This striking 1956 DeSoto ad certainly catches the eye, but in the atomic age, billowing yellow-orange clouds in the sky had rather ominous implications. Maybe it was foreshadowing: Late ’50s DeSotos were big, attractive, powerful cars, but things were about to take an apocalyptic turn for Chrysler Corporation’s mid-price brand.
I don’t imagine that DeSoto ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn intended the illustration in this 1956 ad to look like a nuclear explosion — probably, someone just figured it would give dramatic contrast to the featured two-tone DeSoto Fireflite convertible. However, if the couple in the ad had been facing towards the blast, I’d have figured they were watching a nuclear test.
This was the age of the Bomb, Duck and Cover, and above-ground nuclear testing. The video above shows the 1954 Castle Bravo test, conducted on the Bikini Atoll, which ended up being a terrifying 15 megatons, much higher than the expected yield.
Things weren’t quite that apocalyptic for DeSoto in 1956 — not yet — but they weren’t going too well either.
Back then, DeSoto was Chrysler’s middle-class brand. It was bigger and fancier than Dodge, sharing the longer 126-inch wheelbase of the senior Chrysler line, with flashy Forward Look styling. There were two trim series, Firedome and plusher Fireflite.
A 1956 DeSoto was a lot of car in every sense: It was 217.9 inches long, a couple inches longer than a Buick Super or Cadillac Series 62. A well-equipped Fireflite convertible weighed about 4,500 lb.
Since 1955, DeSoto had been exclusively V-8 powered. All 1956 models except the limited-production Adventurer hardtop had a 330-cid Hemi V-8 with either 230 or 255 horsepower. (The Adventurer engine was bored out a bit, to 341 cid, with dual four-barrel carburetors and a lot of high-performance features, giving 320 hp.)
Nearly all 1956 DeSotos – 98.6 percent — had the two-speed Chrysler PowerFlite automatic, which was standard on Fireflite models. As the ad copy said, PowerFlite now had “modern push-button drive selector,” first of the famous Chrysler pushbutton transmission controls.
DeSoto in 1956 still lacked some of the features fans have come to expect from classic Chrysler models: no torsion bars or TorqueFlite (those would come for 1957), and no Unibody construction (introduced for 1960). The 1956 DeSoto did have new 12-inch Center-Plane drum brakes, and about three-fourths had Chrysler full-time power steering.
A 1956 DeSoto didn’t handle all that well even by ’50s standards, and there was a lot of nosedive when you hit the brakes, but it did have plenty of go. Motor Trend‘s Fireflite Sportsman two-door hardtop got from 0 to 60 in 10.9 seconds, almost 2 seconds quicker than in 1955, and could top 110 mph. In Hot Rod, Racer Brown tried a Fireflite convertible with the optional 3.73 axle (the M/T car had the standard 3.54) and got 0 to 60 in an impressive 9.8 seconds.
I wanted to find pictures of a two-tone Sunny Yellow over White Fireflite convertible like the one in the ad, but DeSoto convertibles were rare in 1956: There were only 646 in the Firedome series and 1,485 Fireflite convertibles.
The white and gold DeSoto pictured here is a Pacesetter, a limited-edition package announced mid-year to commemorate the selection of a DeSoto Fireflite convertible to pace the 1956 Indianapolis 500. The Pacesetter was announced in January and listed for $71 more than a regular convertible. The decals were delivered in the trunk.
Here’s the actual pace car on race day, May 30, 1956.
Chrysler was trying to keep DeSoto in the public eye. In addition to the Indy 500 pace car and the Adventurer (announced in February 1956 as a mid-year model), DeSoto sponsored the popular You Bet Your Life quiz show, hosted by Groucho Marx. The episode linked above aired six days before the Indy 500, guest-starring author Ray Bradbury.
None of this did much good. DeSoto ended up building 109,422 cars for the 1956 model year, but its market share was poor, hovering in the same shaky realm as Studebaker-Packard (which everybody was expecting to go under at any moment). In fact, if you counted Chrysler and Imperial together (which most people still did, even though Imperial was now a separate marque), DeSoto was the weakest Chrysler division in 1956 new car registrations. It was no threat to mid-price stalwarts like Buick or Oldsmobile, and Dodge outsold it 2 to 1.
It doesn’t seem fair: The 1956 DeSoto was an attractive, well-trimmed car, and it wasn’t outrageously priced. However, DeSoto had never really had a strong brand image, and image counted for a lot in that price class. Everybody knew what a Buick was, but was DeSoto supposed to be above or below Dodge? (Even Chrysler had gone back and forth on that one.)
