Memories made in miniature: The influence of tailfins
Old Cars reader, Ron Glasgow tells his story on how his dad’s 1957 Chevrolet Nomad station wagon has left a lifelong impression on him.
One might say that the new car bought by my father in January 1957 would have an influence upon my interests as I grew older. That influence would be proven some years later on a hill above the dairy barns on the family farm (that will be explained later). A picture of me standing next to Dad’s car was taken in the spring of 1962, when I was 11 years old. To this day, I still can’t explain why I was wearing a business suit in that photo, but I still have those license plates, because I collected them from an early age.
Dad’s car was a 1957 Chevrolet Nomad station wagon painted Tropical Turquoise with an Imperial Ivory top. He took the car for a test drive from a dealership about 10 miles south of our farmhouse. Puzzling still after all these years is why my dad bought that car. He loved station wagons due to their storage capability. Farmers are like that — they prefer vehicles that can carry a lot of stuff around — stuff sometimes known as “junk.” Dad traded in his 1954 Chevy “woodie” wagon to get this Nomad. The ’54 had a six-cylinder engine as Chevy didn’t start installing V-8s until 1955. One reason why Dad liked this Nomad was because it had so much more power than his 1954 station wagon. However, I recall the main reason he bought this car was because of its heater. Let’s see: January in Upstate New York, a dairy farmer who spent a lot of time outside driving a tractor (old style, no cab) while pulling a manure spreader in blizzard conditions. Brrr! My hands shake just thinking about it. So, the Nomad’s heater convinced Dad to buy that car.
What doesn’t make sense to this day is that he hated two-door cars. Except for the Nomad, every other car he owned after his Ford Model A days had four doors to better access the area behind the driver’s seat. However, I’m thankful to this day that he bought this car.
I drove the Nomad on our rural back roads before I obtained my driver’s license (no police cars on dirt roads in the sticks at that time). When I got my driver’s license at age 16, I began driving it to school every day. Fun, because my dad was a school bus driver, like most farmers, and I road his bus for 11 years. Being at his next-to-last stop before getting to school, all the seats were taken and I ended up in the seat right behind his driver’s seat. That enhanced my desire to drive to school. Other student drivers loved the look of the Nomad and that increased my interest in it, as did its tailfins.
Because of that newfound love, I began collecting 1957 Chevys. People would often give them to me because they were just sitting around, but others I paid $10 to buy. I would take that Oliver 880 tractor that Dad used to pull the manure spreader and tow the 1957 Chevys home and park them on the hill of the cow pasture. I had 17 cars lined up on the hill, and all were 1957 Chevys, except someone gave me a 1956 Chevy Nomad (how could I pass that up?). It was so much fun for a high school kid: collecting, um, junk. What was I going to do with them? Ask any high school senior and their answer would be, “Um, I dunno, I just like collecting them.” That worked until the local zoning enforcement officer cited my father for having junk cars on land meant for agriculture, and I had to get rid of the Chevys. When word got out that I was getting rid of those cars for free, it took less than two weeks for them to disappear. After college and working in Indiana, I returned to central New York, bringing three ’57 Chevys with me (I hid them behind the cow barns). Then I became the local zoning officer.
As I built my house on the farm, I had some storage issues and Dad’s old Nomad became buried in snow one year. The next year, I stored it in our ca.-1800 cow barn.
There were no problems with moisture in the barn, just issues with pigeons other small birds and mice. Birds would build nests above the Nomad and their excrement fell out of the nests and began piling up and ruining the paint. That car has been through a lot! After cleaning it up, I began storing it in my house’s basement. Life began to improve for Dad’s old car.
As a regular subscriber to Old Cars, I started writing articles and providing the publication with other submissions, such as “Weathered Wheels” (one of my ’57 Chevy parts cars) and “Wreck of the Week” (my dad’s wrecked 1928 Model A roadster). An article published in the Feb. 1, 2023, issue had a picture of my Nomad parked on the hill overlooking the valley near our central New York home, which has glacial terrain, meaning hills and valleys. I wrote “The hills are alive, with the sound of… ‘See the USA in a Chevrolet!’”
That picture caught the attention of fellow Old Cars subscriber Jeff Barry, who’s from Las Vegas. His hobby was assembling model cars. One kit he had not yet put together was a 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, and my picture inspired him to build that model kit to replicate my car in color and deterioration. What a brilliant job Jeff did in assembling that model car kit together and coloring it to match my deteriorated full-size Nomad! Kudos to Jeff for replicating my car and sending it to me for my collection.
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