I’ve never seen a car look more like a vintage bumper car or kiddie ride at the amusement park. Yes, the Bantam deserves its own (proper) story here, but for now, maybe you can help make one up about this young couple out in a drive in this Bantam roadster in 1938. Their future kid probably drove a Chevy 409 to school.
The Bantam is obviously very used. 2nd hand, 3rd hand, 8th hand. Something like that. The car is at least 10 years old in this picture, maybe older. The girl thinks it’s cute, and it has all the power any normal well adjusted person could want. The boy is thinking of dropping a flatty Ford in it, but the draft, then college, will lay waste to his plans. He sold it for $25 and regrets it now. He married the babe when he returned from the war, but their kid didn’t get to drive a 409 Impala SS, he had to settle for a ’58 Rambler, straight 6. .
For some reason that Bantam reminds me of Pinky, a 1947 Ford convertible that hung out on campus at Grand View College in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1958 or 1959. Pinky’s ownership was dubious; I never quite knew whether it had changed hands so fast the title couldn’t keep up, or whether it was actually collectively owned. I do know that I was likely to see any of four or five different guys driving it. It had a bright Pepto-Bismol pink paint job and was in the same general condition as that Bantam.
Daisy and I should have kept the bicycle built for two…
I can’t think of any clever captions when I see a Bantam. All I can think of it the shaft job that they got with the Jeep.
+1. Hence the Jeep curse that destroys any subsequent owner of the Jeep brand. Willys, Kaiser, AMC, Chrysler…
“with this car, how am I gonna convince her we ran outa gas?”
Forgeddaboutit! This dork probably thinks that “maidenhood” is a reference to something Ayn Rand wrote.
Oh, and by the way, she ain’t that cute.
Ah the power of a flat four and a three speed! Feel the motivation urging you and your co-pilot ever onwards! And the cornering is effortless with the new Monroe shocks attached to the Bantam’s beam axle. Woo the ladies and and impress your friends in the car that made Donal Duck famous!
http://www.donaldduck.nl/duckipedia/artikel/68
” Please put the screen up Dear, I’m getting flies in my teeth”
Happy Labour Day folks.
Nice caption! The guy really looks like he was doing some strenuous activity! The girl looks like she let the guy does all the pedaling…
That chap looks akin to the guy busted selling “Devil weed” on the Dragnet 1968 TV show.
The gal was on a different episode a year earlier where via the diligent efforts of our brave detective duo a gal’s life one astray was returned to a path of normalcy resulting eventually in divorce, life in a rural trailer park with half a dozen vile spawn cavorting under her extended lard-laden belly.
Wow! I’m speechless. A dozen kids?
“I passed up a ’32 Ford for this?”
With the lack of chrome the grille looks like it belongs on a commercial vehicle