Despite the lauded traction benefits of having a rear engine, this 1964 Corvair Monza managed to get good and stuck, while a 1957-66 Renault Dauphine, also rear-engine, is watching with smug satisfaction. Today, Corvairs have a strong following, while Dauphines are definitely not seen in the U.S. much anymore.
We lost my mom last fall and I’ve been very busy with my dad’s health problems and moving him from North Carolina to Texas. In going through some of my parents’ things, I unearthed several boxes of photos. My parents couldn’t have been less interested in cars beyond their utility, but they took many shots that happened to have cars in them. The goal was almost always to photograph something else, but happily they produced some good shots of period cars and/or street scenes like the one above.
My parents were kind of unusual in that they always used 35mm cameras and got most of their photos processed as slides, not prints. Somewhere in the 80’s my parents stopped doing slides and lost/disposed of their projector and viewers, and I don’t believe the slides have been looked at since then. When I found them, I got a slide scanner and went to work on them (one slide at a time!), because I’ve always been curious about the “lost” family photos there was no way to view. I regret not doing this before my mom passed, because she would have really enjoyed many of them. But at least my dad is still around to see them. Below are the photos they would be least interested in, but you might hopefully find them worthwhile.
I have no idea what the intention was in photographing a woman getting into a 1962 Mercury Comet in the rain, but the 1953 Cadillac Sixty Special caught in the shot is super cool! Being 12 years old, we can forgive its lack of hubcaps.
For a couple of years my mom was a teacher in Head Start, a federal preschool program for low-income families which was started in 1965 as part of LBJ’s Great Society. It is still around.
These adorable kids are mailing letters, with lots of older cars caught in the background, including a 1957 Ford Country Sedan wagon, a 1946-48 Plymouth Special DeLuxe (likely not original two-tone!), a 1958 Ford Thunderbird hardtop, and a 1956 Buick Century or Special wagon. I’m pretty sure at the end of the row on the left is a 1959 Cadillac Sixty Special.
They don’t make mailboxes like that anymore. In fact, they might not make mailboxes at all anymore!
More Head Start kids. Some interesting cars are caught in the frame, including a 1965 Ford Mustang coupe, a 1965 Buick LeSabre coupe, and a 1963-67 Corvette convertible. The truck is kind of cool too, it’s a Yellow Freight truck with possibly a 1953-56 Ford cab. Yellow Freight started in 1929 and was pretty ubiquitous until it suddenly went out of business entirely in 2023. Despite the name, they were always orange.
There’s not many cars in this picture, but I really like the shot of a big city downtown back when downtowns were full of retail stores and regular people walking and shopping. The wardrobes of the walkers also tells a tale of how much American society has changed.
It’s trash day in this neighborhood, which clearly loves their Tri-Five Chevys, with two 1955 coupes and a 1957 BelAir hardtop coupe. I’m pretty sure the convertible is a 57 Chevy, too, but it’s hard to say without a better view of the taillight and side trim. The fact these 7-9 year old cars were still going strong is a testimony to the solidity of Chevy’s 1955 design.
I would love to have more and better views of all these cars, but what we can see is intriguing enough. Most easily identifiable are a 1957 Mercury Monterey or Montclair, a 1958 Pontiac Chieftain, an early Ford Falcon, and an early Chevy Corvair. I have to admit I can’t put my finger on the blue two door sedan second in (56 Plymouth? but the tailfins seem wrong).
More fodder for car spotters. We definitely have a 1957 Oldmobile 88 with its one-year-only 3-piece backlight and a 1958 88 with its equally distinctive front fender. Spotted also are a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500, 1963 Chevy Impala, and a 1962 Chevy Impala convertible. The import convertible stumped me for a long time. I’ll leave it as a quiz for the sharp minds of CC!
Sixties Ford trucks are popular here at CC, so I figured this hard-working 1964 F100 was worth showing. The sign on the truck reads: “–lton Canoe Rentel”. Mr. Milton (or Hilton, or Carlton…) had good taste in trucks and probably fine canoes, but spelling was not his thing.
Your guess is as good as mine what’s happening in this strange photo. I’d love to have that 1955 Ford Country Sedan with California plates (presumably with no rust). This one has a very well-utilized roof rack for a cross-country road trip.
