’55, ’56, 57 was each quite distinctive in appearance for marketing purposes) that has since come to be priced as classic

The 1958 was a totally different, very large car that to me in its day was the handsomest car made. Chevy kept it in the showrooms for one single year. I wanted one desperately, but seeing that my father’s friend and sometime business associate Joe Parrott was by then selling cars at Cook Ford, we bought a 1958 Ford tudor.

For 1959 Chevrolet came out with possibly the most astonishing car on the market. Formerly vertical, the tail fins were now spread out into enormous horizontal taillights that some called “eyebrows.”

The annual rush of restyling and retooling left us cars of shabby quality in the long run, because there was no time for the attention to quality control and improvement that we see in cars today, when a given model may stay on the market for five or six or who knows ten years.

The old ways were not best, but they were more fun.