Shark’s teeth

Mothers hide yer children! (Photo by Dan Lyons.)

I know I gave up blogging some of my calendars to save time.
But here’s this ’53 Buick glaring at me.
The shark’s-teeth Buicks are the angriest looking Buicks of all.
It started in the ‘40s, an expression of Harley-Earl’s fabulous Y-job of 1938.

Y-job.

After WWII, shark’s teeth, also known as “the waterfall grill,” found their way onto Buicks. My paternal grandfather had one, ’46-’48 or so. It replaced his Packard, which was only the el-cheapo six-inline, not what he wanted. My grandfather wasn’t old money.
His Buick was more what he wanted, although my grandmother poo-pooed it. It wasn’t a Chevrolet.
Starting in 1949 Buick moved beyond its immediate postwar models. They were larger and more substantial.
1953 is the final iteration of that ’49 Buick.
The 1954 Buicks became larger still.
(1953 was also the first year of Buick’s new “Nailvalve” V8, eventually retiring its old “Straight-Eight” overhead-valve inline eight begun in 1931.)
The “Skylark” began as a special custom model, pretty much hand-built at first. (This ’53 is a first Skylark.)
The top window/door-sills dipped; in fact, the doors had to be cut apart and welded back together to get the “dip.”
They follow the lines of GM’s last vestige of prewar styling: where the front fender melds into the rear fender.
I call it the “GM bump.” From 1955 through 1958 all GM cars had it, even lowly Chevrolet.

GM bump on a ’56 Chevy 150.

GM couldn’t leap quickly into a new styling direction. For a few years a body-flare was where running-boards had been.
The ’40 Chevy had running-boards. My parents’s ’41 didn’t; it had the flare.
That dip on a ’55-’57 Chevy looked silly. So did the WrapAround windshield.
But all el-cheapo Chevys had the GM bump; although the wagons didn’t.
This Skylark also has a cut-down windshield, and what could pass as a top-chop. Oldsmobile had a similar offering; it was called the “Fiesta.”
Same deal (more-or-less); custom built, except with a WrapAround windshield the Buick didn’t have.
Standard GM offerings didn’t have that body dip yet, nor the WrapAround, and wouldn’t until the next year.
Chevrolet and Pontiac didn’t have it until 1955.
This Skylark also has full rear-wheel cutouts. The surrounds aren’t skirted, or partially skirted.
The openings expose the full rear tires. Partial skirting partly hid ‘em. You could also get optional fender-skirts that filled the rest of the wheel-well.
Custom-car guys loved ‘em. They made a car look lower by extending the bottom body line. They had to be removed to change a flat.
The original Skylark lasted through the next year: 1954.
I remember a ’54 next to my elementary-school; visible from my fourth-grade teacher’s classroom, craggy old Mrs. Marlin. “Day-dreamin’ again, eh? Division tables for you, Hughes!”
I also note this Skylark lacks Buick’s trademark front-fender portholes.

A four-holer.

“Three-holer or four-holer?” a friend used to ask.
Four portholes was Buick’s RoadMaster, its premium model.
A Buick without portholes? (gasp). They lasted into the ‘60s, were dumped, and are now returning.
“Manny, the portholes are back!”
The Skylark name made it onto Buick’s earliest compact offerings, then the midsize models of the late ‘60s.
Now Buick is perceived as an old man’s car, what Pontiac was before Bunkie Knudson (“newd-sin”).
That waterfall grill continues. Except what’s offered now isn’t as threatening as a shark-teeth Buick.
I also can’t help noticing that biplane (“bye-plain;” not “bip-lane”). The car is 1953, but that biplane is late ‘20s or early ‘30s.