There was also a lot of price overlap between the DeSoto lines and the Chrysler Windsor. The Windsor wasn’t as well-equipped as a DeSoto Fireflite (you paid extra for PowerFlite automatic), but the Chrysler name had more prestige, and the Windsor was often cheaper. For instance, you could have a Windsor convertible with PowerFlite for about $19 less than a DeSoto Fireflite convertible.
DeSoto sales pepped up a little for 1957, but then the bomb dropped with the 1957–1958 recession. Sales fell off by more than half for 1958, dipped even lower for 1959, and dropped by half again for 1960. DeSoto was pronounced dead on November 18, 1960, early in the 1961 model year.
The ominous clouds of the 1956 DeSoto ad also remind me of another 1956 disaster: the infamous Howard Hughes-produced epic The Conqueror, with John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The Conqueror had been filmed on location in St. George, Utah in 1954, downwind of nuclear tests in Nevada; Hughes also had 60 tons of sand from the area shipped to the RKO lot for interior scenes. More than 40 percent of the cast and crew, not including extras, later developed cancer, including Wayne, costar Susan Hayward, and director Dick Powell. (You can learn more about that saga in the 2024 documentary The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout.)
The sad history of DeSoto hasn’t done the value of these Fireflite Pacesetter convertibles any harm: The Bring a Trailer car pictured here sold in April 2024 for $100,000.
Related Reading
Car Show Classic: 1955 DeSoto Fireflite Sportsman – Did The Forward Look Ever Look So Good? (by Aaron65)
Curbside Classic: 1956 DeSoto Fireflite – Yeah, It’s Got A Hemi (by MarcKyle1964)
Curbside Classic: 1956 DeSoto Firedome Sedan – DeLovely (by Laurence Jones)
1957 DeSoto Fireflite Sportsman Hardtop – Like The One I Found In A Desolate Location 40 Years Ago (by Stephen Pellegrino)
Audio Goes On The Road – The Story Of Columbia, Chrysler, and the Highway HiFi (by J P Cavanaugh, at his blog)
A “Push Button Automatic Drive” was revolutionary, the total lack of a ‘PARK’ position is never mentioned. Chrysler lead the field in offering automatic transmissions without a PARK position.
By contrast, I think (But am happy to be corrected), that the only automatic Chevrolet without a PARK position was the otherwise outstanding Chevrolet Corvair.
Great article and you can’t go past the Chrysler Forward Look…..
In the ’50s, the Chrysler parking brake acted on the driveshaft, not the wheels, so a parking pawl was redundant. When they switched to a rear-wheel parking brake in the ’60s, they added a Park position to TorqueFlite. (I don’t think PowerFlite ever got one because they were phasing it out by then, but I could be wrong.)
The pawl was MORE necessary on Chrysler products. The parking brake on the driveshaft didn’t work as well as the usual rear-wheel parking brakes. My dad always had to chock the wheels on his Fluid Drive Dodges and Powerflite Plymouths.
Glad to see how the automotive record player worked. As a kid I thought those players, and in-car reel to reel tape players, were the coolest thing. Later, as an adult, I couldn’t understand how those players worked without skipping, jumping, scratching the record, etc. Our small town had the full assortment of car dealers, except for Chrysler brands. Seems like one dealership was a DeSoto-Plymouth dealership, and then later another dealership was Chrysler-Plymouth, don’t remember there ever being a Dodge dealership.
I wonder if DeSoto’s popularity as a taxi dented its reputation as an aspirational make. There don’t seem to have been many Buick or Chrysler taxis, but if you see footage from a movie set Manhattan in the early Fifties, toothy DeSoto grilles seem to be everywhere. I think they lost out on that market as cheaper Fords, Chevys, and Plymouths got larger, and DeSoto stopped making long-wheelbase cars, but that’s just an impression.
I would wager that Chrysler was focusing on Desoto fleets to keep their production numbers up.
The decals must be reproductions, as that’s definitely not 1950s typography. The attached image shows what the lettering should actually look like. The reproductions are awful — there’s an example of a car wearing them on the Barrett-Jackson site and it looks incredibly inauthentic — but most people seem to be “font-blind” and probably wouldn’t notice.
Somebody who understands typography and inauthentic reproductions! I like your phrase “font-blind.” The two strips that are set in Eurostile Bold could not have been produced in 1956, as Eurostile was not released until the early 1960s. Or it could theoretically be Microgramma, introduced in 1952. In any case the production methods give it away. Things that are super easy to do with computers today were not quite so easy in 1956.
“The American Cancer Society reports that about 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women will get cancer in their lifetime.”
So was it really the nuclear sand?
It can’t be proven, but it certainly didn’t help to be exposed to that radiation.
These are all beautiful cars, but that ’56 Chrysler Windsor Convertible is the one I’d like to have, which proves Aaron’s point in a roundabout way.
