Category Archives: APA News

Man, if you ever want to get my attention, show me an article about the `53/’54 Pontiacs. I’ll be eating out of your hand! If you want to rattle my cage, but good, show me an erroneous article about those cars. The Chieftain did just that last month. Of course, it wasn’t the fault of anyone on the Chieftain “staff’, such as it is. They had no way of knowing that the reprint from Autoweek that appeared last month, was far and away, the most erroneous collection of misstatements I’ve ever seen in automotive magazines. And, that’s saying a lot. Then again, the author, Brooks Brierley, in all likelihood wasn’t a resident of this planet until sometime in.the eady’ 1970’s. That’s just a guess. 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 Hadey 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 bum 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.

Then, there was the matter of all the “niceties”, like the interior trim and appointments. First, bucket seats were installed, along with a console of sorts. Since the car was to be chauffeur-driven, the front seats were designed to automatically move forward whenever the door was opened, allowing for easy entry and egress. The front seats were finished in pink leather, and the headliner was also finished in pink. The back seat was Dull Finish Nylon Frieze. interspersed with aluminum. strands. Pretty nifty stuff. Most GM cars would use this material rather generously within the next few years. The floor rugs were broadtail fur, and there was, according to Pontiac press releases, a Plexiglas dome for the front compartment, but, it was never built. Exterior flourishes were many, but rather subdued to the credit of the design team. The headlight bezels. received a special treatment, as did the taillights. Special hubcaps were fabricated as was the hood ornament and the silver streaks down the center of the hood. All standard side stainless steel trim was gone in favor of three subtle stars on the front fenders between the wheel and the door. Also, on the rearquarter panel, there was a vertical “groove”, apparently meant to resemble some sort of air intake, that was located just ahead of the rear wheel. All in all, a nice car that offered the public some ideas of what cars might look like in the future. Okay, back to the Autoweek article and what they- got wrong: First of all, they referred to a “Star Chief dash”. There was no such thing. All Pontiacs in ’53 had the same dash. Secondly, they referred to the Parisienne as a “highly modified Star Chief’. Wrong again. The Star Chief didn’t show up until 1954. Another glaring mistake was Brooks Brierley’s reference to the automatic transmission as, “a two-forward-speed automatic transmission (called Dual-Range Hydra-Matic Drive)… ° Oh, it was Hydra­Matic, all right. But, it was four speeds forward. I know. I’ve got one. On heavy acceleration, you can feel every one of them! As Paul Harvey would say, “Now, for the rest of the story ….” You have to dig mighty deep to find this part of the story, but, it is a matter of record. The Parisienne was held over for the 1954 Motorama. It was returned- to the Pontiac design studio and outfitted with a ’54 Pontiac grille and the exterior was painted metallic gold. However, there is no mention of the Parisienne at the ’54 Motorama when you go back and check the records. More than likely, the ’54 version was used in smaller GM shows, like the traveling “Futurama”, and perhaps made some appearances at dealerships. In fact, it’s hard to find a photo of the ’54 version, but, there is one in John Gunnell’s book, “75 Years of PonfiaclOakland’. Now, as you may know, GM’s concept cars were all supposed to have been destroyed after their use in the Motoramas and Futuramas. Funny thing about that. Perhaps _there was some insubordination within the upper ranks at The General. Or maybe, certain executives were favored with possession of one of these future collectibles as a “perk”. Either way, it wouldn’t explain how the `53/’54 Parisienne ended up in a New Jersey garage, but that’s exactly what happened! Further investigation found that the New Jersey garage owner, who was a collector, bought the car from “someone in Michigan°, in 1981. That “someone” may have been a family member of the late Robert Critchfield, a former Pontiac General Manager. This is only speculation. Anyway, the Jersey garage owner took it home, and restored it to its 1953 configuration. It later ended up in the Joe Bortz collection in Highland Park, Illinois, right outside Chicago. Joe Bortz has an amazing collection of “show caps”, or, concept cars. You can see them at www.bortzautocollection.com. Visit the site and have a ball. You know you can’t put a price on these cars in his collection. By all. rights, they shouldn’t even exist. But, exist they do, thanks to Joe, who is another certified gearhead, like myself, who grew up in the 1950’s. Oh, and for the record …..yes, the Fifties- were a great time to be a gearhead. One of my most important annual rituals, second only to Christmas, was when my buddies and I would climb aboard our bikes and ride down to the street where all the car dealerships were on the last Saturday in September (or thereabouts), to see the new cars that just arrived from Detroit. We started this ritual in September of 1955, and continued it all the way into the mid Sixties when we had cars of our own. It’s funny, too, how I remember these trips so vividly, just like it happened last month! Wouldn’t it be neat to have that kind of excitement again? Hey, we’re close, with the new Solstice. Now, if only they could duplicate that excitement for the rest of the GM line! Don’t hold your breath.