The 1959s were the last models of the most famous and infamous cars of Chrysler’s history. In the mid-’50s Chrysler was on a roll after having fallen to third place among the Big Three from their traditional No. 2 spot (and never again would overtake Ford). But after replacing the ultra-conservative K. T. Keller with Tex Colbert and a getting new styling direction under Virgil Exner (who was largely responsible for the 1947 Studebaker), Chrysler hit the showrooms with their Forward Look” 1955 models. Chrysler’s 1955-56 models were their most competitive in years, but as they say, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Chrysler had new cars in the pipeline, cars that were going to leapfrog everyone else’s in the industry. They’d have new engines (including the legendary 392 Hemi), new transmissions (the equally legendary Torqueflite), new suspensions (front torsion bars) and new bodies. These cars would be new from road to roof–and oh yes, Chrysler would accomplish all this in two years instead of the usual three.
To introduce their 1957 lineup, Plymouth declared that “Suddenly it’s 1960!” In the fall of 1956, these very cars had instigated sheer panic at General Motors, which responded with a crash program to scrap their planned 1958 cars–after only one year–in favor of wholly-new ’59s. The Mopars out-handled, out-braked, out-accelerated and generally outclassed everything else on the road…except in one very important way.
The ’57 were Chrysler’s first (but not last) unmitigated quality disasters. Parts didn’t fit well. Parts fell off. There were dust and water leaks, plus rust on-demand. After a stellar 1957, sales for 1958 dove off a cliff.
Enter the ’59 Plymouth you see here. By now, Chrysler had largely (but not completely) eliminated the worst quality issues: The ’59s were marginally tighter and the best-put together of the series. No one could know at the time that they would be the last really competitive Plymouths until the 1965 C-bodies.
The Plymouth Fury had been a minor sensation since its 1956 debut. In 1959, Plymouth’s new flagship was the Sport Fury, as the “regular” Fury (seen here) moved down a notch along with the Belvedere and the Savoy and the Plaza was eliminated. For traditionalists, this would mark the last year for the old flathead six. Other engine choices for 1959 included the wide-block 318 and the 361 (called the Golden Commando 395, for its torque output.) Buyers could choose from a three-speed manual transmission, the two-speed Powerflite automatic and the three-speed Torqueflite automatic. But the reputation of the ’57s had stuck to them, and ’59 was again not a very good sales year.
In the fall of 1979, when I was in college, one of my Sunday activities was cruising through car lots when the dealerships were closed. And there it was: A white, ’59 Fury four-door sedan, green interior, with those clear plastic seat covers so popular with old people in the ’50s, and 60,000 on the odo. I went back the next week and drove the car. When I read the glove box sticker and found that this car had been delivered to its original owner on the very day I was born, well, I just had to have it.
How bad did I want it? Bad enough to straight-trade a six-cylinder, three-speed ’68 Mustang. Yes, it was one of the dumbest car trades ever, financially speaking. My mother was furious when I brought it home. She always called it Moby Dick. But I loved that Fury at least as much as any car I’ve ever owned. But after six months the 20-year-old transmission was hinting at a rebuild, and I spotted a ’71 Scamp that became my next new love. I was fickle in those days.
I can attest that the ’59s still had some flaws. Mine was plagued by water leaks around the windshield, and brake lights that would stick and keep glowing. And oh yes, a leak at the gas tank filler pipe. And the very beginning of some body rust (something it had managed to hold off for a long time). Still, it drove like cars that were 10 years newer. It felt much more modern than my friend’s ’62 Chevy. It cornered flat, braked pretty well (for drums), and the 318 certainly was adequate. The car was content to drive at 70 mph all day long. Although it was a higher-maintenance car than its ’71 Scamp replacement, I wish I had kept it longer.
(photos by Paul Niedermeyer)
What can you actually see out of that dash-mounted mirror?
Not much. That was a major complaint with Chrysler Corporation cars during this era. It also supposedly vibrated at high speed.
The last one I drove that mirror vibrated at all speeds! Of course, that particular car was in pretty sad shape.
You could see very little through the mirror on the dash, and it was worse because the side mirror was mounted waaaaay out on the front fender and you looked at it through the windshield. The field of vision was about the size of a quarter.
My problem was solved when a carwash ripped it off of the fender. I didn’t have any luck finding a replacement (it was remote controlled!) and replaced it with a period universal model that mounted to the doorframe with setscrews. It didn’t look that great but was much more functional.
