One
thing that is starting to really gripe me the trend to putting fender
skirts on any with four wheels, especially if it’s from the 50’s through
the early 60’s. back in the day they were mainly worn by cars that also
featured continental kits, dual (often finned) rear mounted antennae,
Appleton spotlights and the ever popular animal tails streaming from them
antennae. In extreme cases there the headlights featured the upper half
chrome shades with of course the lip on the tops.
Many
of these cars were favored by the guys that appreciated real performance
and had the most powerful engines and heavy duty suspensions. Now tail
dragging convertibles with all this crap I do understand when equipped the
base motors and automatics but show me a good high performance model and
none of that crap was on them. Just very recently there was a 1958
Plymouth Fury with the Golden Commando engine on eBay with fender skirts.
Now I have forgotten about how many of these cars were produced but if
more than five of them had fender skirts I would truly be amazed. And
since there weren’t any convertible Fury’s back then I seriously doubt any
of them had continental’s added. There were some that featured dual, rear
mounted antennae but few of the finned variety.
I
know that fender skirts are easily assign to the nearest trash can with no
real damage to the car itself but those connie’s required hacked bumpers
at the minimum so the work of restoring the car to something truly
representative to the era involves a bit more work. And if the vehicle in
question had to have its original bumper hacked to pieces, well that means
a loss of some original parts. A car is only original
once.
Yes
I can only dream of buying most of the cars I see on-line these days but I
am surprised at how many I see that I don’t even bother to read all the
information on when I see that added junk.
John
Hagen
