Not class

(Photo by Richard Lentinello.)

The February 2012 issue of my Hemmings Classic Car magazine celebrates the 1958 automotive offerings as some of the greatest cars of all time.
I beg to differ. I always felt General Motors’ 1958 offerings were among the WORST they ever sold.

A ’59 Olds, the ugliest car ever.

Photo by BobbaLew.

The ugliest Chevrolet of all time.

A ’58 Plymouth Fury.

A ’58 Ford.

Not the worst. That’s 1959, when General Motors trotted out the 1959 Oldsmobile, what I call the ugliest car of all time, and the 1959 Chevrolet, what I call the ugliest Chevrolet ever.
Although a good friend of mine disputes my ugliest car choice. He says it’s the Pontiac Aztek, and I sort of agree. Too bad he wasn’t born yet in 1959.
There were cars in the 1958 model-year that looked pretty good, like the ’58 Plymouth and the ’58 Ford.
Plymouth finally put four headlights under those gigantic headlight brows, and Ford made their ridiculous 1957 body look pretty good in 1958.
About the only thing wrong with the ’58 Ford was its taillights.
But for 1958, the General made their offerings look awful.
It was a continuation of 1957’s bloated styling.
With almighty dollops of chrome.
In late 1957 I began eighth-grade at Delaware Township High-School, a new high-school meant to accommodate the post-war baby-boom.
(We lived in Delaware Township, although now the school is called Cherry Hill High-School West. [Apparently there is now a Cherry Hill High-School East. —I’m not surprised, our area grew mightily.])
I also did seventh grade there, but at that time only the classroom wing was finished.
1957 is also the year our family moved to northern Delaware, so my father could pursue his new job south of Wilmington.
But I stayed at Delaware Township High-School until Christmas vacation. I stayed with my paternal grandparents in Camden, NJ, and rode the transit-bus out to Erlton (“EARL-tin”), our original home-town, so I could continue at Delaware Township High-School.
My first day in my northern Delaware high-school was their last day before Christmas vacation, also before beginning the new year in another new school, again an attempt to meet the post-war baby-boom.
Before our family moved, I rode bicycle with friends out along Haddon Ave. west of Haddonfield (“ha-din-field;” as in “had”), NJ.
Haddonfield is an old Revolutionary-War town just south of where we lived in Erlton.
We rode up where Haddon Ave. passed over the old Pennsylvania Railroad bypass to Philadelphia.
Adjacent were car-dealers, mainly a Buick dealer.
The dealer had new Buicks in his lot under fabric covers to hide styling.
Those Buicks were among the silliest Buicks ever, the waffle-iron grille.
Styling was gigantic and ridiculous, even more bloated than the ’57 Buick, which also looked ridiculous.
The cars were behind a chainlink fence, so we couldn’t raise the fabric covers.
All we could do was peer inside and imagine what the car looked like.
We could see a smidgeon of the waffle-iron grille.
Then I saw the 1958 Chevrolet, a travesty compared to the fabulous Tri-Chevys of 1955-1957.
Spare lines had been lost in a deluge of bloated sheetmetal.
New was the Impala, based on the larger GM chassis.
Not bad looking if that’s what you wanted, sweeping lines and gull-wings.
Worse yet were the standard Chevys, the Bel air, Two-Ten, and One-Fifty.
The Tri-Chevy ruined by bloated styling.
I was devastated.
The elegant Tri-Chevy was gone.
The magazine features two ’58 Oldsmobiles (above).
Sorry, but in my humble opinion the ’58 Olds was a disaster.
Bloated styling and ridiculous lines.
And gobs of chrome.
This from the brand that brought us the fabulous ’49 Olds.
Essentially a Chevrolet with a modern overhead-valve V8 engine.
The motor everyone wanted to wrench into their hotrods.
That is, until Chevrolet introduced its fabulous SmallBlock V8 for the 1955 model-year.
How depressing to think of these fabulous motors dragging around all that sheetmetal.
For example, a SmallBlock in a ’58 Chevy.
I remember riding around in a ’58 SmallBlock driven by a guy whose parents belonged to our church.
Later this guy got a yellow-and-white two-tone ’55 Chevy SmallBlock Bel air two-door sedan.
He was only a high-school part-timer, so he’d leave school early.
Every day on leaving he’d rev it up through the gears (it was three-speed column-shift) in front of our school.
I was in ecstasy.
I’d drop everything in the class I was in, and listen to the sound.
“There goes Bates!” wound to the moon.
The ’58 Oldsmobiles pictured have a 371 cubic-inch version of the Rocket V8 motor.
It had to be that large to drag around all that sheetmetal. And the gobs of chrome, and that grille-mouth that just doesn’t work.
Compare the grille-mouth of a ’55 Chevy, simple and basic.
The ’58 Oldsmobile was a styling disaster, although not as disgusting and silly as the ’59.

• “The General” is General Motors.
• The 1955-1957 Chevrolets are called the “Tri-Chevys.”
• “Erlton” is the small suburb of Philadelphia in south Jersey where I lived until I was 13. Erlton was founded in the ‘30s, named after its developer, whose name was Earl.