Car of the Week: 1964 Super Pontiac service car

Meanwhile, Pontiac’s full-sized Bonnevilles, Catalinas, Safari station wagons and Star Chiefs snared 480,135 buyers by continuing to team their trademark “Wide Track” stance with width-accentuating stacked headlamps and muscular “Coke bottle” rear fenders. Just 448 Pontiacs out of this impressive total were turned into funeral vehicles, limousines, ambulances or hearse/ambulance combinations at Superior Coach Corp.’s “Southern Division” plant in Kosciusko, Miss. Only one of those Pontiacs sent to Kosciusko was evidently configured as a 146-in. extended-wheelbase Model 208 Service Car. It was purchased by the Bear Funeral Home of Churchville, Va. 

There was a time, many years ago, that coachbuilder-constructed service cars such as this “unicorn Bonneville” were commonly counted on to handle less-ceremonial but still-essential mortuary jobs. Such jobs included “first call” duty to a hospital or private home where the newly deceased was reverently placed upon a Ferno cot; a run to the railway station to pick up a rough box, burial vault or casket; or the transport of chairs and tents to the cemetery for the graveside service. These service vehicles, given their “workhorse” status, were most often based on inexpensive, factory-produced Ford, Chevrolet or Pontiac sedan deliveries that were sometimes given a wheelbase stretch and a second pair of side doors by a coachbuilder. However, there are many photos from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s documenting how more deeply pocketed funeral homes sometimes sprang for Cadillac, Buick or Packard service cars matching their front-line hearses. Irrespective of chassis, the most common exterior trimmings on service cars were chrome wreaths placed on the rear side doors and/or quarter panels where a hearse, ambulance or hearse/ambulance combination coach would have windows. Horizontal moldings were also typically fitted above or below beltline level to frame or accentuate the owner’s nameplate.

As mortuary service cars were expected to toil (and inevitably did) before their final dispatch to a junkyard or ignominious, if life-extending, second careers working for plumbers and house painters, it’s hardly surprising their survival ratio is infinitesimal versus other types of professional vehicles. Another contributor to their rarity is that these coach-built creations were costlier than the steel-bodied station wagons automakers started producing in quantity during the 1950s “Baby Boom” and expansion of suburbia. First calls, simply put, could be handled less expensively but just as effectively by Pontiac Safari, Ford Country Sedan or Chrysler Town & Country wagons fitting cot hooks, casket roller racks and vinyl tops trimmed with wreaths or landau bars. Though full-sized, factory-built station wagons themselves disappeared from U.S. carmakers’ lineups after 1996, today’s funeral homes employ Chrysler minivans and commercial vans such as the Ford Transit and Mercedes Sprinter in equivalent ways. 

This all surely explains why this vibrant blue Bonneville so excited Professional Car Society members when its then-owner, Mark Ward, brought it to the PCS Mid-Atlantic Chapter’s Feb. 10, 2024, Micro-Meet in Mount Airy, Md., and the PCS’ 2024 International Meet Concours staged at York, Pa. These appearances fulfilled fervent hopes expressed a quarter-century earlier by Walt McCall, former editor of the PCS’ The Professional Car publication. In 1998, McCall had ran front and rear quarter photos of it with an “OUT OF THE ORDINARY” tagline in promoting its offering at $5,500 by Todd Schrach of Heritage Coach of Norristown, Pa. “Hopefully, this rare coach will find an appreciative home in some PCS member’s garage,” Walt declared in the accompanying caption. He re-affirmed his interest in what was likely the last extended-wheelbase Pontiac service car ever built by Superior by running a side-view shot of it on the cover of TPC ’s third-quarter 2000 issue. “We don’t know if it ever found a buyer, but it should have,” Walt wrote at that time in reference to the ad Heritage had placed two years prior.

