Every once in a while, a blind pig will find an acorn. Such was the case with these pictures.
My father, the youngster in the picture above, turned seventy in December. As part of the smear of presents he gets between his birthday and Christmas, his phenomenally younger sister gave him an illustrated and editorialized album full of Shafer family history. One of the comments she wrote positively jumped off the page: Why do Shafer men always have a car in the background of nearly any outside picture?
Cha-ching! She had already gathered and scanned pictures I could cabbage onto–how fortuitous! So let’s take a brief tour through time.
This is a 1944 version of my grandmother and my father. The Ford in the foreground, likely belonging to my grandparents, is definitely swoon-worthy but the car with the dinner plate sized headlights in the background is what truly has me curious. My dad said he doesn’t remember that far back. Go figure.
Incidentally, my grandmother is still alive and doing quite well at nearly ninety-two years of age. She bought herself a new weed eater this past summer. Last fall, she climbed a ladder to clean out the gutters on her garage; not wanting to throw caution to the wind, she conned her eighty-seven-year-old sister into holding the ladder for her. She is quite the formidable woman.
Despite the temptation, I am not writing an article about her. There is a lot of fodder to work with, but the last two times I wrote about anyone over seventy-five years of age, they died soon thereafter (here and here). Likely a coincidence, but I’m not going to jinx anyone by writing any more such articles.
Here is my dad with my grandparents again; my grandfather is also the man in the top picture. While I cannot readily identify either car in the background, I can identify about a half-dozen chickens and a dog. It is highly probable the car with the rear-mounted spare is a Ford. Undoubtedly, somebody reading this will know what the other one is.
My father told me he once helped my grandfather scrap out a 1939 Packard coupe. My grandfather had repeatedly tried to sell the car, badly needing money. When it finally did sell, he had to repossess it as the buyer could not pay. Still not selling, and still needing money, my grandfather took his ax to the Packard one Saturday morning and sold it for scrap.
This is my grandfather again with his 1940 or 1941 GMC. My father drove this pickup quite a bit as a teenager and said it would do all of forty-five miles per hour. As they lived about seven miles from the nearest paved road, the lack of license for both him and the pickup was never a problem.
From the date of this picture, my grandfather was the age I am today, if not a wee bit younger. He died quite unexpectedly in October 1966 at age 47. His younger brother Donald scoured the countryside looking for my father that evening, driving the 1963 Ford Galaxie that is currently parked out in the shed.
Lastly, here is my aunt in front of the 1953 Plymouth my grandparents owned. This is the car in which my father learned to drive. A metallic green color, he said it was about as basic as anything Plymouth made that year.
As stated earlier, my aunt is stupendously younger than my father as she is currently thirty-seven years old–don’t believe that “me in 1959” filename she created for this picture. Without her, these pictures would have languished for many more moons inside a photo album somewhere. I’m grateful she got them out to see the light of day.
Great photos, the D dynasty didn’t own cars during wartime years so it’s interesting to see someone else’s.
I have a suspicion that the Packard mentioned in your story is in fact the car in the chicken photo. Other one looks like a 1935-1936 Ford to me.
I am inclined to go along with your guesses on those cars.
Why do Shafer men always have a car in the background of nearly any outside picture?
I certainly can’t say the same thing about my ancestors, since none of them had cars, the sole known exception being my father’s father for a few years when he was a doctor in Silesia. But since he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) learn to drive his Chevrolet, he hired a driver to take him to see his patients. But no pictures.
I’m afraid I can’t ID those cars in the background either. I suspect someone else will, knowing this crowd.
My paternal grandparents were German / Lithuanian and didn’t survive WWII (direct and indirect causes). They were reasonably well off Europeans who never had cars.
My maternal grandparents were mid-western American city people and photos indicate they had cars routinely from the time of their marriage in 1928. They were solidly middle class, the growing trend of cars in American households was on. Two car status began for them in the mid 1950’s.
