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MM Retro-Write-up: 1959 Cadillac
^^^^^ 1948 Cadillac tail fins
IN A NUTSHELL: The epitome of 1950's American styling-excess.
After the huge economic depression of the 1930s and the enormous losses and destruction of World War II (fortunately, most of it not actually on Mainland American or Canadian soil, but offshore or overseas), by the mid-late 1940s, Many Americans were eager to look forward to a better future, and not back on the past with its sadness and losses. The new GI-Bill helped returning American troops with money, college, training, and the key to ultimately better life. This was reflected in new machines to help make life easier, larger/better-equipped homes as new developments were built in the suburbs, advances in medicine (particularly with the then-new antibiotics and vaccines) to help beat diseases/infections that had formerly plagued the population, and, of course, newer, larger, and better cars.
Henry Ford and his Model T had helped put the nation on wheels with a simple well-built, affordable car for the masses….so much so that Adolf Hitler, in the 1930s, was jealous, and tried to imitate it in Germany with Dr. Ferdinand Porsche’s air-cooled VW Beetle..itself heavily influenced by Czechoslovakia’s rear-engined/air-cooled Tatra. The Model A Ford and its advances added even more to the country’s new-found freedom on wheels, though the Depression put a large damper on new sales. Then came World War II and its enormous military needs, and, from early 1942 to late 1945, all civilian new-car production was stopped except for VIPs, and gasoline and rubber tires for existing cars were strictly rationed with coupons, along with other daily stapes such as shoes, meat, and sugar. Factories and plants that, before the war, had cranked out new vehicles for civilians were re-tooled to produce military needs, so, for the better part of four years, no new civilian cars were available at all….and mechanics and owners kept the existing ones puttering along with whatever parts they could get or scrounge up….though cars were simple and much easier for Do-it-Yourselfers in those days. For decades, we have seen more or less the same thing in Cuba…old vehicles kept running by ingenious means.
Anyhow, by 1946 or so, Americans were tired the past, overjoyed at the end of rationing and the return of new-vehicle production, and looked forward to new postwar designs. Factories and plants that had cranked out tanks, cannons, airplanes, Jeeps, and military trucks during the war were once-again re-tooled for new cars. At first, the new cars were more or less re-hashed versions of what had been available before the war, but the auto companies were also quite aware of the country’s upcoming automotive future, and were starting to work on new, sleek, advanced postwar designs. Some of the more notable were the 1949 Ford/Mercury, 1949 Oldsmobile 88 and its famous Rocket V8, 1949 Cadillac and its new tail-fins, 1948 Buick and its ultra-smooth Dynaflow transmission, and the ill-fated but super-advanced 1948 Tucker Torpedo, which failed for a number of reasons, but also introduced numerous safety-features that other auto-companies would not adopt for decades.
Harley Earl, GM’s Chief of Styling at that time, had been enamored with the Lockheed P-38 Lightning twin-engine fighter-plane of World War II (and also used in some other reconnaissance/scouting/light-bombing/ground-attack roles). The Lightning had a twin-boom fuselage, twin-rudders in the back, twin Allison liquid-cooled engines with opposite-rotating propellers for better management of low-speed propeller-torque, and was the plane that our top two American aces in the war, Richard Bong and Tommy McGuire, flew. It was also the plane that shot down the bomber carrying the famous Admiral Yamamoto, Japan’s greatest military mind….his loss shortened the war. It was also the first Army Air Corps combat plane (before the days of the postwar independent U.S. Air Force) to exceed 400 MPH in level flight….the single-engine Chance-Vought F4U Corsair was the first Navy/Marine-Corps combat plane to do so. Anyhow, Earl was so enamored of the P-38 that he decided he would apply its twin-rudder theme to GM’s new postwar vehicles in the form of small tail fins, and it first appeared on the fastback 1948 Cadillac and 1949 Cadillac De Ville series…De Ville being a French Term for “Of the Village”.
