Okay, so where do I start? I was going to go point-for-point and just correct the article. But, that’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. I thought it’d be more fun to just tell the story the way it happened. How do I know the story? Well, if you ask any APA member about me, after they finish rolling their eyes and saying something like, “Oh, Dan Gallo! Well, he’s a “different one”, they’ll go on to tell you that I’m only a step down from obsessive about those `53/’54 Pontiacs. That, in itself is a long story, and I won’t get into it here. How `bout a future article for that?
For Pontiac enthusiasts, the name “Parisienne”, may mean those early to mid
Eighties full-size Pontiacs that looked like glorified Caprices. You’re not wrong. But, _ the Parisienne arrived long before that, in Canada. It was, basically, the Canadian version of the Bonneville. In other words, it was a Pontiac body, stuffed with a Chevy dive train and a Pontiac dash. Blame that on the U.S./Canadian currency exchange rate. Where I grew up, we were’ accustomed to seeing those strange cars on occasion. My older brother and I would call them “Cheviacs”.

To be sure, the Parsienne first materialized as a GM Motorama show car. Truth be told, it was an after thought, more than anything else. In preparation for the 1953 Motorama show in New York, each GM division’s design studio was responsible for a concept car. The Pontiac Division received their mandate a little late in the game. Designers were hard pressed to come up with an idea on such short notice, but, if you worked for the legendary Harley Earl, you jumped when he said, Jump!
Now, before you look at the photo of the ’53 Pontiac show car and dismiss it as an easy customizing job, understand that Pontiac’s design and engineering teams had to burn the midnight oil to get this project done, and the modifications were many. But first, what to do?

It was decided that Pontiac’s Motorama entry would be a tribute to the Landau Cars of the 1930’s. You know, those cars that required a chauffeur. What was interesting was that Pontiac`s design team chose a two-door motif! How radical was that? To accomplish this, a regular production Pontiac Chieftain convertible was lifted from the production line and commandeered to the design studio, where it was lowered to a height of just 56 inches. The windshield was replaced with a new wraparound windshield similar to the one that appeared on the Oldsmobile Fiesta and the Cadillac Eldorado limited production cars of ’53. Sure, it sounds easy enough, but to accommodate the wraparound windshield, the standard issue Pontiac dash had to be modified sufficiently to allow for the new position of the A pillar which was a good six, or seven inches further back from the stock version. It took a lot more than proficiency in the sheet metal shop to pull this off.