These were easy cars to see out of…you could see all four corners from the driver’s seat. Try that on yer Accord…. But yes, I didn’t care much for the dash-mounted mirrors on these fin cars. The only one that was bad enough to need replacement was the one on my 1957 New Yorker. I got a used day/night mirror from a mid-60′s Mopar car at a wrecking yard, a new stob from the dealer, and pasted it high on the windshield. It worked much better.
thats the best part .Its like looking back at a gun sight. you can see fine and the bulit side mirrors cover the blind spots.
Very nice job indeed, JPCavanaugh. 1959 being the year of my earthly appearance, the cars of that vintage have always been a source of fascination for me. There were many interesting vehicles built that year but the Chrysler products, while sadly marred by QC issues, were arguably the most interesting to come from the Big 3 because of the performance aspect.
Rambler and Studebaker had some very compelling offerings, but GM and Ford were not really competing for the performance market that year, instead building soft’n'cushy boulevard cruisers.
Oddly enough, twice now I’ve almost bought ’59 Furys. I really wanted them, but they both just needed way too much work for me. Maybe there’ll be a charmed third time.
A great article on a car that isn’t even common at car shows. I always liked the styling of the 1957-58 Mopars – particularly the DeSotos and Chryslers – but the corporation really turned what could have been a huge triumph into a long-term disaster by rushing these cars to market.
At car shows, two owners of Mopars from this era told me interesting stories about the development and construction of these cars.
The owner of a 1958 DeSoto Fireflight two-door hardtop said that an older gentleman told him that, during 1956, the rush was on to get these cars ready for a fall 1956 introduction date. Every major tool shop in Detroit was busy with major work for the other auto manufacturers that were adhering to a more “normal” new model cycle, while the all-new 1957 models from Chrysler required more work than normal. So Chrysler used quite a few “back alley” enterprises to get work done – with the expected results.
The owner of a 1958 Dodge Coronet sedan spoke with a Dodge dealer who toured the Dodge plant when these cars were being built. The dealer watched a worker who was supposed to be spraying undercoat on cars. The worker waved his spray wand back and forth under the car, without anything coming out of the machine. Baffled, he asked the worker what he was doing.
The worker replied that the UAW contract called for him to make 12 “sweeps” with his machine to apply undercoating. Unfortunately, management failed to ensure that his machine was always filled with undercoat material. So, he merely made 12 sweeps with the machine – as required by the contract – and if the car wasn’t properly undercoated because management failed to ensure that he had enough material, it wasn’t his problem! Management didn’t really care – there was no 36,000-mile or 100,000-mile warranties for mechanical problems, let alone rust, at this time.
Reading the old “Owners’ Reports” in Popular Mechanics on these cars is quite fascinating. My favorite is the response from the owner of the 1957 Dodge who said that he regularly found huge blocks of ice in his trunk during the winter months, because water would leak into the trunk, and then freeze.
It’s revealing that Chrysler’s market share hit almost 20 percent in 1957, but had sagged to about 14 percent in 1959. That’s a tremendous drop in only two years! Chrysler sales plunged by 50 percent in 1958 (which was much worse than the total market in what was a major recession year).
GM got hit in 1957, but came back strong over the next five years, as it benefited from Chrysler’s 1958-62 tailspin, as did AMC. Ford built its share of clunkers in 1957, too, but it only dropped as much as the market did in 1958, and Ford Division came back strongly in 1959 with the much better built, and more conservative 1959 models that featured the “Thunderbird” roofline on Galaxie models.
Someone needs to buy that puppy and name it ‘Christine’!
Wow, I’m an author now! Thanks for some editing, Paul, as I dashed the piece off at 7 am before coming in to work.
After I wrote it, I had a couple of other thoughts. Other than the Imperial, this was the last body-on-frame passenger car made by Chrysler. Starting with the 1960 models, Chrysler went Unibody, so this 59 Plymouth was the end of an era. When I owned mine, it sounded kind of like an old ship when you drove it – you could feel it flex a bit and could hear it creak and groan a little. Howard my car mentor drove it and told me that it was lots tighter than the 57 that he had owned briefly when new.
Second, I did not mention that the car in the photos is the much rarer 4 door hardtop with frameless windows and without the full center pillar. My car had been the much more common 4 door sedan with the window frames and rear quarter windows behind the back doors. Two completely different looks. These hardtops also sported a unique windshield. Look at the side view in the first photo and note the compound curve where it curves up into the roof as well as around the sides. My sedan had a more conventional and slightly smaller windshield.
