Blue Green Seat Belts

[Mark McDonald <tomswift@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I realize in the grand scheme of things this really a trivial matter.

However, the question of whether or not Imperial seatbelts were black or
blue-green when new is beginning to bug me-- partially because I feel my
personal experience is being disregarded, and partially because I think
it defies logic and seems to suggest, however inadvertently, that
Imperials were not the high quality automobiles we think they were.

I am %99.9 sure that the seltbelts that came in a Imperial with a black
interior were, at least in 1968, as black as black could be.

I say this because I have a distinct personal memory of them.  For a
period of time in the middle 60's, one of my uncles sold Chryslers at J.
Truett Payne in downtown Birmingham, Alabama.  Occasionally, he would
take me into work with him and let me roam around the dealership at will
while he worked.  (I always tried to be a good kid, so the management
put up with this.)  During that time, I'm sure I drove several mechanics
and salespeople crazy asking questions and poking around.  I also must
have crawled in and out of the front and back seat of every Chrysler
product offered from about 1965 to 1968.  I was like a kid let loose in
a candy store-- only my "candy," in those days, was cars.  Newports,
Town & Countrys, 300s, New Yorkers, Imperials-- I literally spent hours
in the seats of these cars, imagining I was driving them down the road
and studying their interiors.  I remember the bronze trim, I remember
the toggle switches, I remember the fake stitching around the edges of
the sunvisors and armrests.  If I could put it into words, I could even
tell you what these cars SMELLED like.  (I will tell you a Plymouth
smelled different than a Chrysler, and all Chryslers smelled different
than a GM product.  All GM products had more or less the same smell,
oddly enough.)

>From this I can tell you that the seatbelts in a black Imperial were
indeed black.  And not just any black, but a very deep, lustrous,
glossy, almost shiny black.  Imagine the sheen of a rayon or polyester
blend shirt and you have kind of an idea of the shine of a new seatbelt
then-- they did not look the way they do now: dull, dusty, frayed, flat
or matte finish, etc.  They were also a lot more pliable, like the
seatbelts in a new car.  Age has stiffened them-- as well as changed the
color.

I don't know how many different colors of belts were made, but if you
ordered a burgundy interior in your '68 Imperial you got burgundy
seatbelts.  If you ordered a brown interior, you got brown belts.  If
you ordered a green interior, you got green belts.  It is inconceivable
to me that if you ordered a black interior in your Imperial you would
get blue-green belts.

I ask you: why?

Why would they do this?  Are we saying it was beyond the technology of
the day to produce a black seatbelt?  Are we saying the stylists and the
guys on the assembly line were colorblind?  Are we saying Chrysler
didn't care about matching the seatbelts to the color of the interior?
I mean, think about it.  This was Chrysler Corporation's TOP OF THE LINE
car.  And it came with blue-green seatbelts???  It makes no sense.

I'm not an expert on fabrics and dyes, but I do know that a true,
colorfast black is a very hard color to create in a fabric.  If you have
an old sweater or shirt that was black when new, take a look at it
today.  Chances are it's faded, and may have a slight reddish or
greenish tint to it.  And fading can be quite uniform.  I have
personally seen maroon seatbelts that have faded to an almost tan
color-- but I'm not concluding from that that tan seatbelts were issued
with maroon interiors.

I know we can't step into Mr. Peabody's Way Back machine and go back and
settle this matter to everybody's satisfaction, but I hope we can give
Chrysler a little more credit than that!

Mark M