Hard to believe, but we have never had a 1959 Ford CC. Well, it’s going to have to wait for another day, but in the meanwhile, we can feast our eyes on this Galaxie ready to pull into this intersection in Now I’ve never been a particular fan of these, despite certain nice details like the classic Ford C-pillar and of course the rocket-launchers on the rear fenders. And I admit they were in some respects more reflective of where the styling trends was headed in the 60s then either the ’59 GM and Chrysler cars, despite their pretensions of being futuristic. Plenty of folks love ’em, including in Norway. More power to them; preferably FE than Y-block power.
I’ve always liked the ’59 Ford. My brother had a nice one, purchased secondhand, in the early Sixties. His was a six with three speed manual. During that time, my family rented a spare room to a young man from up in Berryville, Virginia. He also had a ’59 with the six and manual, black with wide whitewalls and polished to the nth degree. Nice, attractive cars.
Fins in Finland. That’s wonderful.
I love seeing old American iron in Europe. I’m not certain of the year, but I remember spotting a 60 or 61 Impala in Genoa, Italy wedged into a parking place between two diminutive Italian cars. Maneuvering that thing down some of those streets must have been interesting.
I’ve been wanting to find a ’59 Ford for a CC, but these are elusive. What stinks is I remember seeing one all over Bend, Oregon, when I was there nearly five years ago. It was white with a three-speed.
This particular car is quite refreshing. It’s a terrific color combination and it has been kept in an original looking condition. I remember Ford winning an award from some entity for the design of this car.
Ford claimed that it had won the “Gold Medal” for “exceptional” automotive styling at the 1959 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium.
Whether this was a genuine award, or one that Ford and the fair’s promoters cooked up to hype the fair (and the 1959 Ford) to Americans, is the real question.
Yep, it all comes back now.
The Brussels Expo was in 1958 and the Ford that won the styling award was the 1958 model – not the ’59 (though I think the ’59 is much more attractive).
The 1959 model won the award. They were advertised as the “world’s most beautifully proportioned cars,” which was an indirect swipe at the batwing Chevrolet.
The 1958 model was the one “proved around the world” after Ford sent several on a trip around the globe.
Ironic that the ’58 was “proved around the world” when they never sold the ’57-’58s in Australia.
Theres a very tidy yellow/white wagon around locally I cant seem to catch it parked though.
Looks nice ! .
The Skyliners too ~ don’t forget them .
-Nate
I always liked them too. I think of them as the perfect 50s to 60s transition car.
I still like these a lot, despite (or maybe because of) their portly lines.
That better not have been a recent photo, I’d hate to think that Finland has leaves on the trees and we’re still digging out of snow here..
I hate them! My first car was a 1959 Fairlane, worse car I ever had. It even had that same puke green and white color scheme. Payed $100 for it, lasted about a year. Went all out and bought a $400 1963 Chevy. A much better car. To this day anything with that terrible Y-block earns my disrespect.
What was it about the car that made it so bad?
Slow, vacuum powered accessories that don’t work when your engine is worn out. Parts failing, spark plugs actually came unscrewed! I can’t think of one thing that I liked about that car.
Well, I’d have to say that had more to do with its being a worn out $100 car than with its being a 1959 Ford.
Of course today, nobody would put up with so many slow vacuum-powered accessories. Even vacuum-powered HVAC duct doors got too slow in the 1970s with the detuned engines, so that vacuum reservoirs became necessary.
I can understand a car having that reaction on a person. I was that way with the 62 Bel Air that my college roommate owned. And that one could not be blamed on condition, as it was quite nice for its age. I just hated everything about the miserable thing.
Um… that fact that you only spent $100.00 for the car doesn’t tell you that maybe, just MAYBE, it may have some issues??? Really??? Pretty sad.
Compared to a $400 Chevy it was still a POS. This was also 1969 or abouts.
“Compared to a $400 Chevy it was still a POS”
Well jeez, you had to pay four times as much for the Chevrolet.
I bet you’d think a new $25K Mustang V-6 would be a “POS” when compared to a new $100K Mercedes too!
But what do I know? The cheapest car I ever bought cost $600.
I bought a 1963 Peugeot in or about 1982, it was kind of a POS as well. I was very disappointed in it and sold it to a neighbor kid for $300. 😉
Kinda like this. Mine had been blue at one point and wasn’t this nice but it did run..until the fuel line plugged up and had to be blown out.
Depends on when that $600 was paid. Cheapest car I ever bought was $800 but that was in 2002, so adjusting for inflation of car prices (pretty sure they’ve risen faster than general inflation/CPI) that might not be too far off a $100 car in ’69!
I acquired a few cars for free….the last being an MB W126 with 230kmiles. I sold it to a wrecker for $500. It ran decently and drove, but all fluids were leaking to some extent–coolant and oil from the headgasket or head, ATF from everywhere, power steering fluid from the pump, brake fluid from the master cylinder. I hate the idea of junking a car that runs, but that thing was a rolling oil spill.
I may be wrong but the only vacuum items I can remember on Fords of that era were the wipers. They never worked all that good on even new cars.
