If you were out and about at all this past car show season, undoubtedly you came across The Stew, the award-winning1954 Studebaker Commandercreation of West Seneca’s Kasia (Kat) Jones. Regular RealRidereaders may remember Kat’s first appearance here: the 1950 Chevy Fleetline rat rod which we wrote about a couple of years ago (see it here at https://buffalocars.com/realrides-1769-061519
This 1951 Pontiac Chieftain Streamlinermarked the final year for GM’s fastback from its division whose cars began life as Oaklands back in 1907 (the Oakland firm was founded in Pontiac, Michigan). The 1952 Chevy Fleetline DeLuxe was the last holdout of this once popular body style. The final Oldsmobile and Cadillac fastbacks were 1950 models, while Buick still offered the Custom Special 2-do
One internet source tells us that a restaurant now sits on the former site of Higgins Ford in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. That’s the dealership whose emblem is just below the trunk lid of today’s RealRide, a 1965 Ford Fairlane 500seen over the summer parked outside of an All Ford car show at West-Herr Ford in Hamburg. The styling for the ’65 Fairlane lineup was a one-year only eff
I’m pretty sure that black bumpers weren’t a factory-installed choice back when this 1967 Volkswagen 1300was new. But an in-dash radio was. And VW devoted most of a brochure page to it, whose story began “Ever thought what a lot of difference it can make to have a car radio?”Mostly tongue-in-cheek, the reasons spanned the gamut from “On the way to the office you can t
I’ve been to a slew of car shows/cruise nights in 2021. And thinking back on them all I have to say that this 1967 Rolls-Royce Mulliner Park Wardfixed-head coupé is probably the handsomest car I came across all year. These cars were not mass-produced, but rather were “coachbuilt,” that is, made to order by the H.J. Mulliner Park Ward coach builders in London. They were bas
The roofline on this 1950 Chevrolet Styline Special Sport Coupe is one of four different profiles offered that year on Chevy’s two door models (five if you count the convertible). Also available were the sedan (notchbacked Styline and fastback Fleetline), and the two-door hardtop in the Bel Air series. (See the four closed versions below.)The roofline on these sport coupes is the most close-
You’re probably wondering what’s going on with the windshield of this 1948-49 Hudson(the two model years were identical save for the VINs). Well, the guy inside the Buffalogarage where it was parked outside of when we first saw it on a Slow Roll bicycle ride this past summer told us that he’d planned on putting a set of eyes in there to mimic Doc Hudson, one of the characters in
Yesterday we featured a RealRidefrom a couple of years ago which underwent a wheel/tire change since we first saw it. In a similar story, we photographed this 1950 Dodge Wayfarerin a North Tonawandadriveway a few weeks ago, complete with the original poverty hubcaps, a set of newer whitewalls, and a current Arizona Historical license plate. We drove by a week or two later and saw the car up on jac
We ran into Middleport’s Bob Smith and his newly acquired 1979 Ford LTDover the summer at the All-Ford car show at West-Herr Ford in Hamburg. Showing a mere 13k on the odometer, Mr. Smith’s LTD still sports a window decal (below)featuring the dealership and salesman’s names involved in its initial purchase back in the day. That’s something I’ve never seen before. Thes
We came across this 1971 Saab 96 V-4a month or so ago in Youngstown. Volvo wasn’t the only Swedish car manufacturer to tout its safety-mindedness. “Safety isn’t something you add on like an extra cigarette lighter or a strip of chrome, it has to be built in,”Saab brochure copywriterstold us. Before they were mandated by the U.S. government, Saabs featured “shock-absor