For a while, tail fins, perhaps because of caution by Earl's superiors at GM in not letting them get too widespread, were mostly a Cadillac feature, although the other GM divisions (and other automakers) sometimes used them in a more subdued manner. By the mid-1950s, however, the fins started to grow some, and more chrome and shiny-features were added to the cars to add to the bling and glitz-level. Americans just loved it….and sales took off, even by postwar standards, until the recession of 1957.
And 1957 was the year that Chrysler and its famous “Forward-Look” was first implemented, which caught GM, Ford, and the rear of the automakers completely flat-footed. “Suddenly, it’s 1960” was the ad-theme for these cars…ever mind the fact that quality-control was so horrendous on them that hoods often failed to shut correctly, doors sometimes flew open (in an Age before seat-belts) from defective locks and frame-twisting on curves (Chrysler had not yet converted to the more rigid unibody-construction), and torsion-bar front-suspensions sometimes snapped and broke. But the styling, for the time, was absolutely gorgeous, with long tapered fins, and the long, low, wide, Forward-Look cars stunned Harley Earl and the other styling-managers into immediate action to try and come up with something better. The 1958 GM models were already quite far along in their development, but Earl managed to make some last-minute revisions to them, and add bling/glitz and make them more ostentatious…particularly at Buick, Pontiac, and Olds. Ford’s answer was the radical new 1958 Edsel, but then the 1957-58 recession struck and the recession, together with strong pubic resistance to the Edsel’s design, doomed that vehicle’s future.
But the next year, in 1959, Earl, at GM, was able to introduce some truly ostentatious vehicles, some them done to an unbelievable extent in the new Longer/Lower/Wider format, which made the 1957 Forward-look at Chrysler seem conservative in comparison. Although many other Detroit vehicles reached the peak of their postwar styling-excesses in 1959 (Chevy’s swept-wing trunk-lid and taillights was also way out there), the 1959 Cadillac series was the Absolute King of Bling…..….the very definition of a rolling circus on wheels. Automakers from other countries took one look at it and must have thought that GM’s (and some other American) designers had gone nuts….or were smoking something. The standard 1959 Cadillac was over 22 feet long, had four massive round sealed-beam headlights up front, a scowled-look brow over the lights, massive chrome-bumpers up front with four more huge light-fairings in the bumper, literally hundreds of small chrome bullet-shaped projects, front and aft, chrome trim/strips galore, whitewall tires, (sometimes with double white/gold-stripes), chrome-finished wheel covers, a massive chrome double-rear-bumper, two large chrome square housings around the rear back-up-lights, two enormous rear tail-fins with chrome/red bullet-shaped double-taillights facing rearward in each one, and an extremely sharp chrome-tipped point at the end of the fins the could be quite dangerous….there were documented reports of cyclists and others being impaled on them.
So, it is safe to say that this car represented what was probably the epitome of postwar 1950s design-excesses…..which, although quite popular at the time, rapidly faded by the early 1960s into more mundane body-styling. The 1960 Cadillac kept the tall sharp tail-fins, but did away with a number of the other trim-excesses. The early-60s models gradually lowered the tall fins until, by 1965, they were a small shadow of their former self, and ended up being mostly just a vertical-taillight theme……which stuck with Cadillac for decades, and not completely gone even today, almost six decades later.
The ostentatious 1959 Cadillacs were also made famous because they were a personal favorite of what was arguably America’s top Rock-singer of the time……Elvis Presley. Elvis had served a term in the Army….very few younger men were exempt from the military draft back then, and the Army had put him to good use entertaining the troops. Once he got out of the Army and back into civilian life and in his prime, he was making money hand over fist, and liked to spend it on Cadillacs. In fact, if you got on his good side, he would sometimes give away Cadillac as gifts to his friends……a practice that Mary Kay cosmetics also adopted with their policy of giving pink Cadillacs, and sometimes Buicks or Pontiacs, in their company’s patented light pinkish-beige color. One of Presley’s pink Cadillacs (he liked them in a little different shade of pink than the Mary-Kay color) is on display at his estate’s Graceland Museum in Memphis, TN, though it is a 1956 and not a ’59. And Presley was not the only rock-musician to like them……decades later, Bruce Springsteen, sang about the pink ’59 Cadillacs in his album “Born in the USA”.
