I won’t say that the Car Corral at the Hershey AACA (Antique Automobile Club of America) Fall Meet in Hershey, PA is better than the Saturday car show. The show attracts the cream of the restorer’s skill, performed on rare and unusual vehicles, and a win in one of the many classes is quite a feather in the cap. But the Car Corral is more accessible. Displayed on a ring road around the border of the flea market is a diverse collection of cars from every era… and, they’re for sale. Here are some cars and details that caught my eye. This 1933 Chevrolet sedan was photographed from the bridge over the Corral that separates the two halves of the flea market. Like 90% of the vehicles found at the flea market, it never moved all day. Most of the wheels actually turning at Hershey are parts wagons, carts and electric scooters like the one in the foreground.
This Plymouth Belvedere Custom Suburban embodies the commercially unsuccessful Virgil Exner design ethos that gives it a funky appeal now. Somehow, the ungainliness of the ’61 Plymouth sedans is muted in the wagons. Cars from this era always surprise you with nifty little details, like the tiny ring of Saturn shaped embossings that radiate around circumference of the wheel covers, and the ignoble but irresistible square, translucent steering wheel. When it catches direct sunlight, it looks like a neon tube on a gas station clock. This car also had a funky period antenna booster featuring six red plastic discs. Nitpickers might note that the white walls are correct period width; mid year in ’62, narrow whitewalls landed with a splash, but these are proper for 1961 at about 2 1/2 inches across.
A 1954 Ford Crestline Skyliner also shows its translucent bits: the green plastic roof insert (also available on the ‘54 Mercury Sun Valley) mimicked by a see through dome behind the speedometer that demonstrates how stylists of this era loved playing with natural light effects. It was offered for $27,500.
In the movie comedy, Arthur, Dudley Moore tepidly compliments his fiancee to the woman he is trying not to fall in love with by describing her as quite beautiful when the light hits her a certain way. “Of course, you can’t depend on that light”, he grouses. This XKE Jaguar was not done any favors by its positioning relative to the sun, which appears to circumscribe the result of changing hardware under the hood without double-checking clearances.
I can’t recall ever noticing how the aluminum eyebrow screens on the ’59 Chevy split from the hood when it was opened. Looks like your local mechanic had to be gentle leaning in, or a bent stamping might result.
$29,900 was the asking price of this 1956 Mercury Monarch from Canada. It’s face is an interesting fraternal twin of the US version.
A gorgeous 1978 Ford F-250 Ranger Camper Special in white and brown from Utah would be tough to resist if you were looking for a play truck at $16, 500.
I’m a sucker for compact wagons. This is a 1961 Buick Special. I couldn’t tell if it has the new for 1961, aluminum V-8, which eventually powered many British cars over the next four decades. My pal, Phil showed me that you could tell the year of the car by looking at the part code embossed into the tail light lens. It seems that was true with U.S. cars throughout the 1950s into the ’60s.
Beyond compact, a tiny 1990 RHD Suzuki Join minivan powered by a 660 cc mill was hugely space efficient at an $8900 show-special price.
A virtually unknown marque, this 1923 Lexington was made in Connersville Indiana. It had a straight six with factory dual exhausts making 75 HP. I included it to show the driving lights that appear to incorporate sociable anti-glare shades.
Well, I never. Really. I have no awareness of the International Scout 800 Aristocrat Edition, and wouldn’t have believed it ever existed. Stainless roof rack, rally wheels, unexpectedly attractive dark blue and medium green two tone, and a nifty power winch. $35,000 OBO.
At day’s end, we passed this sharp 1980 VW Brasilia in the flea market. It was a marketed in Brazil, Mexico and, in kit form, Nigeria. Beetle engine, Karmann-Ghia floor pan, 412-style face, but a smaller car.Very nice package.
“Non Auto Related”: I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a pic of a Pennsylvania Dutch dinner (Dutch not being referential of the people of the Netherlands, but an evolution of Deutsche) enjoyed on the way home to NY. Deitsch Eck (“Dutch Corner”), in Lenhartsville, PA served up this combo of meat loaf with gravy, scrapple with apple butter, potato filling (mashed spuds with sautéed onions and celery, milk and bread) and sauerkraut. Scrapple is a loaf made from pork and beef bits mixed with corn meal, sliced and deep fried. Comfort food for the Pennsylvania German-American hoi polloi, my people.
When I used to frequent the Labor Day weekend festivities in Auburn, the car corral was my favorite place.
That Plymouth wagon is a delight! A 61 Plymouth is unavoidably wacky, so it might as well be pink.
Speaking of Auburn’s car corral, I saw the exact same Suzuki Join at this year’s festival.
Great post. Great show. I want that IH, and I know exactly how that jag owner feels. I got a hood pimple that way once myself. In my case, it was a hose clamp with the tightner position on the top side of the hose. #%€*!!! I knew my hood clearance was tight, but I had no idea it was that tight.
