Tom Klockau’s post about old dealerships reminded me of one of the odder pieces of automobilia that I used to collect-dealer nameplates!
When I lived in Florida as a teen and twenty-something in the 1990’s, I would frequent the auto dealerships and junk yards in my town, and check out all the trade-ins and junked cars that were brought down from other states. Sometimes if I was lucky I would score a nice set of license plates (I have a nice collection of those), but more often than not I would find these little dealer emblems still stuck on the trunk. In the case of the dealers, I knew that they would be plucking them off and replacing them with their own, so I wasn’t too concerned about “acquiring” them. And for those of you worrying about me trespassing, my best friend’s dad was the used car manager at the Ford dealer, and he knew that I was always looking for trinkets like this!
I have a number more of these in a box somewhere. These in the picture I had glued to the back of the door of my old stereo cabinet. Some have sadly fallen off over the years. The cabinet and I just parted ways when I left Tawas, but I kept the door, for obvious reasons!
So, how many of these can you still find???
Bought a car from Potamkin in Atlanta, They still have dealerships from NY to Miami
Classic (upper right) is alive and well in Mentor, Ohio. From their original Chevrolet store that opened in the late 1970’s they have added BMW, Mini, Lexus, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Mazda, Toyota, Cadillac and probably some more I haven’t listed.
I want to know where that Body Glove dealership (lower right) is/was! 😉
All kidding aside from my comment. I always disliked those dealer advertising plates that were attached to the cars with little rivets. I gladly like the dealer plate frames that you can take off if you don’t like them than those awful things that were semi permanent. And if you wanted to take them off they left nice holes. The later ones were stick on ones. ]
And CCClassic! I used to have a 15 minute timeframe to edit my post. I don’;t have that anymore. This is the reason for the addendum to my original message! 🙂
I acquired the shelf that that door was attached to when I was twelve, and it was with me up until this summer, from Michigan to Florida and back to Michigan…There were other stickers on it but I managed to remove some of them!
Coady Oldsmobile Toyota GMC became a Toyota dealership, and then when the dealership moved to a newer, bigger facility, the old Coady dealership became a Nissan dealership.
Glassman (red G about 3/4 of the way down on the right side) is still around near Telegraph and 12 Mile in Southfield, only they sell Hyundais, Kias, and Subarus instead of Oldsmobiles now (you can see the Olds rocket in the middle of the G). Not long ago, there were three GM dealerships clustered around Tel-12 land – Glassman, Art Moran Pontiac, and Tamaroff Buick. Glassman stopped selling GM when Olds went away, and Tamaroff lost the Buick franchise to Moran (Tamaroff now sells Hondas and Nissans), so Moran is left selling Buicks and GMCs.
Howard Cooper was a VW-Audi-Porsche-Honda store for a long time. Don’t know what happened. the franchises are still there but under new names.
BTW, it’s interesting how many of these nameplates share the same design (dealer name on top, franchise in a blunt-ended oval in the middle, city on the bottom). Obviously one supplier of these things had a large part of the market.
I always hated them too, and I’m glad Detroit-area dealers these days content themselves with license plate frames.
“Howard Cooper was a VW-Audi-Porsche-Honda store for a long time. Don’t know what happened. the franchises are still there but under new names.”
The dealership was sold to Germain out of Ohio in early 12. Weird quote in the newspaper report on line:
“Cooper said he decided to sell when he and one of the manufacturers had a fundamental disagreement over market potential. Cooper, 83, said it was a good time for him to exit rather than be involved with legal battles over the next couple of years.”
The store is still there. I was sniffing around at a Jetta wagon a few months ago. Decided to wait until spring.
I stopped in there a few months ago to look at a Civic. Normally I don’t like the idea of buying from a mega dealer, but they were really nice in there!
Howard-Cooper was a long-time International tractor dealer (along with other lines of construction equipment) in Seattle. Interesting name coincidence – in the case of the Seattle dealership it was a partnership of Mr. Howard and Mr. Cooper.
That Potamkin badge could have come from almost anywhere on the east coast, Vic Potamkin built an empire. When he died in 1995 the NY Times did a nice story about him.
His son Robert, who runs the Philadelphia operations, said yesterday that the family controlled 54 dealerships in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida, representing virtually every American model and many imports, and, with a vast leasing operation, accounting for $1.2 billion in sales last year. As Mr. Potamkin had once proclaimed, “Not bad for a fish seller from Philadelphia.”
So instead of building a Potemkin village, Vic built a Potamkin empire?
Crown was, and still is, one of the larger dealership groups in Tampa Bay.
Vann Gannaway Chevrolet is still in Eustis.
Napleton now owns the Dodge franchise in Kissimmee.
… as someone said above, the ability to edit a post in its first 15 minutes is now gone.
Not only that, but I keep having to re-enter my user name and email every time.
Here’s one for the group. This one came on an ’85 Chevy Van that I bought for parts a year or so ago. It had Iowa plates, and a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker (with rust-free body to match). Never have been able to determine where ‘Bow Lake Motors’ is/was… does anyone know?
Porter Chevrolet used to have a catchy radio jingle back in the ’70’s. “At Porter they’re such grrrrrrrreat, greaaaaaaaat guuuuuuuys!” You don’t want me to sing it. They’re still there, but now they’re “Home of the Trunk Monkey” whatever THAT means. I drooled over many a Chevy on their new car lot before I got my license. I drooled more realistically over cars on their used lot after I got my license. Ended up with an ’84 Subaru GL sedan from Matt Slap down Cleveland Avenue…”Auto Row”, as it’s still known locally. There used to be a drive-in theater behind it. http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/10473
I live in northern Michigan, and still see the Sadler and Cliff Anschuetz dealer badges in traffic from time to time. The GM dealership in Sault Ste. Marie went through a a couple of name changes in the last few years, from Sadler to Sadler-Rodenroth and then to Rodenroth Motors. It’s no longer full-line (no Cadillac). Cliff Anschuetz is still around in Alpena as a Chevy dealership.