The photo immortalizes a long-forgotten protest or picketing and inadvertently caught a very nice 1964 Buick Skylark Sport Coupe, Buick’s top midsize trim which could be had with your choice of a 225c.i. V6 or two varieties of 300c.i. V8. There’s also the back half of a fairly new 1959+ GMC “New Look” transit bus.
A flat tire prompted a flurry of activity around a well-used Jeep Station Wagon with two-tone paint. This is probably a Maverick Special: an upscale model made in 1958 and ’59 which introduced the two-tone paint with bright trim on the sides, as well as chrome bumpers and a one-piece windshield. Jeep was sponsoring the “Maverick” TV show at the time, so the name was a tie in (they apparently neglected to copyright it, since Ford later took the name). These were all two-wheel drive versions.
This photo was taken during a college summer work project my mom participated in on a North Dakota reservation. The occasion for a parade is unknown, but featured Dodge’s latest model (a 440 4-door sedan) and one of Ford’s earliest Model Ts. The Dodge driver’s view of the road is highly in doubt.
My mom’s former college roommate’s wedding prompted a photo of the happy couple’s 1965-66 Volvo P220 Estate, looking really pristine and ready to serve the new family.
My parents rented a guest house on this farm. The main house was quite attractive and the farmer owned a new 1969 Oldsmobile Toronado.
This rather random photo of a nearby highway suggests that this town had a real fondness for Toronados.
In 1970, my parents moved to Canada for 3 years while my dad attended graduate school there. The photo is of my mom’s workplace office. Just one car here, but it shows good detail of a 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 Town Sedan, eight years old and showing it. Oddly, it sure looks like snow on the car, but the note on the slide says May 1970 and there is no snow anywhere else in the picture.
Plain vehicles in front of plain buildings in Detroit. A fairly new 1970 Ford Ranch Wagon sits in front of a 1965 Plymouth Valiant and a 1967-70 Chevrolet medium duty truck rented by Hertz.
That’s my dad, looking pretty cool and suave on the street corner, though a bit less so if you know that his mother is standing just to his right. Lots of nice cars on the steep side street, including a 1967 Pontiac Beaumont (Canadian Cheviac version of the Chevelle/Malibu), a 1968-70 BMW 1600-2 (or maybe 2002), a 1968-70 VW Beetle, a 1970 Plymouth Fury, and five more further up the hill that are harder to identify.
Most of a 69 Buick LeSabre hardtop sedan is looking good here, and if you regretted not seeing the front of the GMC bus several photos back, you’ve got it here along with a lot of distant hindquarter views. I can spot a 1963 Ford Fairlane 4-door sedan, a 1963 AMC Rambler Classic, a 1966 Plymouth Fury III sedan, a 1969 Pontiac Laurentian or Strato-Chief (assuming Canadian models), and I’m pretty sure a red 1968-69 AMC AMX.
This one is for Paul: A Peugeot 404 sedan, a.k.a Der Französische Mercedes. They came out in 1960 and I don’t know how to differentiate the years or if Canadian versions differed at all. Behind it is I believe, a Mercury Comet that I can’t quite place the year of despite each year being distinct, a 1968-70 VW Type 2, and a 1966 Pontiac fullsizer driving up the street.
If you only watched newer movies/tv shows set in the 60’s, you might think that muscle cars were ubiquitous in their era. I’ve noticed that there has been very little in the way of performance cars showing up in these photos. This 1967 Cougar with aftermarket hood scoop, gold striping and rear mag wheels is just about the only evidence of muscle cars I’ve found. We also see a 1967 Pontiac Parisienne hardtop, a 1963 Chevy Impala, and a 1966 Chevy of undetermined model.
I’m pretty sure the point of this photo was to show the mass of fresh snow, which unfortunately inhibits easy car identification. A few hardy Canadians are making a go of it despite the conditions, including the owners of a 1969 Dodge Dart GT and a 1965-67 Toyota Corona.
All that fresh white snow on the roadways inevitably becomes dirty, gross snow piles. A 69 Pontiac Parisienne and a 69-70 Plymouth Valiant look good with no sign of rust, though I can sense it forming in real time on their undersides.
