For a teenage boy growing up in northwest Arkansas in the late 1950s, getting a car was a big deal. Getting a drivers license was like a rite of passage. One felt like he was passing from the little stage of life onto the big stage of life.
Graduating from high school was a pretty big deal, too, as was going to college. But getting your own car was a big deal.
We boys used to talk cars a lot. Having a sharp car was a status symbol.
If you had a car, but it wasn’t “sharp,” then like as not you were thinking on ways to make it sharper. Our sense of style was different back then. One of the ways we converted a car into a sleek, sharp car was to lower it in the rear, and put on rear fender skirts. A 1949-1951 Ford or a 1949-1951 Chevylooked really fine when outfitted with fender skirts and lowered about four inches in the rear.
Of course, you needed white sidewall tires, and the car needed to be perfectly clean, freshly waxed and shiny. If you could see yourself in the finish, all the better.
Then, the interior of the car needed to be in good shape and stylish. If we had some money, you might cover the seats with white naugahyde leather. If you didn’t have much money, about the best you could do was some pretty good seat covers. Getting the seat covers put on without wrinkles was a challenge, but we spent time on it and usually came out with a good-looking installation. A rubber floor mat was still OK back then, but it was better tohave carpet. That was more money and more challenge in those days.
The motive for all of this was to have a sharp car to show off to your friends, and it didn’t hurt if your girl friend likedit, too.
The real boy stuff of a car is actually not the outside appearance or the interior style; the real guy stuff is under the hood and under the floor. By the late 1950s, it was pretty important for a car to have lots of go-power; especially that it accelerated quickly, passed other cars quickly with a surge of power and sounded classy as it did so. The sound of the motor was very important in having a classy car. Just as boys like to make deep, throaty sounds when they talk or “holler,” (to holler means shout) we boys liked a car to have a deep, throaty sound when we turned up the power.
One way to get that sound was to replace our old stock muffler with a good straight-through glasspack muffler. Glasspacks tuned the sound, taking away the bad part of the loud, but leaving a smooth, deep, throaty rumble.
Back in the early ’50s, when the boys started getting cars, many of them had 10-year-old Chevys. The Chevy guys started tailoring the sound of their cars by what we called “splittin’ the manifold.” That meant removing the exhaust manifold from the engine, sawing it into two pieces, filling in the holes at the sawcut, and adding a new exhaustoutlet to the rear piece.
Then you added an exhaust pipe and a muffler and tail pipe, and, kazam! you had twin pipes!
Listening to twin pipes on a ’51 Chevy was way better than listening to the Everly Brothers inmy opinion! My brother Ben kind of inherited our family’s 1947 Fleetline Chevy about the time I got my first car. He split the manifold, put on twin glasspacks, and had the old car really making music. For us boys, one advantage to having twin pipes on a Chevy was that when you revved it up to about 55 miles per hour in second gear, the pipes would “rack off” with a really loud splatting sound. It was purt near glorious! and it could really wake up the neighborhood. If your object was to be heard and seen, twin glasspacks on a Chevy 6 was the way to go!
Alas, all this glory didn’t apply to me. My first car was a 1949 Pontiac four-door six-cylinder sedan, brown. And, as we used to say, “It was wore to a frazzle!” I was in college at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and I needed a car so the folks didn’t have to make a trip to Fayetteville to take me back and forth.
Dad found a friend at Pea Ridge who had this old Pontiac he would sell for $200. I wasn’t much into being a cool dude in those days, and I didn’t mind thinking practical, and even $200 was pretty much to spend on a car at the time. In those days, going to college with a new car was unthinkable, at least for us, although once I got to Fayetteville I began noticing that some of the students had Jaguars, Austin-Healys and MGs. Those guys must have grown up in the lap of luxury!
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 08/17/2011