I never got to test-drive a 1959 Cadillac, but I did sample a white ’58 (a Coupe de Ville or Sedan de Ville, if I remember, but I’m not sure), with a tan interior, that an old friend of mine from high school had picked up as a used car….and my late father and mother had owned a used 1962 Sedan de Ville that my mother’s great-cousin had previously owned, and sold it at a good price to my Dad when he got his new 1967 Sedan de Ville. For those of you who remember, I already did a story on that 1967 De Ville, which I got to drive a number of times. Anyhow, I got to sample and test-drive my friend’s ’58 and my Dad’s ’62, which both had more or less the same mechanicals as the ’59. Both of them were typical Cadillac engineering for the period, which meant body-on-frame construction….GM, at the time, used an “X”-shaped under-frame, not the perimeter-type frame with cross-rails that typically comes to mind when we think of a BOF design. Power-drum brakes were on all four wheels (Cadillac, being a premium-brand, and also because of the car’s weight, used finned-drums for added-cooling). Suspension was typical GM coil-spring front and rear, with a pillow-soft ride, and tons of sound insulation both under the hood and in the cabin. Very durable, high-quality components and hardware were used inside the cabin……this was long before the Age of GM’s dime-store-plastic interiors. Under the hood was a 390 c.i. (6.4L) 325-HP push-rod V8 and the four-speed GM Hydra-Matic automatic transmission typically used in Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs. The Hydra-Matic was more flexible than the two-speed Chevy Powerglide, the Fluid-Drive Buick Dynaflow, and the three-speed Buick Super Turbine 400 transmissions, but lacked the extreme silky-smoothness of the Buick transmissions…..Hydra-matic shifts could be a little jerky, particularly on the 2-3 shift. With these cars and their soft seats/suspensions, like in Lincolns of the period, you glided over bumps in Cush-Tush comfort like the bumps simply didn’t exist. But steering these cars, as one would suspect, was an exercise in futility….they typically had the responsiveness of a battleship. You turned the wheel on the power-recirculating-ball steering system (with feather-light effort), waited for an eventual response, and rolled and plowed your way around a corner….if you weren’t going too fast (which didn’t take much) and wind up in the ditch. I was cautious enough that I knew the car’s limitations and didn’t try and overdo it. Back then, if you actually wanted SOME resemblance of steering response, you got a two-seat Corvette or pre-1958 Ford Thunderbird, a two-seat British roadster which had excellent handling but was constantly in the repair shop (and I MEAN constantly LOL) , or a rear-engined air-cooled Corvair/VW Beetle with classic snap-oversteer from the rear swing-axles and light front-ends, which could be dangerous in the other extreme, and even flip you over. I noticed something else when driving big Detroit full-size cars from this period with power-brakes…the engineers had not yet figured out (and the technology may not have been available) to properly co-ordinate pedal-pressure with proportional response. Often, even a very light push of the pedal would give you a very abrupt slowdown…you had to practice and get used to it. I never did get used to it in my Dad’s ’62 Cadillac, probably because I didn’t get to drive it enough to get enough practice before he later traded it for a used ’65 Ford four-seat Thunderbird. I had just gotten my license, and was driving a Plymouth Valiant most of the time. The Thunderbird’s brakes, for the period, power-disc up front and drum rear, were simply phenomenal both in feel and response……Consumer Reports also lauded how good the disc brakes were on Ford products, even compared to the (rare) disc-brakes available on non-Ford products. Eventually the auto industry converted to all-discs, but, except for the Corvette and some Studebakers (they went out of business in 1966) Ford clearly got a head start on everybody else with disc brakes in the 60s.
So, the 1959 Cadillac will live on, in auto history, in a very unique position of being the (ultimate) manifestation of a time, a culture, and a public fascination with the automobile and the driving-freedom it represented at the time, that we will probably never see again. There are still a good number of them still in existence, and they can readily be seen at classic auto shows and classic-GM shows. Elvis always gave the impression that he would come back from the dead for one……we’re still waiting to see if he makes good on that promise LOL.