Just did some articles about my mom and these pictures look very familiar. There were a lot of old cars in my pictures as well. Same age group. Sometimes the car was just what you were proudest of. My parents grew up with horses and the cars epitomized modernity. Good find.
It really is amazing how many changes have occurred during your grandma’s 92 years when you think about all the events. Makes me think of how greatly different this world will be in 2082 when I am 92 and honestly, the thoughts scare me a bit. I do admire her spirit for cleaning out the gutters and even getting some help from her sister. My friends and I (we are in our 20s) and our parents are trying to figure out how to “deal with” our old family members since they will do things that worry us. However, we have come to the conclusion that they are their own person and as long as they are of sound mind we will probably not try to dissuade them. I hope that when I am 92 I will be able to do the things I want, be healthy, and not have a family of pricks trying to hold me down or stuffing me in a nursing home when I am too young.
I too am superstitious and call me silly, but I am merely human and do not want to mess with what I do not understand. For example, those tombstones in New Orleans that supposedly curse any non-Voodoo that touches them; better safe than sorry.
Thank you for this great article I really enjoyed it. Between the Great Depression of 1929 and World War 2 ending in 1945 I assume that for many people buying a new vehicle (or just buying any vehicle) was impossible and as a result I assume a lot of 1920s vehicles were still on the road by the 1940s. If you think about it, the Greatest and the Silent Generation had about 16 years of hardships, makes this current Recession seem like a cakewalk.
I recall reading that the Sears catalog had a section of Model T Ford parts as late as the early ’50s.
And they didn’t even have Twitter or Facebook to complain about things…
“These soup lines are sooooo fail OMG…..”
“Polio? WTF?”
The family albums from my grandparents contain very similar photographs. They lived in rural settings, and a vast majority of the pictures were taken outdoors (no flash required, and therefore less calculations on what the f-stop should be, remember that all camera settings were manual back then) where there was likely to be a car, truck, or tractor parked in the background. Plus I think that they were secretly proud to be car owners – it was a bigger deal back then esp. if you came from poor, agrarian roots.
I have pictures of my mom & her parents with the 1951 Allis-Chalmers WD tractor that my grandfather bought new. My brother and I learned to drive on that tractor in the 1980s. We finally sold it off at an equipment auction in 2003 and it still had the original battery cables and terminals (still had the orange paint on them) on it. The cars they owned, on the other hand, never stayed around longer than 10-12 years before being upgraded.
Great photos Jason. A thank you to your aunt for finding them.
I’ve found several old photos of my grandfather’s cars that I’ve been meaning to post. This will no doubt inspire me to post them soon.
Great pictures and a great piece to go with them. Your family’s pictures remind me a lot of the photos I used to sift through at my Grandma’s house when I was a kid. There were a few shots with cars, notably the family’s 35 Ford.
Thanks for sharing these with us.
“She had already gathered and scanned pictures I could cabbage onto–how fortuitous!”
Man, Jason, I haven’t heard that Midwestern expression, apparently derived from folk etymology (fr. MF cabas, cheating, theft; to take surreptitiously: steal, filch – Webster’s) in a long time. The first time I used it in graduate school at UCLA many decades ago, I received some very puzzled looks☺.
I have a lot of family albums with pictures of cars (and trucks and tractors!) in the background. I assume they were prized possessions that played a significant role in the mobility of what was then a much less urban country. I only wish there were even more examples in my collection.
Great article – thank you. One of the fun things about CC is sharing these old photos.
This is a phrase I didn’t hear until I was 25 but it has stuck with me like a bad habit ever since.
There are more pictures that are newer, but I haven’t realized tremendous success in converting slides to jpegs.
For slides, you really need to use a dedicated slide scanner to get the best results. I’ve scanned thousands of slides using a Nikon slide scanner. It’s amazing how much detail can be found on Kodachrome slides. And Photoshop can be used to bring back most faded slides to their original colours with minimal effort.