One of my good friends in high school had a Custom 300 6 three speed. It was 6 years old when he got it. We really flogged that poor thing. It stood up to his younger brother too. When the body finally gave up they put the engine in their farm truck and it lived on.
Beautiful car. Needs wide whitewalls. I have a ’64 Fairlane 4 door, stock except for chrome smoothies and lots of patina. It is certainly not my favorite car, I acquired it in an even trade for an ’88 Suzuki Samurai with a bad engine. I grabbed it, because it was my chance to get a pre emissions American car cheap. After a couple thousand $$$ in repairs (parts only) it became a safe and reliable daily driver. I drive it often when the weather permits. I have thought about putting 1000 hp under the hood, and turning it into a real sleeper, but it would cost a fortune to have the body reinforced enough to handle that much power.
My grandpa had a plain white 4-door 1959 Ford for his work car. He called it “Stinky,” a very appropriate name, since he was in the seafood business, and he’d park it out on the dock. Meanwhile, grandma had a brand-new 1967 Bonneville wagon! Nice to see a 59 Ford in such good shape, enjoying its golden years in Finland.
Reminds me of the Lake Wobegon story about the seafood guy who would prepare lutefisk in the trunk of his car (coincidentally also a Ford, him being Lutheran) since the smell killed all his other business if he did it in the shop and his wife wouldn’t allow it in the house.
An ad I don’t recall seeing before. Is the green car in lower left same shade as the one in today’s pic?
I got a particular chuckle out of “Hula Hoop-Wide Doors.”
That’s a keeper.
Seems a shame for a top-series car to have plain, basic, dog-dish hubcaps. But I’m glad to see one of these still on the road!
Nice. One of my top 5 favorite cars, the lineup from Ford for ’59. Something about the styling just does something for me. Make mine a Del Rio Ranch Wagon two door.
There are precious few of these remaining in Soviet Canuckistan. In an era of rust-buckets, the 1959 was famous for disintegrating long before the note was paid off.
> Soviet Canuckistan
Do you have that tied to a hotkey or do you take the time to type it out every single time? 😛
I would copy and paste the term every time for me. 😛
It is a result the extreme poverty and hardship we Canuckistanis feel, we must post of our Bolshevik ways, as a warning to our Southern Brothers.
” It is a result the extreme poverty and hardship we Canuckistanis feel, we must post of our Bolshevik ways, as a warning to our Southern Brothers.”
One of my old 1960’s school chums lives in Ganoque (! SP !) Island and feels the same way but she never wants to move back to the U.S.A., so maybe this is just hyperbole ? .
.
-Nate
There are dead bodies at my doorstep daily, it is so bad in Canuckistan. All because of socialist medicine.
Love these cars,never seen a 59 in that shade of green before
Even as a GM and MOPAR guy, I have always liked the 59 Fords. There were a number of these in my neighborhood as a kid. I always thought they were a perfect transition style, and probably looked less dated by 1963 than their 1959 competition.
A few days ago I saw one of these in a setting more “appropriate” to Finland: under a blanket of snow. That one was a 2 door with pale blue in place of the green on this one.
Until reading some of the comments here I had forgotten an uncle had 2 1959 Ranch Wagons: 1 was black and the other this car’s green….but all over. Somehow I don’t think I ever got a ride in these cars.
The 59 cleans up Ford’s design compared to the 58 but looks smaller even though the books say it’s bigger…not a good idea in the 50s/60s where looking ever bigger is better. My family had a 60 Country Sedan, but I think today I’d rather have a 59 Del Rio as well.
BTW, the Del Rio only cost $100 more than a cheap Ranch Wagon but the cheaper car outsold it nearly 6 to 1.
My uncle had a 59 Galaxie Fordor Sedan, light green bottom,white top. One of the things I like best about the 59 Fords is how many bodystyles they came in. Hardtop and soft top convertibles, two- and four-door sedans, two- and four-door hardtops, two- and four-door station wagons, pickup truck and sedan delivery all on the same wheelbase. If you throw in the four Galaxie models, iwth the “Thunderbird” roofline, that’s 14 models, not to mention trim variations. Where is that kind of variety today?
The 59 Ford is such an interesting design. Everyone agreed what a car should look like in 1957, then again by maybe 1963. But from 1959-61, nobody had any frigging idea and the ideas came out of Detroit at a furious pace.
When I was in jr. high school, I used to cut through some yards on my way to school, and came out right next to a driveway that had one of these parked in it. This was maybe 1973-74. A 65 Galaxie 500 got the garage, and the copper-ish brown 59 sat out quietly rusting in the driveway. I always harbored ideas of buying it and fixing it up (along with about a million other cars) but then one day it disappeared. The 65 was outside and a used 73 LTD had the garage.
What I find interesting about this era is that it marks the end of any of the Big Three trying to really “upset the apple cart.”
The Ford Motor Company gave up any thought of knocking GM out of the number-one slot. Even the Ford Division wasn’t as obsessed with outselling Chevrolet.