And, as Always, Happy Car-Memories
MM
__________________
DRIVING IS BELIEVING
^^^^^ 1948 Cadillac tail fins
IN A NUTSHELL: The epitome of 1950's American styling-excess.
After the huge economic depression of the 1930s and the enormous losses and destruction of World War II (fortunately, most of it not actually on Mainland American or Canadian soil, but offshore or overseas), by the mid-late 1940s, Many Americans were eager to look forward to a better future, and not back on the past with its sadness and losses. The new GI-Bill helped returning American troops with money, college, training, and the key to ultimately better life. This was reflected in new machines to help make life easier, larger/better-equipped homes as new developments were built in the suburbs, advances in medicine (particularly with the then-new antibiotics and vaccines) to help beat diseases/infections that had formerly plagued the population, and, of course, newer, larger, and better cars.
Henry Ford and his Model T had helped put the nation on wheels with a simple well-built, affordable car for the masses….so much so that Adolf Hitler, in the 1930s, was jealous, and tried to imitate it in Germany with Dr. Ferdinand Porsche’s air-cooled VW Beetle..itself heavily influenced by Czechoslovakia’s rear-engined/air-cooled Tatra. The Model A Ford and its advances added even more to the country’s new-found freedom on wheels, though the Depression put a large damper on new sales. Then came World War II and its enormous military needs, and, from early 1942 to late 1945, all civilian new-car production was stopped except for VIPs, and gasoline and rubber tires for existing cars were strictly rationed with coupons, along with other daily stapes such as shoes, meat, and sugar. Factories and plants that, before the war, had cranked out new vehicles for civilians were re-tooled to produce military needs, so, for the better part of four years, no new civilian cars were available at all….and mechanics and owners kept the existing ones puttering along with whatever parts they could get or scrounge up….though cars were simple and much easier for Do-it-Yourselfers in those days. For decades, we have seen more or less the same thing in Cuba…old vehicles kept running by ingenious means.
Anyhow, by 1946 or so, Americans were tired the past, overjoyed at the end of rationing and the return of new-vehicle production, and looked forward to new postwar designs. Factories and plants that had cranked out tanks, cannons, airplanes, Jeeps, and military trucks during the war were once-again re-tooled for new cars. At first, the new cars were more or less re-hashed versions of what had been available before the war, but the auto companies were also quite aware of the country’s upcoming automotive future, and were starting to work on new, sleek, advanced postwar designs. Some of the more notable were the 1949 Ford/Mercury, 1949 Oldsmobile 88 and its famous Rocket V8, 1949 Cadillac and its new tail-fins, 1948 Buick and its ultra-smooth Dynaflow transmission, and the ill-fated but super-advanced 1948 Tucker Torpedo, which failed for a number of reasons, but also introduced numerous safety-features that other auto-companies would not adopt for decades.
Harley Earl, GM’s Chief of Styling at that time, had been enamored with the Lockheed P-38 Lightning twin-engine fighter-plane of World War II (and also used in some other reconnaissance/scouting/light-bombing/ground-attack roles). The Lightning had a twin-boom fuselage, twin-rudders in the back, twin Allison liquid-cooled engines with opposite-rotating propellers for better management of low-speed propeller-torque, and was the plane that our top two American aces in the war, Richard Bong and Tommy McGuire, flew. It was also the plane that shot down the bomber carrying the famous Admiral Yamamoto, Japan’s greatest military mind….his loss shortened the war. It was also the first Army Air Corps combat plane (before the days of the postwar independent U.S. Air Force) to exceed 400 MPH in level flight….the single-engine Chance-Vought F4U Corsair was the first Navy/Marine-Corps combat plane to do so. Anyhow, Earl was so enamored of the P-38 that he decided he would apply its twin-rudder theme to GM’s new postwar vehicles in the form of small tail fins, and it first appeared on the fastback 1948 Cadillac and 1949 Cadillac De Ville series…De Ville being a French Term for “Of the Village”.
For a while, tail fins, perhaps because of caution by Earl's superiors at GM in not letting them get too widespread, were mostly a Cadillac feature, although the other GM divisions (and other automakers) sometimes used them in a more subdued manner. By the mid-1950s, however, the fins started to grow some, and more chrome and shiny-features were added to the cars to add to the bling and glitz-level. Americans just loved it….and sales took off, even by postwar standards, until the recession of 1957.