The tale of how this unusual Pontiac ultimately graced two PCS gatherings during 2024 should start on principle with the long-established and still-extant family firm that ordered it new and kept it in their possession for 34 years. The Bear Funeral Home, of Churchville, Va., serves a bucolic Augusta County community of 195 residents, according to the 2020 United States Census. It is situated several miles northwest of Staunton and the Interstate 81 corridor. The funeral home’s comprehensive website at www.bearfuneralhome.com recalls Christian Bear (1783-1847) and his parents, Andrew and Veronica (Graff) Bear, were pioneers of Swiss heritage who settled in the Shenandoah Valley (Rockingham County, initially) after venturing into Virginia from Lancaster and York Counties in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. Christian, the eldest of 13 children, moved slightly farther south to neighboring Augusta County in 1809 to manage his father-in-law’s plantation and establish a woodworking business that soon built coffins and performed other funeral-related services. Quite a few of his customers paid by bartering flour, sugar, coffee, lumber, cloth and livestock in lieu of cash; one 1818 transaction archived in Christian’s early account books records how he once traded a coffin for one-and-a-half packs of clover seed. Christian Bear, Jr. (1818-1888) — the youngest of eight children born to Christian Bear and his wife Elizabeth (Hottle) — followed his father into the funeral trade while also maintaining his interests in woodworking, farming and wool processing. Some of Christian Bear’s descendants still live in the home he built from brick fired on-site in 1852; it is this handsome building that appears in the background of this feature’s 1998 photos.

Third-generation undertaker Ephraim Baxter Bear (1842-1902), meanwhile, is esteemed by his descendants as the 18th person in Virginia given a license by the State Board of Embalmers (on Aug. 18, 1894). He was another avid woodworker who continued to make his own caskets in the family’s water wheel-powered mill despite purchasing others from newly operating funeral supply houses. Ephraim’s sons, William Theodore Bear (1877-1970) and Frank Alexander Bear (1885-1958), anchored their family firm’s fourth generation after graduating from the Renouard Training School for Embalmers in New York City in 1902 and 1908, respectively. “W.T.” was also a building contractor who constructed numerous Churchville-area schools, businesses and homes, while Frank was a World War I Corps of Engineers veteran and a skilled woodworker and furniture maker in his own right. When the family’s old mill was partly dismantled in 1926, it usefully furnished brick for a new funeral home building that’s since received numerous additions and improvements, including lanterns sourced from the firm’s horse-drawn hearses.

The original owner of the 1964 Superior Pontiac Service Car being profiled in this feature was Frank’s son and fifth-generation mortician William Theodore “Bill” Bear II, a Cincinnati College of Embalming graduate who joined the family firm in 1947 and remained integral to its operations until his 2015 passing at the age of 90. His son, William Theodore Bear III (“Will”), himself a Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science alumnus whom today stewards what is now a six-generation family concern with his sisters, Judith “Judi” Bear Delp and Jill Bear Bussiere, cannot say for sure if it was his father, Bill, or his great-uncle, W.T., who originally ordered the Pontiac from Superior; he did recall, however, it was most often used to carry flowers to the cemetery versus handling first calls. 

Exactly why this Bonneville was finished as a service car with a crinkle-painted black top, Art Deco-style quarter panel wreaths and opaque rear side door window opening fillers remains a mystery no Bear family member living today can resolve. It was such an unusual thing to do by 1964 that Thomas A. McPherson’s definitive 1995 Specialty Vehicle Press book “Superior: The Complete History” doesn’t list a stand-alone production figure for a Model 208. As its rear compartment fits floor-mounted casket rollers and a driver’s side wheelhouse cot bar, but no attendants’ seats, its completion was likely counted amongst the 25 full-time funeral coaches or 147 part-time hearse/ambulance combinations Superior built in Kosciusko on extended Pontiac chassis that model year (it also built an additional 67 long-wheelbase Pontiac ambulances). While Superior’s 123-in. unaltered-wheelbase Pontiac Consort portfolio also catalogued a Model 308 service car whose 1964 retail price of $6,360 was well below the $7,825 quoted for a longer 208, it also found few takers (a stock Bonneville Safari Wagon started at $3,633 that model year, and equivalent six-seat Catalina Safaris were even cheaper at $3,203). Both Pontiac wagons left a lot of money on the table that a funeral director could use to buy a casket roller rack or have a casket table built by his local body shop!

