It was the mid-1940s. America was emerging from a decade and a half of depression and war. The nation’s industrial might and entrepreneurial spirit were now being focused on something they had not done in a long time…sell stuff. For the first time in years, Americans had money to spend. With their new found wealth, they wanted new suburban houses, washing machines, refrigerators and TV sets. But most of all they wanted automobiles. They wanted new cars to replace the old ones that for years they’d been holding together with spit and bailing wire. Demand was frenzied. Anyone making cars could sell cars…lots of them. The great Seller’s Market was upon us. And like wildflowers after a spring rain, strong demand brings forth entrepreneurs blooming with ideas to sate it. 

Car historians and Merc-O-philes tend to agree that the 1950 Coupe driven by James Dean in Rebel without a Cause is perhaps Mercury’s most famous representative. But each Tuesday night during the 60s and 70s, another one was seen by many more eyeballs.

Many years ago I was out on a date with an artist, a hipster before anyone had thought of the term.  I’ve long forgotten her name but not her style. Upon discovering that I knew something about cars, she announced that her current dream car was a 1960 Plymouth Valiant. Really, I asked, not expecting that pronouncement and intrigued. She liked tail fins, you see, and the Valiant was the cheapest car she knew of that had them. 

Ah, those glorious dream cars. Every big auto show features some. They rotate on their elevated stands, seductively draped in a glamorous model who enthusiastically rattles off feature after amazing feature. How often have we dreamed of ourselves behind the wheel of one of those rolling sculptures, maybe that glamourous model by our side, as we cruise the boulevard. Isn’t that why they call them dream cars? But how many of these dreams actually came true? Even if that beauty gets the go ahead for production, only a few of her amazing features make the cut. Maybe that cool grill stays, but those hand shaped lusciously curved fenders? Victims to the cruel realities of mass production. One dream did come true, however. In the end it was not a profitable dream, but it was a most delicious one.

2006 Subaru Baja Sport

When the Baja hit the scene 15 years ago there hadn’t been a vehicle like it in America in decades - not since the Chevy El Camino, the Ford Ranchero or the Subaru BRAT. Unfortunately, there was not enough interest in car-based pickup trucks in the mid 2000s to justify the cost of making a second generation Baja. A total of only 30,000 of them were built from 2003-2006. In fact, this particular Baja was one of the last 3 ever sold in the Bay Area!

Midget Motors of Athens, Ohio made the King Midget micro car from 1946 to 1969. It was the most successful independent car maker of the last 75 years, though few have ever heard of it. How is that possible? Well, it depends on how one defines success. The measure of Midget was certainly not volume. The well-funded Kaiser Motors – which began the same year as King Midget - built over half a million cars over 10 years – 100 times Midget’s total sales. Of course, Kaiser lost the modern equivalent of over $1000 on each car it sold. Midget Motors made money on every one of its. Is success gaged by notoriety? The drama surrounding the amazing Tucker played out loudly and tragically in period newspapers and on magazine covers. Even though Tucker’s production was 1/100th that of Midget’s, its story was so compelling that 40 years after the fact, Frances Ford Coppola made a movie about it. No one is ever going to make movie about the King Midget. The car business is not for the faint of heart. Henry J. Kaiser lost tens of millions of dollars on his Last Onslaught on Detroit. Preston Tucker lost his shirt and his reputation on his Tucker Torpedo. Midget Motors’ owners, Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt, on the other hand, carried no debt when they sold their company after two decades of profitable operations. It seems that succeeding small can be pretty dull stuff when compared to failing big.

To understand the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, one must understand the times in which it was conceived. 1950s America was experiencing growth and wealth like no other time in history. The automobile industry responded accordingly. Cars got bigger. Features were added. Power rose as well, although most of the latter was applied to lugging around additional bulk caused by the formers. To give visual movement to all that mass, designers took inspiration from the premier technologies of the day, rockets and jets. It started innocently enough, a fin here, a spear there. Soon, fenders and bumpers were sprouting wings and thrusters. The Jet Age was upon us. One after another, new cars seemed to burst from the pages of a science fiction comic book, each more opulent and outrageous than the one before. It was a chrome encrusted orgy of SciFi bling.

When I came to know Pontiac as a kid it was a good time to know Pontiacs. This was a make that took risks. It had its ups and downs, its deaths and rebirths. The Pontiac Division of General Motors had just seen three brilliant management teams in succession guide it from the brink of extinction in 1956, to its pinnacle which I was witnessing as a pre-teen in the early 70s. Pontiacs took up more than their fair share of real estate on my bedroom wall - before later giving way to Cheryl Tieges and Farrah Faucet-Majors. In a way, the two art themes were not so different, only the preoccupations of the viewer had changed. Pontiac’s looked hot! Unlike the other of GMs lost makes that have been gone for a decade now, the story of Pontiac is fun to think about. Upstart Saturn was a tragedy pure and simple: A great and heroic quest that was done in by corporate jealousy and atrophy. Grand ol' Oldsmobile's fate flowed like the opus of a life lived well. It had early glory, a long steady rise, and then a much shorter but just as steady decline. Oldsmobile’s very name all but ensured that one day its time would come. The audacious Hummer and the quirky Saab were no more than corporate larks. "Here's a trend, " said some suit in Detroit, "Let's follow it." Things couldn't have ended well for Saab; they shouldn't have for Hummer. But over at Pontiac, you never quite knew how things would turn out. Pontiacs were exciting! The occasional few that weren’t? Well, at least they were interesting. With Pontiac, it was all about the cars. So why don’t we let the cars tell the story. 

The Woodill Wildfire rode the lip of a wave sweeping over America in the early 1950s. Sports cars had been absent from the scene for too long. The great makers of the classic era - Auburn, Duesenberg, Marmon and Stutz - were all pulled under by the Great Depression. The 1940s were pretty much consumed by war and its aftermath, with little energy remaining for the frivolity of sports cars. But as servicemen began to return home, they brought with them a taste for the fast, minimalist machines - Morgans, Singers, Rileys and Triumphs - they had on occasion flogged through the English countryside. Detroit was busy at the time filling America’s pent up demand for cars, any cars, with stodgy old sedans based on pre-war designs. By the late 40s a few British roadsters were being imported, namely MGs and Jaguars. But they weren’t really suited to American needs. By the dawn of the 1950s, the time became right for an all-American sports car. Everyone knows about the Chevrolet Corvette, the fiberglass dream car that wowed the nation when it debuted in mid-1953. Many credit the Corvette as being the first post-war American fiberglass sports car. Many are wrong. Predating the Vette by a more than a month was the Woodill Wildfire, a luscious little roadster that, had history taken a different turn, might have been the one known as “America’s Sports Car.”

Dreams can come true when money is no object. The Gaylord grand touring sports car was the brainchild of James and Edward Gaylord, heirs to a fortune built on their father’s invention of the bobby pin. The Gaylords were auto enthusiasts in the grandest sense. They found themselves dissatisfied with the offerings of the high performance luxury sports cars of the 1950s. They mourned the passing of the great marques, Bugatti and Delahaye, Duesenberg and Stutz. The brothers set about to build a car that, like those storied makes, possessed panache worthy of the finest streets of Paris or New York, with the performance to compete on the tracks of LeMans or Monaco, the most advanced and spectacular luxury sports car in the world. They succeeded…as long as you don’t count commercial viability as one of the criteria.