And 1957 was the year that Chrysler and its famous “Forward-Look” was first implemented, which caught GM, Ford, and the rear of the automakers completely flat-footed. “Suddenly, it’s 1960” was the ad-theme for these cars…ever mind the fact that quality-control was so horrendous on them that hoods often failed to shut correctly, doors sometimes flew open (in an Age before seat-belts) from defective locks and frame-twisting on curves (Chrysler had not yet converted to the more rigid unibody-construction), and torsion-bar front-suspensions sometimes snapped and broke. But the styling, for the time, was absolutely gorgeous, with long tapered fins, and the long, low, wide, Forward-Look cars stunned Harley Earl and the other styling-managers into immediate action to try and come up with something better. The 1958 GM models were already quite far along in their development, but Earl managed to make some last-minute revisions to them, and add bling/glitz and make them more ostentatious…particularly at Buick, Pontiac, and Olds. Ford’s answer was the radical new 1958 Edsel, but then the 1957-58 recession struck and the recession, together with strong pubic resistance to the Edsel’s design, doomed that vehicle’s future.
But the next year, in 1959, Earl, at GM, was able to introduce some truly ostentatious vehicles, some them done to an unbelievable extent in the new Longer/Lower/Wider format, which made the 1957 Forward-look at Chrysler seem conservative in comparison. Although many other Detroit vehicles reached the peak of their postwar styling-excesses in 1959 (Chevy’s swept-wing trunk-lid and taillights was also way out there), the 1959 Cadillac series was the Absolute King of Bling…..….the very definition of a rolling circus on wheels. Automakers from other countries took one look at it and must have thought that GM’s (and some other American) designers had gone nuts….or were smoking something. The standard 1959 Cadillac was over 22 feet long, had four massive round sealed-beam headlights up front, a scowled-look brow over the lights, massive chrome-bumpers up front with four more huge light-fairings in the bumper, literally hundreds of small chrome bullet-shaped projects, front and aft, chrome trim/strips galore, whitewall tires, (sometimes with double white/gold-stripes), chrome-finished wheel covers, a massive chrome double-rear-bumper, two large chrome square housings around the rear back-up-lights, two enormous rear tail-fins with chrome/red bullet-shaped double-taillights facing rearward in each one, and an extremely sharp chrome-tipped point at the end of the fins the could be quite dangerous….there were documented reports of cyclists and others being impaled on them.
So, it is safe to say that this car represented what was probably the epitome of postwar 1950s design-excesses…..which, although quite popular at the time, rapidly faded by the early 1960s into more mundane body-styling. The 1960 Cadillac kept the tall sharp tail-fins, but did away with a number of the other trim-excesses. The early-60s models gradually lowered the tall fins until, by 1965, they were a small shadow of their former self, and ended up being mostly just a vertical-taillight theme……which stuck with Cadillac for decades, and not completely gone even today, almost six decades later.
The ostentatious 1959 Cadillacs were also made famous because they were a personal favorite of what was arguably America’s top Rock-singer of the time……Elvis Presley. Elvis had served a term in the Army….very few younger men were exempt from the military draft back then, and the Army had put him to good use entertaining the troops. Once he got out of the Army and back into civilian life and in his prime, he was making money hand over fist, and liked to spend it on Cadillacs. In fact, if you got on his good side, he would sometimes give away Cadillac as gifts to his friends……a practice that Mary Kay cosmetics also adopted with their policy of giving pink Cadillacs, and sometimes Buicks or Pontiacs, in their company’s patented light pinkish-beige color. One of Presley’s pink Cadillacs (he liked them in a little different shade of pink than the Mary-Kay color) is on display at his estate’s Graceland Museum in Memphis, TN, though it is a 1956 and not a ’59. And Presley was not the only rock-musician to like them……decades later, Bruce Springsteen, sang about the pink ’59 Cadillacs in his album “Born in the USA”.