It was a couple of days before I could even stand to look at my car.
Don’t feel bad; I once put a sizeable dent in the fender of my beloved and pristine BMW 330 with a soup can. “I’ll just transfer this shopping bag from one hand to the other while standing next to the car and OH ******@!” I feel your pain.
I used the fender of my Voyager to break up a bag of ice and dented said fender which is when I felt silly.
That 61 Plymouth is proof of Alien intervention
It’s good to see that the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t afraid of a big helping of greens with their fare 🙂
A nice little collection there. My feeling is that everything seems to be priced at about double what a realistic transaction price might be. However, everything old seems to be pricey these days.
Regarding the plastic panoramic sunroof on the ’54 Ford Crestine, how did these hold up over time? Did they stay clear or did they get brittle and cloudy as old (and newer too I suppose) plastics used to do when exposed to the elements?
Dutch as a corruption of Deutsch also explains Old West stories about a “Lost Dutchman” mine; I hardly think many Netherlanders, living near or below sea level, would have interest in or expertise at mining.
BTW, some American Anabaptists call white outsiders “Englisch” regardless of origin, so tit for tat.
Ever heard of the chemical company DSM ? It’s on number 28 of the world’s largest chemical producers (year 2014). Originally it stood for Dutch State Mines. Yessiree Bob.
Great pics! That ’61 Special wagon speaks to me, our ’62 was the same color. And being a ’61, it would have the 215 V8, as it was the only engine available that year. The V6 didn’t appear until ’62. And how did you know I am craving meatloaf? 🙂
I’d forgotten how much the front end of the 1956 Mercury resembled the Plymouth and Packard of the same vintage.
Nice Aristocrat though I think the bottom color is a little off, it shouldn’t be so green that one would call it green, it was called silver by IH. You missed the coolest feature of the Aristorcrat that roof rack has bars that curve over and down the back to mount on each side of the tail gate. Not exactly sure what the intention was whether it was as a hand rail or to tie on additional cargo. While the winch is an era proper Warn and you could order Scouts with winches that front bumper is custom made. The face is a Scout II bumper that has been cut in half.
The Aristocrat is one of a number of “Doll-up Scouts” they produced on the baby Scouts, others include the SR-2, Comanche and Red Carpet Special but the Aristocrat was the most Dolled-up of the bunch.
Great pictures until that photo of the dinner table. I’m from Pennsylvania and have eaten a bit of Pennsylvania Dutch food, and I couldn’t tell one dish from another….just a collection of brown dishes.
Glad to hear that there really are more than 1 or 2 lovers of the 61 Plymouths. I like them, too, but have to admit my favorite 61 car is the full sized Ford. IMHO, the 61 Dodge is way uglier than the Plymouth.
rudiger:
The car pictured is a Canadian market Mercury Monarch, it’s a sort of amalgam of U.S. Ford and Mercury parts, the U.S. market Mercurys had a somewhat different front end treatment.
While I like the Plymouth wagon, I’d want to take the Buick wagon home.
You are right about PA Dutch food, Howard. I didn’t actually have it often as a kid, since my Mom’s parents came from Slovenia. Eating it in PA happens in the spirit of the moment. I have always found the side dishes awfully homogenous — and coming in varying shades of white to brown. Green is not a color often seen. Scrapple frightened me in childhood. But now it’s a local thing to eat “when in Rome”. Love the potato filling, though.
The car is actually a Monarch Custom Phaeton (Phaeton was the marketing term for 4-door hardtop), not a Mercury Monarch. Monarch was the make and these cars were sold through Ford dealers in Canada.
Scrapple is tough to find around here, but its Ohio cousin, Goetta, is on lots of menus around Cincinnati…substitute steel cut oats for cornmeal and you have Goetta. I even make my own…it’s a pain in the neck hand-grinding the meat, but it sure is good.
Dates on lenses- some carried over for several years. Don’t forget the various Ramblers that would turn the lights over during one year or another.
Yup and sometimes they would use them on other models down the road. For example I was surprised to find that the license plate light lens on my 73 Pinto had the code for a 69 Cougar and of course the tail lights were shared with the Maverick.
Between the cars, the venue and the food, I’m trying very hard to make up some excuse to hit this next year. Of course nice old cars are not exactly hard to find here in SoCal, but the meatloaf is generally pretty bad and scrapple either REALLY bad (frozen and super fatty) or nonexistent.
That Chevrolet, by the way, is identical to the one my grandpa bought new and finally traded in exactly twenty years later on a six-window Chevy pickup. I liked the truck okay (and eventually got to drive it a bit), but riding around in the bed, while fun for a while, was not as pleasant as that cushy 1933-vintage back seat. Especially in, say, November …
As a fellow Pennsylvania Deutscher, I’m envying that meal.
