O Scale Motor Vehicle Chronicle June 12

Richard,

You hit another home run. My grandparents owned a four-door DeSoto. I never will forget the drive from California to Oklahoma. Crossing the Mojave Desert in July with only one of those coolers that hung out of the passenger window. Least I forget the water bag hanging on the front bumper.

Interesting topic. The ad for the Frazer Traveler really shows the difference in the times. No way a car ad today would show a rifle as part of the load, unless it was made especially for the American Rifleman. If you had a gun in a general-media ad, the company would never hear the end of it. 

Ah, for the good old days, when America was free.....my mother with two teenagers carried a rifle, one that she killed chickens with by shooting them in the head, with her across country for protection, and declared it at National Parks, where she was admonished to keep it unloaded and in the trunk while in the park, back in the 1950's.

How do you think that would fly today?  Interesting about the DeSoto and Chrysler cars above, as I don't remember them. although I was familar with the Kaiser and Frazer

models, and Nash models with fold down seats, that could make into a bed, which had been proceeded in the late 1920's by Durant models, also available in that configuration.   It was rumored that parents would not let their daughters date guys driving Nashes with those bed-making seats.  I became enamored with practical hatchbacks in 1966, with the Dodge Charger, and bought them as long as I could get them, until the last 1993 Mustang, when Ford dropped the fuel efficient four and the hatchback, and I had to shop elsewhere.  I, with the Charger, and later Barracuda,

used those cars to a great extent for camping America.

Ah, yes, such good days...

• "Colored" people had Jim Crow to deal with
• Women being treated as second class citizens
• Autistic and dyslexic kids beaten into learning
• Diseases we had no way to fight
• Soldiers being subjected to above-ground nuclear tests, marching to ground zero minutes after nukes had been set off

Yep, such wonderful times...

Richard, Whitebox has a DeSoto Suburban. I don't know how accurate it is maybe the same as Vitesse.

Bob 

 Those are interesting cars, a few Kaisers and Frazers were still running when I grew up. Oh, and our neighbor owned a Studebaker.

  Today's world has changed an ad showing a shotgun would be politically incorrect today for anything but an "outdoor" publication. Even an empty gun rack is a no no.

  National parks have recently relaxed some of the rules on firearms.

  Today is the "good old days" for tomorrow. I'm saving a Daihatsu Charade for the next generation.

Douglas

Nostalgia causes to remember the good thing in our past and forget the bad.
I grew up in the north during the1950s. I don’t remember any Jim Crow laws.
We lived without air conditioned homes, but we could leave our doors unlocked
I was part of a study to find a vaccine for Polio. Now we can prevent it but still can’t cure it. There are a multitude of diseases we still have no cure.
Life is a journey, wee learn from our past mistakes.

I hope you don't think I side-tracked your topic. But any student of history will roll their eyes when someone speaks longingly for the 'good old days' unless they're speaking of something specific only (such as the era of steam, not the entire era for everything else going on in the world).

A good example is the sinking of the Titanic. We've romanticized the history of the ship and people often forget that while those in the upper classes lived well (until the ship sank and killed most of them, that is), the lesser classes were hardly were doing well below decks. Imagine how the people in the engine room were doing.

As for the whole, "We always kept our door unlocked" part, there's ample evidence to support that crime has remained, all in all, a constant throughout history and it changes only with shifting areas of 'the bad side of town' and the type of crimes (for example, ID theft wasn't a big thing at all until very recently). You might have never had to worry about crime on your street, but I can assure you that people on the other side of town sure did within the same timeframe.

Jim Crow...thank goodness that's gone.  Today's discrimination is much less blatant.

Most women were treated as the Ladies they were.  Those that weren't were treated accordingly.

Yesterdays "slow" learners and discipline problems may have been spanked...but most eventually DID learn...and most grew out of it.

Diseases...oh, you mean like Ebola, AIDS, MERS?  We're not fighting them so good now are we?

I was in the military in those days.  I did go to Trinity Site...suffered no ill effects, and most of those who went there or to similar sites did not.  Some did.  Being in the military means taking certain risks.  It's a given.

I value this site...and don't want to see it yanked or become a political forum.  I just want to point out that there were problems in the "good old days"...and we still have

problems today.

Back in the "old days", women used solar power to dry the laundry.

I sure dose along with this1946 Nash Pickup.

Let's move any more political discussions to Facebook

I always thought of trucks in that timeframe as how SUVs are considered now, in that i know they were often used for your overall subject, but didn't want to introduce them here if you felt they didn't belong...

Yeah, sorry about that.

I don't know if this could be used as a utility vehicle, but it looks like something I would have liked to own and drive.  