These are my grandparents taking a stroll with me in my first vehicle. Ain’t it fine? The parking lot is loaded with very typical commuter cars for the time, including my parent’s green 1970 Maverick.
Notes on the slide did not explain the significance of this photo, but for me it’s notable for some nice older homes and a really sweet maroon 66 Chevy Impala coupe, a 67-71 VW, a 1970-71 Plymouth Duster, and what I thought was a 68-69 Pontiac Tempest/LeMans/GTO but I’m not sure that’s right.
This neat street shot shows a wide variety of vehicles, though IDing particular cars is not the easiest from above. The Checker cabs are obvious and delightful. Beyond that, I see a 71-72 Chevrolet clamshell wagon, a 1970-72 Buick Skylark hardtop coupe (could also be a Chevy Malibu), and a 1968 Plymouth Fury police car. Can you identify others?
The following three photos are a surprising subset, though perhaps not, given it was the 1970’s and funkiness reigned. My parents took a bunch of what I’d call “art” photographs, which are usually extreme closeups of various random subjects, a number of them being automobiles. These are representative.
AMC made an attractive steel sport wheel in the 70’s.
Even without the context of the whole car, the hood and roofline say this has got to be a 1974 Buick LeSabre coupe.
And based on the year it was taken, this must be a 1975 VW Rabbit. My parents would later buy a new 1979 Rabbit.
Since my mom took many of these photos and this article is kind of a tribute, I’ll include a more recent photo with automotive content. It’s probably around 2000 with my parents’ 1994 Honda Civic Del Sol. She loved that little car, especially when they could take the top off and roll down the rear window.
That’s it for now. My parents have more boxes of slides I haven’t gone through yet, so there may be another article of unintentional car photos in my future. Hope you enjoyed them!
Thanks so much for your efforts to put this together. Very interesting.
Very cool photos, thanks for sharing!
What a joy. I’m a sucker for period photos and CC has really set the bar high with its continued coverage. There’s something a bit extra about these, maybe it’s the faded blacks that send me back before my time like sepia is sometimes used to do. I can be a bit pedantic about composition, but the ad hoc framing, particularly the city shots, puts me right in the moment as if I’ve just turned around and this is what has confronted me. Looking forward to more. Thank you.
I would describe my mom as pedantic about composition! She always wanted natural unposed shots, which was kind of annoying during family gatherings when she’d be moving around rather conspicuously taking photos and saying, “just ignore me, I’m not here…”
But I really appreciate that she (and my dad) took photos of the physical environments around them. The automotive and architectural views are of real interest decades later, at least to me.
In the 1970 Quebec photo, that’s not a Comet…it’s a 1962 Fairlane 🙂
In that 1970 Quebec photo, that’s not a Comet…it’s a 1962 Fairlane 🙂
You’re clearly right, which explains why it doesn’t look like a Comet! I could have sworn I looked at all the smaller early 60’s Ford possibilities, but I missed that one.
Even without the family connection, this would be a fine bundle of CC photos…….the lovely narrative wraps it all up in ribbon with a beautiful bow–hooray!
I can also testify to a good number of those 55-56-57 Chevy sedans making it well into the 1960s, even in Great Lakes salt belt territory. The styling looking “old” (in the way that no 10-year-old car does today), but they chugged on and were apparently simple to maintain.
Thanks a bundle for this! There’s a “Downtown Cleveland” FB group what would love the 1964 photo, but I wouldn’t repost it there without your OK.
Thanks for the kind words.
Car styling was changing so fast then, I’m sure a 57 Chevy looked antique in the mid 60’s. Hard to relate to that now, when it seems like car styling has moved in slow motion for the last few decades.
You are welcome to repost that photo there. Could you put a link in the comments here if you do? I have no additional info on the photo or even why my mom was in Cleveland.
The “import convertible” could be a Hillman Minx convertible.
There’s also a couple of Fiat 600s, mk2 Ford Cortinas, and possibly a Vauxhall Viva HB (aka. Envoy Epic HB).
It is a Hillman Minx convertible.