OKay, three thoughts. In addition to this being the last year for the old flathead 6 and body-on-frame, this was the last year (until the 90s) when the sailing ship appeared on a Plymouth. The emblem in the center of the grille combined the funky Plymouth spearhead with a sailing ship. I think this emblem was also on the wheel cover on the fake spare (often called the toilet seat) that was on the trunk of my car but not on this one. That was a fairly common option on these in 59. That trunk-mounted spare held water all the time. Fortunately, it was stainless steel, so it didn’t matter that evaporation was the only drain.
I always wondered how much of a world of difference there was between the Body & Frame ’59 Mopars versus the Uni-body 1960s. I also always wondered why such a leap in technology was wrapped in “1960 is here, told ya so” styling (although all full sized cars were in a weird 1950s zeitgeist style that yeah without much pointing to the rather quick shift to subtle designs 1961 would bring from GM and Ford).
Did Chrysler think another massive shift in style was too much? But they couldn’t wait to address the quality issues the new Uni-Body would solve? It just seems weird even now that they plastered the Forward Look on such new cars, just to shorn them of Forward look details by 1962, like peeling a Banana (notably in the 1961 Plymouth and 1962 Chrysler’s case). Although, the 1960 Chrysler/DeSotos are my favorite looking “Forward Looks” after the original 1957 Chrysler/DeSotos.
Some aspire to greatness other have it thrust upon them,
That compound-curved windshield was only on convertibles in 1957 and 1958 (I believe). In 1959 it could be found on two-door and four-door hardtops as well.
I should like to point out that evaporation was not the only drain for water from the trunk-mounted spare. If you opened the trunk lid in the rain the water poured across the front of the lid into the trunk. At least it did on my 1958 Imperial – I imagine that it worked the same way on the 59 Plymouth, which inherited the smoothly curved decklid along with the optional tire-shape in place of the more squared-off decklids of the 57-58 Plymouths.
1959 was the end of other eras for Plymouth:
-Final year before it got a “kid brother” with the Valiant (who was briefly a separate division)
-final year of the L-head 6 (soldered one more year in Dodge trucks)
-final year where Plymouth didn’t get internal competition. Things changed when Dodge stepped his toes in the door with the Dart. Even if Dodge was still upscale, it was a beginning of some changes. Design of the 1960 Plymouth looked too much like the 1957 and the akward front end didn’t helped while the Dart was attractive.
I spotted on the Forward look forum, a proposed idea of stacked headlights for some design studies for the 1959 DeSoto. Just imagine how the 1959 and/or 1960 Plymouth would had look. It could had outsmarted Pontiac by 3 or 4 years.
Wow thats a clean old car I remember seeing a lot of these not hardtops back in the 70s they must have been popular new out here A friend had one similar it was a Plymouth Savoy flathead 6 it went ok but on gravel roads all the dust stayed in the car his claim was in the rain it turned top mud and ran out thru the rust holes sounds like it could have been typical. I havent seen any of this model for ages even at shows except for the shipping costs that one would be well worth buying and it seems cheap compared to what old US iron brings here.
As Geeber mentions above, while Chrysler’s sales did take a hit from the quality problems in ’57 (as did Buick, for similar reasons), those issues alone didn’t account for the magnitude of the sales drop in 1958, which had a lot to do with the recession. The ‘Eisenhower recession’ started around mid-1957, just before the ’58 models went on sale, and continued through 1958. Nearly everybody except AMC took a hit. Plymouth’s sales drop in ’58 was stiff — over 40% — but it wasn’t any worse, in percentage terms, than Ford’s.
As tends to happen in recessions, sales of mid-priced cars tended to be hit worse than the low or high ends, although I do think that the quality problems tended to compound the problem for Buick and Chrysler. If middle-class buyers are already wary about buying a new car, and are thinking of either waiting another year or buying something cheaper, a bad reputation for build quality or reliability is certainly not a great enticement. But it’s hard to separate that from the overall economic malaise, at least in ’58.
Where you see a bigger difference is in ’59. Both Ford and Chevy posted huge gains for 1959, but Plymouth, Dodge, and Chrysler sales rose only incrementally, and DeSoto actually declined further, by about 4,000 units. (The confusing price overlap between the three had a lot to do with that.) How much of that was due to quality problems and mixed feelings about the styling, and how much was attributable to Chrysler having facelifted versions of two-year-old designs against all-new rivals, is harder to say. Probably all of the above.