While there are regrettable gaps in this service car’s stewardship history after Bill Bear sent it to Heritage for its first resale in 1998, longtime Mount Airy, Md., PCS member Steve Lichtman recalls, “Lew Wallace, and his brother Leo, owned it at one time. Lew was a past PCS member from Dover, Pennsylvania. I also met an earlier owner of this car, but don’t remember his name.” Mark Ward, meanwhile, recalled, “I was a PCS member in 1998 who wanted to buy this car (when it was advertised in TPC that year), but hesitated and it slipped through my hands. When I saw it again on Craigslist in or around 2015, I wound up buying it for $11,500 from (former Whitehouse, N.J. PCS member) Jon Ponulak and his brother, whose first name escapes me. While it was billed as a good driving car, it was actually far from roadworthy until I had its three-speed Roto-Hydramatic transmission rebuilt and replaced the car’s fuel lines, brake lines, master cylinder and gas tank.” The interior, at least, “was in excellent condition as was the original 389-cid Pontiac V-8,” which easily handles the added avoirdupois of Superior’s coachwork thanks to how its four-barrel carburetor and 10.25:1 compression ratio put 306 brake horsepower on tap. 

Conversations Mark Ward had with Bear family members confirmed this Bonneville was indeed “ordered blue to match the Cadillac (hearse) they were using at the time. The ’64 color originally used was, I believe, Pontiac Yorktown Blue.” His post-purchase re-paint of its still otherwise-original coachwork “ended up looking more like Nassau Blue, which is much brighter than the Yorktown.” Specific hues aside, this solidly established that the car was specially ordered as opposed to being purchased already built from a coach dealer’s inventory, in concert with the black paint Mark found in its firewall and door hinge areas (1960s Superior factory photos corroborating that the front clip/cowl/chassis units supplied by Pontiac originally had black or dark-hued primer hoods and front fenders). In our correspondence, Mark naturally declared himself “pleased to be the caretaker for this Pontiac and am truly taken back in a great way regarding the attention given her,” thanks largely to how “it differs from many pro-cars as it is neither a limousine, combination coach or landau hearse.”

Shocking as it was to learn while this story was being prepared for Old Cars that Mark Ward had passed away on Dec. 14, 2025, at the age of 74, it was heartening to hear his 1964 Superior Pontiac Model 208 already has a new owner proudly sharing Mark’s Maryland State Police affiliation. 

James Laisure details he retired as a sergeant back in 2016 after 26 years of service with the MSP, while his affection for Pontiacs evidently got sparked by the 1966 GTO his father bought new in December of 1965.

“He had [the GTO] until he went into the Army and was sent to Vietnam in 1967. While he was overseas, my grandfather was involved in an accident in the GTO and he sold it. I never got to see the car, because it was before I was born, but my father was very fond of that car and he has talked about it ever since. I’m sure hearing stories about that car since I was little has had some influence over the years.” 

Turning to the circumstances that led to his purchase of this 1964 Superior Pontiac, James added, “I knew Mark from working with him at the Maryland State Police years ago. I knew he had a car collection, but not the specifics. I’ve owned a few older hearses in the past and I was talking with a mutual friend (who) told me Mark had an older hearse and he was thinking about selling it. I had an ’80s Cadillac hearse at the time and was looking for something more classic.”

After James saw Mark at the MSP’s November 2025 retiree breakfast and asked him about it, “he showed me a picture and I fell in love. I thought the color was fantastic! That was the first thing I noticed. We made a deal and were working on a plan to do the transaction and paperwork. Unfortunately Mark got sick and we lost him before we could complete everything. His wife (Donna), who is as great a person as Mark, completed everything in her name and I took possession at the beginning of this year.” Aside from the color, James also liked how this Superior “wasn’t a Cadillac. I love the Cadillac coaches, but I was looking for something different. Mark’s car definitely ticked all the boxes!”

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