You are correct! Probably 1958-60.
Yes, series III (1958-9) as it has the horizontal style rear number plate area. s.I & II were a taller square format and the next model s.IIIA had added fins and bigger taillights.
It looks like it still has a UK number plate under the US one?
I think half the Mavericks ever made were painted that same snake vomit green (as was every apartment carpet in the early 1970s). Never understood the supposed appeal of that color, just glad that it is not everywhere any more.
I remember commonly seeing other Mavericks and such cars in that color. My parents bought it new and so far I’ve only found one partial photo of the nose from shortly after they got it. The color does look pretty sharp in shiny fresh glory, but didsn’t age well (As seen in the photo here when it was only two years old.) I have no problem with light green metallic on cars in general, though I prefer dark green. Toyota in recent years had had nice greens, which aren’t seen on many other brands.
Basically. little to no “colors” in the mix anymore.
Your parents had a good eye for photography; there’s some really nice shots here, like the one looking down at the Chicago streets. And they had an eye for car design, as those three shots near the end show. Thanks for sharing them.
Thanks. Photography has been a longtime hobby for them. They even developed their own slides for a period, which unfortunately led to some batches of overexposed film as seen in the 1974 shots above.
Fun city car shots, thanks for sharing. Your parents are roughly our age (mid-late 70s) and some of those cars played an important role in our life, the ’69 Toros and ’70 Plymouths come first to mind. Those were cars that were rapidly falling out of fashion by then, but we loved them later on, however during that period (early ’70s) of early adulthood and before kids we were very much Volvo/SAAB people.
My parents bought a new 1985 Saab 900 and drove it for six years. Never had a Volvo. I’ve never been a real fan, but I have to say that I wouldn’t mind having that P220 Estate at all now! It looks good!
Ah, slides. My Dad shot slides from the day he got a camera up until the light meter in his trusty Pentax finally died. I’ve got the family archives here in the basement, two full boxes of carousels and another with assorted collections. In the first year of COVID I rented a high-end Nikon with a slide scanner setup and went through the entire collection, using Photoshop for color correction (I did a ton of prepress as a graphic designer, so this was second nature) to clean up the worst of them.
Pictured: our house in about 1972, with Mom’s ’64 Buick Special convertible in back and Dad’s ’68 Ford Ranch Wagon in front. Out in the circle is his company car, a new Chevy Impala. Dad was always a Ford guy, so I have no idea how he felt about that car, but he was a wagon guy up until he died.
That’s a great looking photo! The scan looks flawless, and what a snapshot in time. The Buick looks especially appealing. I’m guessing your mom’s car got to use the garage. A convertible and a wagon is a good combo, maximum fun and maximum utility both covered. Who needs a sedan?!
When my children were growing up I drove a Mustang convertible and my wife drove a Taurus wagon. We never had a sedan in our household!
Some great photos showing typical family things. I always loved those funky AMC rims, I had those on several cars.
Living in southwestern Ontario I can tell you it’s completely possible to have a snow covered car in early May. Maybe no snow in London, but the car could have been driven from further north overnight and not melted out yet.
My condolences and comiserations on the circumstances that led you to these photos. My mother’s been gone for 6 years now, I just helped dad move into assisted living and my home is now full of boxes and tubs. I also discovered my grandfather took slides for several years, so that’s another thing to scan and distribute.
Thank you! My cousin and I recently spent five days clearing out their house in NC, saving only what could fit in a small apartment and putting that into a storage unit. Dad’s currently in assisted living but hopes to get into independent living. We took about 6 trailers full of stuff to the dump, gave away about 1 trailer, and estate sale’d a one car garage full of stuff. I left no box or tub unsifted! That was the hardest I’ve worked in a long time!
Thanks so much for sharing your parents’ slides! They did a great job of capturing ordinary scenes that have turned into a window into a world that no longer exists.
That’s a fascinating selection. These ‘incidental’ pictures give a more realistic insight into the times than big occasions and special events. My Dad was very keen on slides too, not sure how many, but probably more than the 2200 odd I took myself. The earliest colour ones were a large format, switching to 35mm film from 1962 until 1978. There are a few print films too including some older stuff including some from around 1934 to about 1950 for which I don’t have negatives. Again very few are specifically pictures of vehicles, and many have none at all, but the sheer numbers mean there are quite a few in absolute terms.