Anschuetz still has the Caddy franchise as far as I know. I used to live in Tawas and it wasn’t all that uncommon to see a Cadillac still with one of these on them. It was either that, or Labadie (which is where I bought my Olds) or McDonald.
FWIW, there are a lot of Anschuetz’s in Iosco County!
I know Franklin Pontiac-Buick-GMC well since I used to live in Jasper, AL. One of the teachers at my high school was “Mrs. Franklin”. She drove a new Reatta then, only because it wouldn’t sell at her husband’s dealership.
My father bought a new red 1994 Trans Am there. He told them to not, under any circumstances, apply that dealer emblem to the car. After Pontiac bit the big one, the dealership hung in there on the main bypass (Hwy 78) about 1/4 mile from Carl Cannon Chevy-Olds. I can’t remember which dealership sold Cadillacs but anyway, Cannon bought out Franklin in 2007 which is kind of sad.
The old dealership was home to some surplus-crap outlet place the last time I rolled through there — I imagine that business venture was short-lived.
I plucked that Franklin emblem off of a green 1991 Firebird!
Edit, I take that back…it was the Bobby Lang emblem I took off the Firebird! The Franklin emblem came off a Buick Regal…
I believe Disch in Moosup closed awhile back. Moosup is kind of the middle of nowhere for CT. I do still see Disch stickers on cars driving around. A lot of the small town dealers merged with bigger dealers here in the last decade. It looks like Disch may be part of Gates/ Premier Chevy know with a dealership a little further North.
Bob Hastings was still in operation until very recently in Penfield, NY. After Olds and Pontiac went defunct, they sold Buick and GMC. They were bought out by a large “automotive group” that has dealerships encompassing just about every brand (foreign and domestic).
It’s really a shame that small businesses are disappearing so rapidly.
Mr. Hastings was apparently great to work for.
I’m pretty sure Farnsworth Chevy is still alive and well about 30 minutes from the old Hastings. Maybe there is hope after all.
Believe it or not, I can still recall every car I plucked each of these off of!
As I mentioned, I have a LOT more of these, but they are just in a box somewhere.
When I started noticing that I had a number of similar looking ones, with the fake woodgrain on them, that’s when I decided to start gluing them on that door!
Just wait till next year when I get my massive license plate collection out and displayed…many of them have dealer frames on them!
I got a real kick out of seeing that “Franklin” badge! I have some dealer badges also, but not too many of the plastic ones. If I can scrounge enough of them up, I’ll submit them.
Totally unrelated: One of the oldest used-car lots in Jasper was “Boyd Taylor” Used Cars. He passed away some time in the 90’s I think: lots of cars had his name on the back… Fast-foward to 2009 or so… I bought a ’73 VW Beetle for my g/f (now wife) from a pretty nice entrepreneurial-type of guy in Raleigh whose name just happened to be Boyd Taylor. He thought it was awesome that someone named a car lot after him & now I wish I had kept one of “his” dealer emblems to give the guy.
Porter Chevrolet is still in business here in Newark,Delaware
I live in California. This practice has been illegal since the 80’s or so. It is easy to spot out of state cars because they always have these.
The dealers always add their license plate frames. They come off as soon as I get to a screwdriver.
Why is it illegal? That’s interesting.
Never heard of any laws against it – dealers tend to get their way with state legislatures – but manufacturers must’ve cracked down on it at some point.
I know one small-town dealership (E.J. Barrette Ford in Swanton, VT) that used potmetal badges with a ’50s script and Ford crest well into the ’90s. I’m not sure if they finally ran out or if Dearborn cracked down on dealers drilling holes in cars, because they went to a decal soon after.
I know both potemkin and porter well growing up in the Philadelphia area. I too have a bunch of these dealer symbols as well as license plates and plate surrounds from cars the family and I owned as well as from project cars and parts cars. They are hanging in8n my garage with all of our old license plates.
Sudbay Motors in Gloucester, MA still uses the potmetal badges. There’s one on my friends’ Pontiac Vibe
My dad didn’t like promoting the selling dealer’s name on his new cars. So, he’d get me to remove them with a air dryer. ASAP. Fortunately, the local Chrysler dealer was pretty cheap on their branding and used the thin foil-type stickers. They were a breeze to remove. Removing the adhesive was more of a challenge.
These dealer tags are fun to collect but I, for one HATED them. Maybe that’s because I grew up in California, where you almost never saw these (one big exception was Ellis Brooks Chevrolet in San Francisco, which had a cool one and the Spitzer group in Northeast Ohio). Aside from the neat “Spitzer” script (I bought a Chevy Venture from them in late 1999), I removed these when stationed/living in places east of the Mississippi. Hawaii used stickers – small ones, i.e. “Cutter Ford, Aiea, Hawaii” or if you look carefully at old 1960s/early 70s Hawaii Five-O episodes, “Honolulu Ford” stickers on the rear window glass . . . .
For those stationed in Guam, the “Good Move Guam – Toyota” window sticker. Other than that, license frames . . . which you could leave off once you got your permanent plates in the West/Alaska/Hawaii . . .
Didn’t buy it from them, but I sport a Wood Chevrolet tag on the front of my 97 GMC. I like it because the name is spelled out in cuts of wood. And remember, “A Wood deal is a good deal!”