I was watching cars go by the other day and it dawned on me that modern automobiles look OK, but they all look pretty much alike. Those aero-effecient bodies just don't have much pazazz. A few days later, I went to an old car show and figured out what was wrong. Modern car bodies are designed to work right, give good fuel mileage, and appeal to new car buyers who average 34 years old. Style and beauty are not a major part of the package.

Look at the old cars. They don't look alike, but most of them have class. They are works of art, not industrial machines. My favorite period is the fat-fender era which is roughly 1935 to 1948. Cars had chrome grills and bumpers. They were decorated with pen stripes or stainless steel strips. They had narrow, large diameter wheels and tires, with hubcaps that only covered the center of the wheel where the lugs are. Windshields were flat and the side windows had rounded corners. There was a single, large round headlight on each fender and small taillights mounted low in the back. Rear windows were small. Early in the period, headlights were stalk mounted and late in the period, Hudson and Studebaker broke from traditon and switched to slab-sided bodies. Things were different under the hood. If you got a Ford, it was almost always a flat-head V8. If you got a Chevrolet, it was an in-line six with overhead valves. A Plymouth was a flathead six, and Packard and Pontiac were mostly flathead in-line eights, and Buick had an inline eight with overhead valves. Some cars offered a choice of six or eight cylinders, but others offered only one engine. You could pick paint color, two or four doors, and options were radio or heater.

But they had style. You could identify a Nash, or a Chrysler, or an Oldsmobile, from blocks away. When a car came toward you, their distinctive grills made it easy to tell them apart.

They were not all the same size either. Big cars were Cadillac, Chrysler, Packard, and Lincoln. Hudson, Dodge, and Oldsmobile were mid-size and small cars were Ford, Chevy, and Plymouth. Studebaker, always a trend setter, build cars that were different sizes. The smallest was the Champion which was smaller than a Ford.

By 1949, the slab-side look went almost industry wide and about 1954 there was a slow painful slide to big ungainly, gaudy, cars. No wonder "foreign" cars became popular.

As far as I am concerned, the classics were Ford's model T, model A, and model B. Then came the Chrysler Airflows, Lincoln Zepher and Continental, LaSalle, almost any Packard. The Hudson Hornet was a benchmark model and 46, 47 ,and 48 Chrysler, the '55 Chevrolet and '46 Ford, pretty much complete my list.

If you are still reading this, you are offically a car buff.
Howard