I’m sure there are a lot of gems in there!
You don’t need a slide scanner to digitize slides if your phone has decent macrophotography capabilities. Find or make a small lightbox, and then make a cardboard mask with a cutout just slightly bigger than the 36x24mm slide image. (See photo) Experiment a little bit (when shooting you have to fill the frame in your phone’s camera with the slide image in order to get a good exposure) and soon you’ll have digitized all the slides laying around in all those boxes. I recently digitized hundreds of slides this way and the results were just fine.
That’s a good idea. I’d be interested in a side-by-side comparison on image quality between that and a regular scanner. The advantage seems to be that taking a photo would be faster than the scanner, which takes a few seconds to scan each image. The main difficulty in copying large amounts of slides is still the same, though, that you have to individually place each slide for copying one at a time.
What a terrific collection, and thank you so much for posting all these pictures here! These “normal” street scenes become like gold decades later, and are even better with your stories to go along with them. I particularly like the St. Louis scenes, since my wife grew up there, and her family has pictures of similar neighborhoods.
Each picture has a bunch of interesting nuggets. I’ll pick just one here. In the London, Ont. photo with the Esso station, you can see a promotion for “NHL Power Players.” That was a 1970-71 Canadian promotion where Esso gave away 252 “color action stamps” of all NHL players that could be put in an album (I’m not sure if the album itself was given away, or was sold). Of course, customers were urged to “collect all” of the stamps to fill up the album. It seemed to be a popular promotion – there are quite a few of these albums available on eBay.
Also, I love the mailbox with Mr. ZIP (the ZIP Code mascot).
And thanks for including a picture of your mom at the end as well. A great tribute.
I’m glad you liked them. I think they are gold, too, but I wasn’t sure how interesting they would be to others. That’s cool you remember the NHL Power Players, the sign does say “collect them all”. Would you still see that sort of thing in Canada? Is hockey still super popular in the culture?
Wonderful photos, that really evoke the times without being predictable. And aside from that feeling, it’s also fun to remind ourselves that not everything in the 60’s and 70’s was a Ford/Chevy/Plymouth, or even VW Beetle, as shown by the Hillman, Fiat 600, Peugeot and a few other imports.
Really nice post. Intriguing photos, to boot. Thanks for sharing, Jon.
I’ll join in and compliment Jon for putting together all these moments in time past.
Even thought the sharpness of the shots on my computer screen being only so-so, I’d put my money that, In the 1964 St. Louis MO picture, the blue 2 door sedan in front of the Mercury (with cruiser skirts) is a 1955 Ford Mainline.
Thank you!
55 Ford’s definitely possible, the greenhouse looks spot on. The wheel openings also match up. The tailfins in the pic are hard to see, but don’t look the same as 55 Ford to me. There is also the chrome strip on the front fender side and a name badge on the rear fender which don’t match the 55 Ford.
Wonderful photos ! .
Some have the knack for taking good pictures, sadly I do not in spite of taking photography classes and shooting thousands of pictures .
My father too took many pictures but never showed them to us, when he died my siblings grabbed all the images, I only wanted a very few but no .
Please keep sharing these wonderful images .
-Nate
Thank you! It’s a shame about your father’s photos. I’m glad now that my parents had slides, since the image quality is so much better than prints would have been, but for decades I could never look at the photos and that was frustrating. Your siblings don’t sound like they play well with others.
Very interesting slice of life shots and wonderful tribute to your mm. My dad was a slide guy too. One of these days I’ll have to go through the many trays of slides, which will feature a ’62 VW Beetle (first new car my dad ever bought), ’63 Ford Fairlane wagon (w/ Di-noc), ’63 Oldsmobile F-85 (nicknamed the Royal Barge), ’69 Mustang coupe, ’74 AMC Hornet (he almost bought a Vega!)…
Those would be cool to see!