I never got to test-drive a 1959 Cadillac, but I did sample a white ’58 (a Coupe de Ville or Sedan de Ville, if I remember, but I’m not sure), with a tan interior, that an old friend of mine from high school had picked up as a used car….and my late father and mother had owned a used 1962 Sedan de Ville that my mother’s great-cousin had previously owned, and sold it at a good price to my Dad when he got his new 1967 Sedan de Ville. For those of you who remember, I already did a story on that 1967 De Ville, which I got to drive a number of times. Anyhow, I got to sample and test-drive my friend’s ’58 and my Dad’s ’62, which both had more or less the same mechanicals as the ’59. Both of them were typical Cadillac engineering for the period, which meant body-on-frame construction….GM, at the time, used an “X”-shaped under-frame, not the perimeter-type frame with cross-rails that typically comes to mind when we think of a BOF design. Power-drum brakes were on all four wheels (Cadillac, being a premium-brand, and also because of the car’s weight, used finned-drums for added-cooling). Suspension was typical GM coil-spring front and rear, with a pillow-soft ride, and tons of sound insulation both under the hood and in the cabin. Very durable, high-quality components and hardware were used inside the cabin……this was long before the Age of GM’s dime-store-plastic interiors. Under the hood was a 390 c.i. (6.4L) 325-HP push-rod V8 and the four-speed GM Hydra-Matic automatic transmission typically used in Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs. The Hydra-Matic was more flexible than the two-speed Chevy Powerglide, the Fluid-Drive Buick Dynaflow, and the three-speed Buick Super Turbine 400 transmissions, but lacked the extreme silky-smoothness of the Buick transmissions…..Hydra-matic shifts could be a little jerky, particularly on the 2-3 shift. With these cars and their soft seats/suspensions, like in Lincolns of the period, you glided over bumps in Cush-Tush comfort like the bumps simply didn’t exist. But steering these cars, as one would suspect, was an exercise in futility….they typically had the responsiveness of a battleship. You turned the wheel on the power-recirculating-ball steering system (with feather-light effort), waited for an eventual response, and rolled and plowed your way around a corner….if you weren’t going too fast (which didn’t take much) and wind up in the ditch. I was cautious enough that I knew the car’s limitations and didn’t try and overdo it. Back then, if you actually wanted SOME resemblance of steering response, you got a two-seat Corvette or pre-1958 Ford Thunderbird, a two-seat British roadster which had excellent handling but was constantly in the repair shop (and I MEAN constantly LOL) , or a rear-engined air-cooled Corvair/VW Beetle with classic snap-oversteer from the rear swing-axles and light front-ends, which could be dangerous in the other extreme, and even flip you over. I noticed something else when driving big Detroit full-size cars from this period with power-brakes…the engineers had not yet figured out (and the technology may not have been available) to properly co-ordinate pedal-pressure with proportional response. Often, even a very light push of the pedal would give you a very abrupt slowdown…you had to practice and get used to it. I never did get used to it in my Dad’s ’62 Cadillac, probably because I didn’t get to drive it enough to get enough practice before he later traded it for a used ’65 Ford four-seat Thunderbird. I had just gotten my license, and was driving a Plymouth Valiant most of the time. The Thunderbird’s brakes, for the period, power-disc up front and drum rear, were simply phenomenal both in feel and response……Consumer Reports also lauded how good the disc brakes were on Ford products, even compared to the (rare) disc-brakes available on non-Ford products. Eventually the auto industry converted to all-discs, but, except for the Corvette and some Studebakers (they went out of business in 1966) Ford clearly got a head start on everybody else with disc brakes in the 60s.
So, the 1959 Cadillac will live on, in auto history, in a very unique position of being the (ultimate) manifestation of a time, a culture, and a public fascination with the automobile and the driving-freedom it represented at the time, that we will probably never see again. There are still a good number of them still in existence, and they can readily be seen at classic auto shows and classic-GM shows. Elvis always gave the impression that he would come back from the dead for one……we’re still waiting to see if he makes good on that promise LOL.
And, as Always, Happy Car-Memories
MM
__________________
DRIVING IS BELIEVING
