The Family Car: Just what is cousin Pam standing in front of?

Yesterday I announced that one of the things that I hoped would come out of this blog would be the "Family Car" project, or how pictures with people and cars can help you understand more about what is going on in the picture.

So this is family car week, then I'll make Monday's family car day.

The image at the top is my cousin Pam - distantly related, but on both sides of my grandfather's parent's family.  Pam died in November 2011, and her mother, Lucille, the next day.

What the family was left with was a huge box of family photographs, some identified, some not.

We know that Pam in the picture, because we all knew her, sometimes, though, the people in the picture are unfamiliar.  If we look at just what she is wearing, and you didn't know when she was born, most people would see the saddle shoes and think late 1950's or early 1960's.  If we look at the print - a square Kodak color picture, we know its from the 1960's.  And if you don't know cars, well, it could be anything.

With all those factors, there is no one thing to give us an approximate date.

Let me give you a fact: Pam was born in Ohio, in March, 1957.   And we can see that the weather is kind of grey, the trees in the background are just branches and there is a lot of land, so she is in a rural setting.

When I get asked to identify a car, in a picture before 1980, I look at the shape of the body, the character lines in the doors and the panels.  If I can see a tail light, or the front of the car, I can usually tell you with some level of certitude what the Make, Model, and Year is if the car was made after 1930.  Before 1930, things get a bit more difficult.

So lets look at this car, which is what could be termed a blocked 3/4 view.  Its blocked because Pam is standing there, but we are essentially looking at the rear 3/4 of the car.

Here are something things that standout:

1) The car is a hardtop.  Meaning that the when the door window and the rear window are rolled down, there are no pillars  - no structure to the door upper frame around the window or the rear window.  Hardtops generally cost more money than a pillared sedan, and were almost all produced in the U.S. between 1949 and 1976.
2) The car is has a fastback roof line.  That is to say that to the end of the flat portion of the roof, the structure of the rear of roof aims for the edge of the trunk in a long, angle. It doesn't drop down at steep angle like a sedan roof.
3) The car also has an enormous rear wrap around window that comprises most of the fastback roof line.  We can see that by looking through the car and out of the rear window on Pam's left arm.

We can break down the design components even further.

The dark green line, looks almost black shows us the shape of the fast back roof.

The solid blue line shows us the height of the car's "beltline"  And this beltline height is important when looking at cars.  The higher the beltline, the older the car.  This beltline is pretty common for cars made in the mid to late 1960's up through the early 1980's.

Between the beltline and the roof line is the greenhouse.

The blue arrows point to a character line.  Different models years of the same car often times used these lines to break the bulk or mass of a car.  In this case, the character line is "chamfered" making it a transition between two planes instead of just a crease.

And the red circle helps us see how the rear bumper is treated.  This is important because most domestics cars manufactured in the 1960's used the same body for three or four year cycles.

So if we take all of that together, and use a picture guide book like Tad Burrness's amazing "Monstorus Car Spotter's Guide" (which boasted on the cover that it weighed nearly five pounds), we can tell that this car is a Plymouth Barracuda.

But what year?  It is either a 1964-1965, or its a 1966 model car.  The key is is in that chamfer and the rear bumper.

So take a look at these two samples:

 1964 Barracuda

 1965 Barracuda

1966 Barracuda

All three cars share the same greenhouse, and all three share the same basic concept in shape, although the 1966 has one major difference.  The 1964-65 Barracuda's have a large bulge in the rear fenders that carry the wrap around bumper shape.  The 1966 has no bulge and that smooth rear quarter panel with the chamfer that reaches all the way back to the rear bumper, looks like the one in the picture with Pam. 

So we know that the car in the picture is a 1966 Plymouth Barracuda, which, according to the Standard Catalog of American Cars, 1946-1975, officially debuted on November 25, 1965.  By the way, Chrysler's Plymouth division sold 38,029 Barracuda's for the model year, which was the end of the cars three year sales cycle.  For 1967 a totally new Barracuda would emerge. 

So we know that the picture wasn't taken before the end of November, 1965.  But that Pam was born in March, 1957, she looks older than seven and a half in the picture.   

My guess is that this was probably taken between 1967 and 1970, when Pam would have been between ten and 13 years of age.  One thing we know about her family, though.  Pam's family took car of their cars.  It's relatively clean, no rust for a picture taken in either the late fall, winter or early spring in North Central Ohio.     

This may have seemed like it took a lot to go through, but I wanted you to get an idea of what we look at when dating cars in pictures.  

If you have a family picture with a car in it, and your would like it ID'd, use the link on the blog's profile and I would be happy to walk it through with you if we can use the picture on the blog.  

TOMORROW, the Family Car will post tackle an older car, in one of the more famous pictures of the  preWorld War II era.