 I try to start an auto or model car related discussion each week. But I don't care if somebody wants to write about their Aunt Tillie's Super Stock Dodge. These posts tend to drift off the original subject, and that's fine

Just as I was about to hit "submit", the power went off....storm here..so, repeat.  I have never seen a Nash pickup in a show (and have heard of a Packard pickup being

used around the plant..not seen that, either), but I have seen Terraplanes.  They,

and their also Hudson-bult predecessor, the Essex, were reputed to be popular with

farmers and others in remote areas with dirt/mud roads as they were equipped with

stump-pulling 5+ to 1 rear axles.  I would guess they were not very fast and had

reduced engine life.  Too bad Matchbox did not include that with their Reo in their

offering....I would want at least one Terraplane pickup model.

That is a later Packard pickup, under Studebaker domination, and one that I had not heard of, or seen either, than the one used around the plant, which I think was late 1930's-early 1940's.  I have seen Packard flower cars that are similar to pickups.

I have seen in the 1/43rd listings, models of Rolls-Royce pickups, and I have certainly

not seen one of those, either.

With the Rolls the exception, you wonder why GB cars were so bad, and yet airplanes

such as the Spitfire were able to keep the Messerschmidts at bay?

The Stout Scarab was American built and used a rear mounted Ford Flathead V8 for power along with a unitized body. They only built a vary few, each hand made. They cost $5000 about $80000 in today's money

I had not heard of the early Packard pickups, either. When did Packard get out of making trucks?

Flying ability and reliability are two different things. Ask any Maserati owner.

I bet the Spitfire mechanics could tell you stories of how hard they worked to keep those beautiful birds in the air.

The Stout Scarab was American built and used a rear mounted Ford Flathead V8 for power along with a unitized body. They only built a vary few, each hand made. They cost $5000 about $80000 in today's money

My mistake - I thought the thing was made in England. 

Richard,

You don't have to answer unless you would like to. I respect you and your thread. My question is as follows.

Did you ever drive the early clutch assisted automatic transmission(s)? The type that came in the Desoto's, Chrysler's, Buick's and the like.

Someone brought up the Packard pickups. Did they forget the Hudson and Plymouth pickups? You could devote two entire weeks to the forgotten pickups of the era.

Packard made trucks from 1905 until 1923, mostly larger ones.  The only pickup I am

aware they made was the one used around the plant.  However, the flower cars were

built, and I have in front of me a statement saying some commercial vehicles were

built on Packard chasses, showing a 1933 armored car.

I went to high school with a kid that had a Plymouth with one of those hybrid transmissions, and, I think, a swapped in hemi.  As I remember, he carried spares for the transmission in his trunk and could do roadside repairs/replacements when they failed, not infrequently.

Back in the good old days of 1941...a new house cost $4,075.00...a new car $850.00...gasoline .12 cents a gallon...postage stamp .3 cents...milk .54 cents per gallon...eggs .20 sents per dozen.

Bob

Bob,

If you think about those,"good old days" of 1941 and how they evolved into horror on December 7th.

I think that Richard does a super-duper job on this weekly epaper for us to escape to .

In the old days, regular car frames/workings, were fitted with custom wood bodies and called "shooting-brakes". These cars, including Rolls, were for "gentlemen in hunting parties". These evolved into station wagons, but are still referred to as "brakes" outside of the US. I never thought I'd see the day when Cadillac made a pick-up and Porsche made a SUV.

Something for everyone's taste.

I once had an MGA with Lucas ignition.  If there was a cloud in the sky, it wouldn't start.

I had a new '64 MG Midget and a used '84 Jaguar. A few "Lucas problems", but many other problems as well. The saying was "Lucas, prince of darkness".

The only thing Lucas I owned, luckily, was a kit to install those Lucas pointed metal

center headlights, which I did and used on my 1960 Impala coupe, trading it off in

1966 with them still installed and working.

I had a new 1971 Harley Davidson 350 sprint motorcyle. This is when they were owned by AMF. You guessed it. They used Lucas electric parts for the street version. It would almost NEVER start. Still have bruises on the back of my right leg.

Azgary 

Years ago I drove an old DeSoto with Fluid Drive and a buddy of mine had a Dodge with a Gyro-Matic.

After Studebaker and Packard merged they sold Studebaker trucks branded as Packards in South America, I believe they were assembled in Argentina. 

Funny, I used to have the older 250cc version of the Sprint and I don't recall any chronic electrical problems with it. The Sprint was made in Italy (by Aermacchi, if I remember correctly) and I think mine had an Italian electrical system. Maybe they switched to Lucas later on - I had my bike around 1969-1970 when I was in college, and it was of course used when I got it. The bike was parked outdoors in Michigan, so it was subject to plenty of wet weather.

The bike figures in one of my favorite stories. I had a part-time job at a country music radio station, spinning records and operating the transmitter. This was when Waylon Jennings still sang with a backup band called the Waylors. The owners fired me because they didn't want a hippie college student around who had long hair and a beard and rode a motorcycle to work. Of course, it wasn't too many years later that Waylon and every country music star had long hair, a beard, and a motorcycle. I was just ahead of my time.