I liked that one as well.
A couple of item- There was a book out in the 60s, The Hidden Persuaders I think that discussed subliminal messaging in ads. The atom bomb was New!! Powerful! Manly! American! It could be a subtle reminder. However the yellow/orange sky treatment was around since the 1920s in the more lurid magazine covers.
A little OT- What puzzles me is that both DeSoto and Edsel were stopped about two months into the model year. Did this have something to do with dealer franchising agreements? It seems odd that the companies would throw in the towel like this so soon in the model year, as all the sunk costs for the new cars were done.
Chrysler’s epic year of 1928, when Plymouth and DeSoto were launched and the Dodge Brothers Company was bought, created a model that couldn’t be sustained in the long term. Dodge’s success came at the expense of DeSoto and, ultimately, Plymouth. Chrysler didn’t have the resources to differentiate its brands in their example of GM’s “Sloan ladder.”
What year did they have the Hernando de Soto’s head as hood ornaments??? I think for a few years they even lit up. Always thought that was a neat touch.
Also I wish gold would make a comeback as a color. And I dont mean that ugly 90s/00’s color that looked like dirt(GM pewter)
I wouldn’t have thought of a nuclear test when first glancing at that ad, but now that you mention it… it’s hard to unsee. And through 1950s eyes, I bet that was even more pronounced.
But it seems that several illustrators in that period used yellow skies. Stan Galli (an illustrator who designed a number of travel ads) seemed particularly fond of yellow skies, and he also illustrated this 1960 GM ad below. Seems like the yellow-sky fad (if it can be called that) went away shortly thereafter. Definitely an odd choice, but it’s also a striking image. I wouldn’t mind having a poster of that DeSoto illustration in my home.
I wouldn’t have either, and frankly, certainly no one else did at the time. It was just a phase of illustration rendering technique. It would have been the kiss of death to show an obvious nuclear blast in a car ad at the time. The worst possible imagery to get folks in the mood to splash out on an expensive convertible.
Orange skies are common in dusty places like Oklahoma. At that time orange skies were universal in polluted Los Angeles. It wasn’t necessarily a nuclear thing.
Those images of the rear bumper make me wonder about what appear to be shield-shaped openings on the ends. At first, I thought they might have been exhaust ports but other images show the actual exhause extensions.
Maybe they’re not openings, at all, but just inserts or appliques?
I looked at the ’56 brochures and there is no mention of them but they are clearly visible there and look open so I’m assuming they are exhaust outlets. The car above has aftermarket exhaust with tips that I have not seen on a Mopar of that vintage.
Just painted on an indentation I believe.
The pictured car has aftermarket exhausts, like Dave says, but I think Randerson is right. Here’s the rear bumper from a different 1956 Fireflite.
Design wise, It gives a look like there was a missing piece of trim there. Not a good look
It seems like the shape is supposed to be akin to the Desoto shield. Not sure if Chrysler was still using that badge in 1956, though.
I think DeSoto was always the weakest link among the Chrysler brands. There just was never enough to differentiate it from the comparable Dodges and Chryslers. From the early 30s (when they flipped DeSoto ahead of Dodge in the price ladder) you could save some money with a Dodge that was almost as nice or spend just a hair more for a Chrysler. Chrysler tried to act like the multi-division GM, but with a centralized structure like Ford.
I think I remember a 1957 Chrysler ad with an orange sky, but I KNOW that Roulette Records made a splash with Count Basie’s 1957 album.
Were Desotos actually sold in Canada? I am a bit too young to have seen them. I became car aware about 1970 and the last Desoto was a decade before this. Cars usually didn’t last more than five or six years, which is probably why I have never seen one.
A quick trip to the Toronto Star archives finds this ad from Halnan Motors, on Lakeshore Blvd in Long Branch (Toronto). So yes we had them.
I could be way off base given my parents weren’t even born yet in this time but wasn’t duck and cover/fear of nuclear annihilation more of a post-Cuban Missile Crisis phenomenon? I’ve long been under the impression that during the 1950s the splitting of the atom was still considered something to be optimistic of for the possibilities for the future of mankind. Obviously it entered everybody’s minds as “the bomb” but it also demonstrated the achievement, so maybe that’s exactly what this ad represented IF in fact that’s what it represented.
I’m sure it had no bearing on this ad, but Chrysler Corp were a major industrial contractor for the Manhattan project, and would go on to build the nuclear warhead capable Redstone Missiles and rockets for Americas space program that would lead to the Apollo missions.
Chrysler must have been an industrial powerhouse back then.
“Safe and Solid Under the Style”. Does that mean it’s Safe, (for a convertible)… Or is the “styling” safe?
Either way, it IS ‘delightful’ and even ‘Delovely’.