I aways did love these even before I ever read Christine.
There’s probably a reason why it was the Plymouth that was chosen to model for “Christine.” That car always looked, to me as to Stephen King, as dark, heavy and brooding – even when it was contemporary. I’m a child of the late 1950s also; and one neighbor “church lady” with kids about our ages sometimes did carpool duties. With her 1957 Fury.
Everything about that car was somehow sinister. The frameless window-vent glass; the dash-mounted rearview mirror; the cloth interior (I’m going from memory here) seemed so like an old-folks’ living room. And the little details kids notice – like how other Furies had four headlights, but that one had two, with turn-signals where the high-beam bulbs later went.
The car somehow creeped me out. It obviously creeped King out also…don’t get me wrong; I don’t dislike that car. But it was somehow different, and more so even than most MoPar products tended to be.
I’ve said the same thing. Just watch the movie, there is something sinister about that car.
Although in the book you can tell the book was written before he chose the car as there are many, many discrepencies in the descriptions of the car and an actual ’58 Plymouth Fury.
Great book and movie anyway, both favorites of mine. I think I’ll watch the movie right now. It’s been a while.
There were other old Mopars with more sinister front ends than Christine. The leader would have to be the 1959 Dodge, followed by the 1961 Plymouth. In fact, kind of a cool sequel to Christine would if she would go up against a possessed 1959 Dodge.
Of course, the Dodge didn’t have the name, and while the ’61 Fury had the name, it didn’t have the fins. The 1958 Plymouth Fury, while not being the most sinister in appearance, was close enough in overall malevolence to qualify as the most evil of all Mopars (particularly with the absolutely abysmal quality of the real cars when they were new).
Thank you jp for this great write up of an overlooked model. I too was born in 59′ and have always considered that years styling for American cars to be about the most interesting.
My Dad had what I thought was a 58 Suburban station wagon in Fire engine red. Even as a small child I considered it to be of poor quality. We had ditched it for less than $100. before 1965. My Dad switched to a used 62 Rambler American and It was a world better.
But even as a small Child I considered the Plymouth to be vastly inferior to GM & Fords.
The Back Doors didn’t even open after the car was 3 years old for some reason. I remember feeling sympathy for the rather poor man who was thrilled to pick it up for $100, to transport his family of 6. My Dad gave him back most of his money when he realized the back doors wouldn’t open. I think I remember my Dad still feeling guilty for having unloaded it on someone so already down on his luck.
I remember it was the low level series with White & black patterned woven vinyl seats.
It had the ugliest little speedometer IIRC.
Thanks again for stepping up to the plate. I really enjoyed your writing & I look forward to reading more from you. Well done!
To my other comments above I should add that my father-in-law replaced his wrecked 1950 Ford station in 1962 or so with a 1959 Savoy 2-door sedan in white on green. This rig was a six-cylinder three-speed car that didn’t even have a factory heater but some kind of a Motorola or Auto-lite substitute. I remember buying a junkyard radio and installing it for him as kind of a birthday present. I think he decided it was a little too spartan, because his next car was a 1962 top-line Chevy station wagon.
Wow, it’s late 50′s week? Neat. Gladly, I’m younger than these cars, but they were plentiful on the roads when I was a young child. I remember them rather well, but the Mopars didn’t hold up well in the rustbelt for many of the reasons already outlined. I liked the original versions of this body shell, but the 59 amped it up in a good way. Nice to see one again.
I always thought these were cool cars. My favorites are the ’57 and 58 coupes with their cleaner lines. Love to have one, but wow, they have gotten waaaay too expensive for me. Like ’57 Bel air convertible expensive!
Infamous? Nah… the ’59 Plymouth is still a pleasing design. The ’61 models, however… those might fit the mold of infamy a bit better!
I always thought these needed several more inches of wheelbase. They stand on their tippy toes!
Despite their flaws, I always liked the late Fifties Mopar offerings. Back about 1980 or ’81, one of the teachers at my high school brought a similar vintage DeSoto (a two-tone blue and white four-door) into our auto shop. The body was in decent shape, but it looked like it had been sitting for a while. When we popped the hood, there were dead leaves on the flathead six. Obviously it had been sitting for quite a while. In the right hands, one of these old beasts could be rebuilt into something way better than it was when it left the factory.