The Family Car: Know your decades, Part II

This post is late - sorry for the delay.  I wish I could give you some amazing reason, but it was just life that got in the way.

Today, lets look at cars of the 1930's through 1942, when U.S. automobile production "ended for the duration" of WWII.

In the 1930's, there are a a few milestone years: 1932, 1934, 1936 and 1939.

1932 is common seen as the "end" of the Classical era in car designs, and the bottom of the depression.   What I mean by classical car design is that until the end of the 1932 model year, cars had been pretty much what they had been all along.  A boxy passenger compartment, mated to an engine box, four bicyclelike fenders over four wheels.  At the front of the engine compartment was an upright radiator.

Out back, there was still no semblance of a luggage trunk as we know it, but there could be an actual "trunk" sitting on a metal rack, like this red 1932 Huppmobile.  For all of its beauty, this "Hupp" is a rather basic looking car for the era.  Can you spot the one thing that makes Hupp's from this era immediately recognizable?

It's not the color matching trunk.

ANSWER: Its the distinctive Circle H radiator cap.  Other makes used women, goddesses of speed and motion.  Hupp used the Circle H, design by Raymond Lowey.

But again, lets stress that 1932 was the last year that most cars were bolt upright.  Beginning in 1933, American cars began to acquire streamlining.  Fenders behind the front wheels developed skirts, radiators began to recline. The passenger compartments were less up right, and the lines softer.

Everything was evolving nicely along when Harley Earle and GM unleashed this:

The 1934 LaSalle almost didn't happen.  GM almost killed the make off in 1933.  But the 1934 LaSalle was a game changer, just as its 1927 model was. But under that streamlined body was a passenger compartment that still was using wood - most notable in the doors.

Still, compared to the Huppmobile in the preceding image, the LaSalle was light years ahead of Hupp, Ford, too for that matter:

Not one to follow anyone, Chrysler came out with its streamlined Airflow series:

Perhaps the "Airflow" was too, too much.  Your ancestors either loved it, or hated it.  Most hated it, and Chrysler had to come up with a "B" plan, the "Airstream".


1936 is important because by this point in the arch, with the exception of station wagons - which were considered "trucks", most autos were now made with all steel.  The only thing wooden in the majority of cars on the highway were the painted wood grained dashboards in front of drivers.

Why does this matter?  One of the things that literally went away across the board were the canvas coated central roofs on cars.  That right, the center of the early steel car bodies on the road prior to this point were wooden box frames covered in canvas.  Car owners had to coat this canvas with a dressing to make them weather proof.

This is a 1934 Chevrolet Master series sedan.  If you look at the roof your see the dark canvas top.  There didn't retracts - they were in place all of the time.  Well by 1936 this disappeared.  GM call the new all steel roofs "turret tops.   And its important because deaths from accidents dropped in a drastic fashion.  If a car was hit and rolled, the chases that anyone in the car would be ejected through the roof of a sedan dropped to virtually zero.   And the car companies promoted this.

If you compare the two Chevrolet's you can see that in the span of two years, cars became safer, more streamlined.  And not the headlights.  In 1930, the headlights were down in front of the grills, attached to bars.  Then they moved to either side of the radiator shroud.  In 1939, they dropped back down again as hoods widened, and the space between the fenders and the radiator opening began to disappear.

 So, as you can see, the changes in cars between 1930 and 1939 were fairly amazing.  What started the decade as a legacy look from the early 1900's evolved into an almost full envelop design.  And this form continued to evolve through 1942.  Front fenders raced toward the rear of the car, running boards went away.   1940, Oldsmobile introduced the first automotive transmission, Hydromatic.  Nash introduced "Weather Eye", the first system to heat, cool, filter air inside the passenger compartment. Things were looking up as the family car evolved from a machine into necessary luxury.

And then World War II hit.

Following the declaration of war in December, 1941, Cars for consumers dried up.  Automakers, like Ford, GM, Studebaker, Nash, Hudson, Chrysler and Packard were converting to full war production. But some car production continued, for necessity buys (the government, farmers, doctors) through the first two months of 1942.  These ares were stripped of ALL chrome trim, save for the bumpers.

If you notice on this 1942 Chevrolet everything has been painted, save for the bumper.  These cars are called blackout cars.

Yesterday, we started with a crude cycle car in 1900.  Forty two years later, the family care was fit and finished.  No other country on the earth embraced the automobile like American's did.  And in the years after WWII, the industry boomed, before crashing in the 1970s.

And that is a basic introduction to the family car.

On Monday, we'll ID a car that came in through email and show you what we look for when we see a station wagon from 1969.