Dedicated slide scanners are not cheap, but can probably be rented.
Renting is a very good idea. My father has hundreds and hundreds of photos on slides and they have started to deteriorate in some cases. He has a slide scanner but the quality is atrocious.
Meh. Don’t bother. Just get one of these for the old family slides. It does a good enough job and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
http://www.amazon.com/Wolverine-Super-4-In-1-Digital-Converter/dp/B00GIDADP0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418691474&sr=8-1&keywords=wolverine+super+f2d
I used mine to scan the color slides in this post from earlier this year:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/imagining-the-stories-behind-old-photographs-of-cars-that-werent-that-old-yet/
Great post Jason! Really enjoyed it!
Wonderful pictures. I especially like the photo of Howard Hughes holding your dad. The Ford in the second picture looks like a 1940 Standard. I have no idea about the rest of the cars.
The mustache is very Howard Hughes, I thought the same thing.
I believe that the Ford is a 1939 Deluxe rather than a 40 Standard. It has the slightly awkward-looking headlight rims that would have been used to convert from the original headlights to sealed-beam units. 1940 was the first year for sealed-beam headlights, and 40 Fords had cool-looking headlight rims to facilitate the transition from the curve of the fender to the flat circle of the headlight edge.
You remind me that this topic is ripe for a writeup here. Many of our readers are probably unaware of Ford’s brief prewar practice of offering a Standard model that looked like a detrimmed version of last year’s Deluxe model. Could this be the ultimate upsell technique? “Sure we’ll sell you a cheap one, but you will have to take one that will make your neighbors think you bought it used.”
I think the vehicle with the “dinner plate headlights” is a Ford Model AA pickup truck or a Ford Model A car. Being that it looks like there is a tractor or some other farm implement next to that mystery vehicle, I would say it is a Model AA pickup as they were very popular on farms of the times and as a utility vehicle, it was not subjected to the fads and fancy of getting a new vehicle every few year so it could have survived on a farm for decades. The Grill, hood, lights and bumper look like a Ford product of the late 1920’s to early 1930’s.
On the mystery vehicle hidden behind the chickens and your father and grandparents looks like it is a Ford Model 51 pickup truck. You can see the running board and the back window looks too close to the front door even for a coupe. It makes sense as your Grandparents look like they owned a farm so a pickup truck is a must in that aspect
Great pictures. Our own family albums also show many pictures with cars used as props.
The oldest one I found with someone I recognize is shown below. My older brother is sitting on my uncle’s car, which I can’t identify. The picture was probably taken in 1946, so the car is likely about 20 years old. Which is probably why my older sister remembers this car as ‘Uncle Pierre’s jalopy’. I’m sure there were a lot of ‘jalopies’ in 1946, after WWII and the Great Depression.
That looks like a Cadillac crest on the radiator. It also appears that someone converted those huge old bulb headlights to sealed beams, which had become the industry standard in 1940 models.
I believe you are correct – thanks!
Looks like it’s a 1927-28 Cadillac. I don’t remember much about my Uncle Pierre, but I certainly did not think he was a Cadillac man. I suspect he bought a well-used example. One of my other uncles was a Packard man, switching to Cadillacs around 1960. Below is a picture of myself with uncle Paul’s 1967 Eldorado.
Interesting about the headlight retrofit. Makes sense, as I can imagine how much it would have cost to replace the original Cadillac parts in 1946, assuming they were even available.
Plus, those old bulb headlights with the reflectors were notoriously bad at throwing light in front of the car, especially as they got older. The reflectors in the headlight buckets would degrade over time. Sealed beam conversions were very popular, but they usually replaced the whole assembly. This looks like a very clever mount of the new lights into the old. I wonder if this is where Dodge got the idea for those pie-plate headlight surrounds on their trucks in the early 60s. 🙂
Neat pictures. Your aunt is only a few years older than me; I turned 34 last Monday.