Chrysler Corporation, meanwhile, gave up trying to reclaim the number-two slot from the Ford Motor Company.
The Ford Motor Company settled for a comfortable and safe second-place ranking. Chrysler Corporation worked to regain market share after 1962, but even GM and Ford seemed to accept that Chrysler’s market share in 1961 and 1962 had been abnormally low. And there was no talk from Chrysler about knocking the Ford Motor Company back to third place.
Well, it was the sixties. It seems like everyone in the Big 3 knew that so long as they didn’t do anything terribly stupid, maintaining the status quo would be good enough to at least make it through the decade without any trouble. That’s certainly the way Chrysler’s Lynn Townsend thought after the 1962 Mopar downsizing debacle.
The same can’t be said of the seventies.
Speaking of Y-blocks, I learned a while ago about their strange exhaust arrangement. If I remember correctly, the passages were narrow and even went up for some reason. I tried to look into why Ford would have done this but had no luck. (Maybe to continue the flathead tradition? If Henry had been around, I would have suspected him…) Can anyone shed any light on any possible reason for this design? I remember how mediocre those engines were in late 50s/early 60s Fords. They just seemed DOA in 58s and 62s I experienced.
I’ve always liked the ’59–great details (the floating star grille, the afterburners and rocket pods, the shape of the trim, the thunderbird roof) and it’s amazing how much better it looks than the ’58 with which it shares the basic body shell. While overall for ’59 I still prefer some of the GM designs (Buick, Chevy, Cadillac) with their sheer excess, these Fords are quite nice in their own right.
Great color too! I don’t even mind the dog dish caps, even though a Galaxie would have had full covers.
I always liked the conservative-when compared to GM and Chrysles styling -of the `59 Fords.Somebody in Brooklyn had a two tone blue and white `59 Galaxie two door sedan with under the dash air conditioning.Nice car, but when I asked him if he was intrested in selling it back in the early 1980s, he just smiled and said he was saving it for his grandson when he got his license.If so,he really got a nice car. Hope its still around.
I knew a guy back in ’73-’74 who had a ’65 Galaxy 2 door hardtop with a modified 390FE engine. The whole town knew that car. Orange with Cragar SS wheels. He ran it at the local dragstrip (on street tires) and did impromptu burnouts all over town. He went through a lot of rear tires. About the only thing in town that could beat it was a ’69 Roadrunner 440 Six Pack.
I woke up today with no idea I’d contemplate being the next owner of a nice low-line ’59 that somehow avoided the rust:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ford-Other-2-door-1959-ford-custom-300-/281623306148?forcerrptr=true&hash=item41920e9fa4&item=281623306148&pt=US_Cars_Trucks
Do it.
This is an amazing car. Do it.
As an aside, I attended a classic car auction in the late ’90s. The very first car was an all black ’59 Ford with the same trim and drivetrain. It was immaculate and had 20,000 miles. I’ve been kicking myself periodically since then for not even bidding on it. After much work by the auctioneer, it sold for $1000.
At this price even I would pull the trigger right now .
-Nate
Thanks to all for your encouragement. I went far enough as to contact eBay seller…bidding is stalled at $5200; I asked if there was a BIN price–he did divulge that *reserve* price is $7200, which doesn’t sound unreasonable.
Tempting, tempting, tempting…
at $7K it had better come with all new : ball joints , suspension bushings , U-Joints , water pump , clutch , LT Radial tires and some other things that $5 says are rotted or worn out just like that picture of the rotted & leaky backlight grommet is ~
The front plate makes it appear this is yet another goofball curbstoner who’s looking to get rich off an old car that will need $3,000 in parts to make it a weekend driver….
Not to pi$$ on your parade but old klunkers like this are what I do : buy them , lavish way too much $ into mechanical repairs and general sorting out as I drive and enjoy them ., then I sell them at a dead loss because no one ever wants to pay for a fully sorted out old thing unless it’s got shiny new paint & chrome .
-Nate
It’s one of those personality oddities, that some details on cars bothered me right from the start. The general shape of this car is good in 1959 terms, but as a 9-year-old, the rocket pods looked ok from the side, but finishing them out with backup lights just didn’t work for me… it just seemed too big a buildup running along the car side to find it’s showcase in a little white light that only came on when you wanted to go in reverse. I always felt that going backwards was recidivist and not something to prop a car’s potency; not an activity to rule a stylistic bauble. Same with the turn signal pods on the front fender. I also got that squiggly feeling looking at the way the chrome return under the pod didn’t fit in the crease but was tacked on below it.
Just for chuckles, I messed around with this detail a little in the 3 photochops attached.
That blue 59 in that ebay listing looks like a twin to the 59 that my Dad owned until 1966 when he traded it in for a 65 Impala 4 door hardtop….I was brought home from the hospital in my Dad’s 59 Ford after I was born……The only difference from the ebay car is my Dad’s car did not have a white roof…..but it had the same 6 cylinder/3 speed manual powertrain……The car had over 150,000 miles on it when it was traded and the body was shot due to rust.
My second car was a 59 Ford convertible that I paid $150 and my 56 Ford for.