1957 Superior-Cadillac Landaulet Side Servicing Coach
1957 Superior-Cadillac Beau Monde Combination
1957 Superior-Cadillac Beau Monde Rear Servicing Coach
1957 Superior-Cadillac Beau Monde Ambulance
Vintage Ads: 1957 Superior-Cadillac Illustrations – Hearses and Ambulances Artistically Rendered (And Exaggerated)
– Posted on April 17, 2021
As long as schoolbus! Good looking cars though.
Some days I’d rather have a long car than a minivan or SUV or big pickup.
It seems to me that what’s most exaggerated is length and what’s most minimized is the size of driver’s head-and-shoulders, but others here have a better eye for such things.
Are those “second-row doors” really rear-hinged? Seems like a lot of extra work, but there must be some convenience gained…
Yes the rear doors are rear-hinged. Not only that, there is no B-pillar. The doors latch into the rocker rail and the roof. This is to allow removal of a casket from the side. The casket is sitting on a table that slides forward while turning to the side out the large door opening.
MadHungarian: I had no idea—very instructive! (Also somewhat Hungarian.)
There are videos of the side loading hearse…
https://youtu.be/zz6QqtMErNc?t=6
https://youtu.be/04z_MMvt1tc?t=187
Superior and other coach builders also offered “suicide doors” on end loading coaches that retained the B pillar and partition.
I can’t figure out the constant tendency to show miniature drivers. Most people don’t want to feel like a small child lost in the vast interstellar space of a huge car. Most people, especially the executives who were reading these ads, want to feel respected and significant. Larger-than-life drivers would seem more productive for an advertiser.
Buick had an ad featuring Shaq driving a Verano.
I don’t wish to gainsay you but I only remember the Lacrosse one for Shaq.
However, Peyton Manning (6’5″) in a Verano is a unique enough image.
And of course, VW told us that if you’re shorter than Wilt Chamberlain you’d fit in a Beetle.
In the 70s I worked with a guy who was 6’ 8” and he drove a beetle.
Nine out of ten Pygmies prefer Cadillacs!
Back when professional cars had style. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a new hearse.
Here’s the hearse of the day. Prince Philip designed his own.
This is car porn from the “Golden Era of Car Porn” or they are illustrations from a Professional Car fetish magazine. It’s tempting to dig in and expand on that but not here, not now.
It also occurred to me that these might be illustrations, bright and cheerful, not from a Superior brochure but from a somewhat offbeat book for children about Mr. Nick Romancer, the undertaker of the town, who drives that really cool Candy Lime 57 Cadillac Hearse that he customized himself. The story would help to alleviate children’s anxiety and fears of death and dying. The illustrations would show that death is not the messy, frightening horror they may have already encountered or the dark, mysterious force shaping and determining our fate, but is,instead, just another part of our modern, clean, efficient and orderly world. An important part, certainly, that is addressed elegantly and stylishly by the industrial know-how of our leading businessmen and greatest thinkers and educators. And it is through the leadership of energetic community focused individuals like Mr. Nick Romancer and his friends with their colorful Superior Beau Mondes and Landaulets, that we see this enlightened attitude at work to dispel gloom and doom and help make the world the brighter, happier place we always knew that it should be. And that includes a ride in that cool hearse if you eat all of your broccoli.
Might possibly include a forward by President Eisenhower or SAC General Curtis LeMay
A good friend of my father and a neighbor in Manhattan was a funeral director. In early summer of 1956 he showed me the new ’57 Cadillacs. It was his brochure from hearse manufacturer. Yes, the line up was of hearses and ambulances, but one knew how the new front of the car would appear.
Wouldn’t the ideal hearse be a vehicle which offered both side and rear “servicing” ?
Judging by photos of the ’57 Cadillac Superior models as found online, the chief sin of the illustrator was to radically lower the soaring roofline of the series.
My car-porn magazine would be called “Big Ones”; the inaugural issue cover would be a photo of the front of a ’57 Cadillac, shot low and close . . .
Very nice illustrations .
My old 1980 Cadillac Fleetwood based S & S Victoria hearse was a basic & cheap model yet it has the three way manual table .
-Nate
You too can have a Millennium edition hearse!!!
That is a rather cheerful color palette for funeral coach usage.
In my hometown, the funeral directors were closely tied to the various ‘language’ churches of the various Eastern European communities who came to work the mills in the late 19th / early 20th century, plus some old school Protestant churches and the older Irish Catholic church. The guy who ran the Irish Catholic home always ran mint green Superiors like the first picture above, and I suspect he wasn’t the only funeral director to do so.
Interesting. I grew up in NY and lived one block from Ferncliff cemetery, notable for who was buried there. Among the famous dead are Malcolm X, Judy Garland and the odd Mafiosi here and there. As a little kid I got to see some awesome funeral processions consisting of seeming miles of gleaming Cadillac hearses, flower cars, limousines and sedans all of them black with an odd silver one thrown in. Those were quite a show bringing all local traffic to a standstill as they passed through the center of town on the way to Ferncliff. The idea of anything but black seemed inconceivable. New York at that time was pretty conservative and I don’t think anyone felt the need to change certain customs for the sake of change.
Still another
Love the “Dagmars” =8-) .
-Nate