posted at the Cohort by stephenpellegrino1
It’s dangerous to generalize, but these three rather epitomize the three main types of front ends in the sixties to mid-seventies era: horizontal look, vertical stacked headlights, and loop bumpers, in this case along with hidden headlights. Did I miss another common facial type? As I said, it’s dangerous to generalize.
Back in the good old days when you knew the year and what it was two blocks away. Most vehicles look the same today and you need to be close enough to see the badge and nameplates.
On the contrary, I can’t say right off the top of my head what any of these are, except maybe the third (Chrysler product, I think?). But modern cars I can tell apart from the shape of the windows and headlights alone. It’s all a matter of what you were exposed to the most. All cars look quite similar in the context of their times.
Go back and look at a Life (or was it Look?) magazine two-fold picture of all the 1939 cars. With the exception of Graham Paige, they all looked the same back then.
I’m coming to the belief that the only time cars didn’t look alike was between ’55 and maybe ’75.
To be fair for each model year a lot of cars back then looked very similar, too. In the mid ’60s it was all boxes, either with horizontal or vertical quad headlights. The Ford (Fairlane, 500, I don’t even know) in the picture above could just as well be a Pontiac from afar and to an amateur eye. The only difference to today is that cars got facelifts more often.
What a great variety.
The only common type I might add is the Central Jewel Grille as popularized by Mercedes and the Continental Mark III/IV. And there was this early version.
Was thinking the same thing – you might call it neo classical. And the Buick would just qualify.
Another way to look at the Fairlane is the “fence” grille, vertical headlight variety.
What about the 1st-gen Valiant and the ’63-’64 big Chryslers? Would they also fall under this category?
Paul,
Thank you for selecting my picture. However, the name is
“stephenpellegrino1”.
Fixed.
And that is a terrific picture.
In the same vein, skinflints are always called out by different and uglier grilles than the high line versions of the same model. For example, Ford let everyone know you bought a mere 1972 Torino, not a Gran Torino.
On the other hand plain Torinos were so worthless that they’ve become unicorns in the meantime, and today it seems that there are ten gaping Gran Torinos for every plain Torino.
A possible further division would be between ‘butressed’ and ‘non-butressed’ fronts, examples on the same bodyshell would be the 1966 (with) and 1968 (without) Buick Riviera.
Beaks, you forgot beaks like the 1970 Thunderbird.
Too much overlap. All four major automakers played around with vertical quad headlights. Don’t forget the changes brought about by impact bumpers. Remember when Chrysler went from loop bumpers across the board in 1971-1972 to more GM-type grilles with bumpers below for 1973? Plus GM played around with loop bumpers too.
I wasn’t suggesting that these three facial types were exclusive to each of the Big Three. They all used them; mix and match. That’s my point.
I think there’s a chronological element to this. Horizontal headlights were big in the early 60s as a carryover from the last decade. Vertical headlights came into style starting with the 1963 Pontiacs then loop bumpers came along with the trend of disappearing headlights.
DROOL!
Me wanty ’69 Caprice!
I always thought that the Plymouth shown above with hidden headlights looked so much like the big sunglasses that were popular in the 70’s.
Stacked round headlamps were popular with GM on the mid ’60’s, Pontiac, Cadillac, then stacked rectangular headlamps came in vogue. Loop bumpers on the smaller Pontiacs. I can’t think of a Chyrsler car with stacked headlamps.
The ’65-’68 Plymouth Fury had stacked round lights, and some of the late ’70s Furys had stacked rectangles, but those are the only ones I can think of.
Great subject, Paul. I Googled “sixties-seventies car grilles” trying to scoop up as many images as I quickly could; not as helpful as I hoped but there’s some mighty interesting stuff on display, anyway — try it.
Yesterday I was looking at Frank Lloyd Wright images. This c. ’72 LTD or Galaxie, curiously compressed, appears in the lower corner of a shot of Unity Temple in Chicago. The mini-vertical grille centered on the wall-to-wall front end might be a sub-group ?
Don’t forget the single-headlamp “starter kit” look. IE Falcon, Valiant, Nova…
Looking at that Fairlane,I expect to see Joe Friday and Bill Gannon jump in and cruise over to a crime scene. Cops in my town used those Fairlanes, and it was easy to know if one was behind you at night because of the stacked headlight arrangement.
How about diagonal headlights? I’m thinking ’61-’62 Chrysler.
I’m thinking maybe a category for experimental quads. There were several early 4 light designs that ended up being dead ends. Several versions of the canted lights between ’58 & ’62.
The wide spacing like the ’59 Olds. The early ’60s Dodges, and of course the freestanding pods on the ’60-’63 Imperial.
Also on the 58-60 Lincoln Continental.
From left to right: 1973 Buick LeSabre or Centurion, 1966 Ford Fairlane, 1972 Plymouth Grand Fury (you can tell by the hidden headlights).
These days it’s hard to pinpoint the exact year of the car in recent years because of the model cycles…
That explains why the middle one looks so narrow–it is a narrower (mid-size) car.
I always thought the ’73 Buick was the best looking of the ’71-’76 generation and the ’72 Fury with hidden headlights the best of the ’69-’73 “Fuselage Look” Plymouth. Prefer a ’66 Comet over a Fairlane, but thought the ’67 Fairlane was more handsome than that year’s Comet.
I’m also a big fan of the ’69 Impala/Caprice with hidden headlights.
I like the ’71-’76 Olds even better to be honest. The early years had a pointed tip at the center of the hood and kidney grille, and then another pointed tip between each set of headlights. Along with the massive rest of the body and the Di-Noc treatment the wagon in particular looks like a rolling cathedral. The sheer size is staggering. And in ’76 the Olds was one of the first adopters of the boxy front with quad rectangular headlights and a thin layer of indicator underneath which would dominate the look of Detroit cars for over a decade to come.
Even the AMC Ambassador worked the “over-under” headlights very well.
Not bad for a Rambler!
When my dad traded our ’67 Ambassador on a new Gremlin X my mom wistfully lamented ‘They’ll never make another car with vertical headlights’. They did, of course, but they were arguably never as attractive as the ones of the ’60s.
Then there was the ‘overhanging brow’ look, exemplified here by the ’59 Olds. Designers wanted to compress the lights and grille into a single narrow strip, but found they had to do something with the metal above them.
Pontiac was so dominant in the styling department in the 60s that once the big Pontiacs adopted the vertical quad-round headlights for 1963 (and the Tempest/LeMans/GTO in 1965), multiple car divisions did the same in the ensuing years — Ford, Mercury Comet, Cadillac, Plymouth, AMC — with the trend ending by 1969 (at least until the silly-looking stacked retangular units came into vogue around 1976).
I liked the look at the time, still do, and also don’t mind hidden headlights. Loop bumpers never did it for me though.
The interesting use of the Mercedes type grille on the Studebakers is a result of a short-lived contract between Studebaker-Packard and Mercedes Benz at which time Studebaker-Packard was the sole importer of Mercedes automobiles into The United States. The S-P designers decided to identify their cars as Mercedes-related (UGH or YUK!).
I am not sure I agree with you on this. The distribution agreement between Studebaker and Mercedes was signed in 1957 when Studebaker was under a management arrangement with Curtis-Wright. But the 1956 Golden Hawk (which came out in the fall of 1955) used the keystone-shaped standup grille. This car was styled in probably 1954 either during or shortly after the Packard merger, some time before Curtis-Wright (or Mercedes) came on the scene. Were the designers trying to ape Mercedes? Good question. But this grille design came about well before the tieup with M-B.