Thank you for sharing these! My father went slide-only from about 1960 to 1965, and I’d only ever seen those pictures maybe twice during my childhood. I was so thrilled to learn that my scanner had a slide attachment when I started the project of scanning in all of my family photos a little more than 20 years ago. The best part was being able to finally capture their beautiful 1961 Beetle Convertible!
Thank you! That Beetle photo is fantastic.
Can hear the buzz, hum, and “beep-beep” now. Car is quite new here?
Jon, this was such a treat. Thank you. And I love that you ended with the picture of your late mother with her Del Sol.
Thank you, Joseph!
Great photos, slides were the thing. My dad shot mostly slide film during this time behind his Argus, using a handheld light-meter that I still can’t figure out. Easiest way to share images with the family and get everyone together. I can still smell the sparkly screen and feel the heat of the projector.
The one looking down on the residential, neighborhood may be significant for where it’s taken from?
Perhaps. I need to ask my dad if he recognizes it.
Late to the party – hell, it’s probably over – but I still want to chime in and thank you, Mr S. And your mum, and dad.
As I, er, shall we say, move further into the deepening colours of the age spectrum, I find I’m doing stuff very similar to what I perceived to be stuff only older folks do, as I slide towards the ages they were when I knew them, and it happens in ways I never foresaw as possible. One notable one is to find that old pics and slides get my attention more for the humans than the things I’ve looked them up for, such as cars (or houses, or whatevers).
That pic of your dad in Montreal is a real composition, of the type that painters often don’t match. It’s wonderful.
Again, thanks for your efforts with this. Some of the cars are nice too.
Never too late! I wish that commenting went on for a longer period than it does here.
All the other people in that photo are also family (my grandmother, uncle, aunt and cousin). The photo might have been a little more painter-grade with just my dad, but still a great shot. Quite a lot of the photos I scanned are of family, which of course has the most interest for me. I love these street and car shots, but people are the most important for sure.
Norman Rockwell himself could not do a better painting of those school kids mailing letters at the old style mailbox.
That is a great shot! I’ll bet the folks who run Head Start today would love it.
Wonderful photos; thanks for sharing!
Here’s an interesting tidbit on the early VW Rabbits: Only the 1975 model had the Rabbit nameplate on the left side of the hatch; later years put the Volkswagen nameplate on the left and Rabbit on the right.
My most sincere condolences for your loss.
Hi, Jon.
A couple of points:
1) I have been a car guy since I was a kid, and now I’m 63, and I’ve never been able to tell the difference between a 1965 and a ’66 Mustang, so I would be interested in knowing how you’re so sure the blue Mustang in picture #4 is a ’65, and not a ’66. I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to tell these two model years apart.
2) You made reference to a Pontiac Beaumont. That is a common misconception because the emblem is a narrow vertical arrow similar to that of Pontiac’s but it is not quite the same shape, and has a maple leaf in it. Beaumont was never sold or marketed as a Pontiac product. From 1962 to 65, Beaumont was a model under Acadian, a brand of GM of Canada. In ’62 and 63, it was a linemate to the Chevy II. The Acadian came in 3 models: the Canso, Beaumont and Invader. In 1964 and ’65, Beaumont, while still a model under the Acadian brand, was now a linemate to the Chevelle. The Acadian Beaumont was made in 1964 and ’65 as a sister to the Chevelle. From 1966 to ’69, Beaumont was its own division of GM of Canada, and then it was no more. Some sources say that the Beaumont division was from 1964 to ’69, but this is incorrect, as shown in brochures, and I have seen 1964s and ’65s with the Acadian brand on them. The Acadian division continued to the end of the 1971 model year, as a linemate to the Nova. The Pontiac name never appeared on, or in, any of these cars, and you won’t see the Pontiac name in any Beaumont or Acadian brochure, except for the Acadian that was produced in the ’70s as a linemate to the Chevy Chevette. The brochures are available at oldcarbrochures.org.
Again, please accept my most sincere condolences on the passing of your mom.
Sorry, I haven’t looked at the comments here over the last week.
I was going by the side scoops to call the Mustang a 65. https://www.cjponyparts.com/resources/1965-vs-1966-mustang
I see you are right about the Beaumont. As a non-canadian, I don’t have any native knowledge of these cars, so my research was faulty. Thank you.