You betcha! For me, with my mom’s half of the family being Pa Dutch, that’s my soul food! Of course I had to go to the restaurant’s website to drool over the menu. OMG! It’s fabulous! If my travels brought me to the area I would definitely stop by.
Oh yeah, the cars were really cool too 😀
That Plymouth roofline is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The perfect flourish, as if the sedans weren’t wacky enough. Count me in on the steering wheel too, as well as the atomic horn buttons, dashtop mirror, taillights, and so on…
Hershey is great fun, one never knows what oddities will show up along with the perennial favorites. But scrapple for the uninitiated is definitely an acquired taste……
Exactly. Scrapple brings back unpleasant childhood memories to this day, personally. Now a nice pickled egg in beet juice? That’s the good stuff.
Some of us acquire the taste upon first bite … I grew up eating fried mush on a regular basis, and scrapple turned out to be the major improvement I’d always hoped for. Oddly enough, it was in a soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania Dutch-themed restaurant outside of Nashville, maybe a week before it closed for good. The owners were so clueless they dressed the waitresses in trad Netherlands garb, but that scrapple was good.
I love the early ’60s bizzarro styling on that Belvedere wagon. But the compact V8 Buick wagon really appeals to me as well. Do you recall the price on that Buick? The paint looks a bit faded. Could it possibly be ‘affordable’?
Happy Motoring, Mark
The owner wasn’t around, and there was nothing written on the car. There were a few like that. Makes you wonder if they really wanted to sell them. Or if they even know much about an individual car. It seems like a goodly number of the cars were being flipped, so you wouldn’t get the cool family stories along with the purchase.
Scrapple texture at Deitsche Eck is like a heavy piece of black toast. It has the heft of food with fat in it, but nothing about it suggests what parts of animals it is made from. As with any soul food, it’s a matter of not wasting what is edible.
Scrapple is disgusting. An amalgam of every possible remnant of the animal all mixed together and deep fried in lard. First time I tried it almost puked at the table. Nasty nasty food. The texture killed it for me.
Please, John: “Scrapple disgusts me” is what you’re saying. When your life depends on eating every possible part of an animal, you find a way, and if you work at it right you can come up with something you and your tribe really like. My German Mennonite relatives are quite a few generations removed from Pennsylvania, and we never had scrapple, but tripe and souse and head cheese sure set me up to like it. For them as don’t, well, I’ll just have your share, and thanks!
That ’61 Plymouth is another kind of controversial. I found it just too bizarre at the time, but loved the ’62s. The greater portion of the car market very much disagreed. Too bad …
I have to come to the defense of one of my favorite foods here! As a native Philadelphian, I grew up eating scrapple, and have had good and bad examples of it. When it’s not cooked enough, it can be sort of gelatinous, which is the texture that many non-natives find gross. Scrapple when cooked more thoroughly (sliced thin) is similar to sausage patties.
That said, I don’t know of many scrapple aficionados who didn’t grow up eating the stuff. Kind of like the people who used to buy AMC Matadors — it’s an acquired taste, and other folks simply don’t understand.
My father grew up near Philly and hated the stuff. I got introduced to it at fairly young age and grew to like it. My sister, however, couldn’t stand it.
Until our last relatives left the area, I always “imported” several pounds of the stuff in a big cooler every visit. My wife and kids like it too.
Here’s a photocollage of a 1954 Mercury Sun Valley, the grown-up brother of the 1954 Ford Crestline Skyliner. This was at a small car show near me, obviously run by Chevy fans since a fair-to middling grade light-custom 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, a car as common as dirt, won “Best of Show” over this.
Scrapple, as they say every part of the pig but the onke. Wasn’t there any shoo fly pie?
Something like shoo fly pie is what I think of when someone mentions Pennsylvania Dutch food. But then again, who doesn’t like pie?
I’ve started thinking – I have an old Isuzu pickup, that I brought to Virginia Beach several years ago, to occasionally haul appliances and other stuff for my rental property. But it’s no longer running. And a ’72 Mercedes 250 coupe in my only garage-space that I’m thinking about selling. Something like that ’61 Buick wagon might be a cool retro replacement for both, with my garage-space freed up to preserve it between rental deliveries.
I went with a friend down to Kitty Hawk this afternoon and stopped along the way at a used car dealer to look at a ’61 Corvair Lakewood 700 station wagon. It looked pretty much restored, but not perfect. They were asking $6900.
‘Flipper’ reminds me of a craigslist $2000 ’65 Valiant wagon in Hampton VA.,I checked out for a friend two years ago. That one had way too much rust peeking out from under the new burgundy Earl Scheib paint, so my friend passed. A couple days later, I saw one the same color for sale on craigslist in Virginia Beach for $3500. As I reviewed the photos, I realized it not only was the same color – it was the SAME CAR!
Happy Motoring, Mark
Hauling appliances you say? There is only one classic wagon to consider. ?