I haven't written much about cars that came out before my birth year of 1964 like this 1951 Plymouth Cambridge Club Coupe. I think that's partly because I lack perspective although when I was a kid a family across the street from my family and I drove a 1952 Pontiac. I thought that big musty smelling tank was ugly and impossibly old-timey looking; it was like something out of a movie. Funny now to think that thing was only twenty-years old at the time. My daily driver is a twenty-year old Chevrolet Monte Carlo, my wife drives a twenty-five year old Lexus and we don't think they're that old looking. Maybe we're just kidding ourselves.
What's more there aren't many pre-1960 designs I find that interesting to blog about. I find most of them, there are rare exceptions, about as interesting as today's glut of look-a-like crossovers. New Years Resolution number one - find more cars to write about that I really don't like.
In many ways the first post war models that GM and Ford rolled out between 1948 and 1949 made Chrysler's first post-war efforts look as dated as what Elvis Presley did to Frank Sinatra and the like. Much of that we can blame on K.T. Kellar whom became president of Chrysler after Walter P. Chrysler passed away in 1940. His styling acumen ran counter to not only anything GM and Ford were doing but to Walter P.'s sensibilities as well. Kellar of the opinion that cars should accommodate people rather than the far-out ideas of designers. That auspice led to the edict that passengers should be able to wear a fedora comfortably while driving one of their wares like our Plymouth here.
That explains the awkward dimensions of a car that appears to be taller than it is wider. Someone wearing a stove-pipe hat could drive this without having to remove it. Sorry, fans. This is one ugly car.
It's amazing that there's just a decade between this thing and the "downsized", far-out, compact-based full-size cars that Plymouth and Dodge rolled out for model year 1961. I'm big fan of those crazy-arse cars. especially the '61's although Chrysler toned them down each subsequent year until they were more or less homogenized into looking like everything else on the road.
More amazing than that, actually, is there's just six years between this Plymouth and the game changing 1957 models that sent General Motors into a literal styling tizzy. Even 1955 Plymouth models appear to be jet-age in comparison to this fuddy-duddy, three-on-tree flat-head. I wonder what buyers of this thought of Plymouth's that hurriedly caught up with GM designs later in the decade. Were they drawn to them or did they want their fedora back?
Created by Walter Chrysler in 1928 as a better equipped alternative to GM and Ford's low-priced models, long gone Plymouth was a perennial number three in sales. Not a bad place to be. Sadly, while Plymouth held onto third-place even after they launched these cars as their first post-war models in 1949, they slipped out of third come 1952 and never really recovered. Chrysler dropped the brand after model year 2001.
I found this for sale about an hour from our home here on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio with an ungodly asking price of just under $13,000. Here's the listing. If you're interested, comment below about what it is you find compelling about this car that you'd consider dropping that much money on it. I'm not judging, I'm just curious.
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