1939 Cadillac LaSalle & 1954 Oldsmobile 98

      Momma and I decided to go out for breakfast this morning and upon arriving at Nick's Restaurant we discovered a grand old lady in the parking lot out front...

      It is a 1939 Cadillac LaSalle with a unique two-tone paint job. It is owned by a woman and she told us the car is powered by a 409 cubic inch Chevrolet engine with a 4-speed automatic transmission. The entire running gear of the car has been taken from the donor Chevy and the interior is re-done in a horsehair type material similar to the original stuff.

     The owner also told us she has the original bumpers, but while they were being chromed she became accustomed to this look and simply left them off. Sure fire clue to it being a woman's car is Betty Boop on the trunk lid. Really a clean car and I would expect to see it in the car show in downtown Denison tomorrow ( Saturday September 7th).
      On the way home we had to make a stop at the local pharmacy to pick-up a prescription and look what we found in their parking lot..

       This is a 1954 Oldsmobile 98 four-door sedan. Among the General Motors family Cadillac held on to its straight-eight cylinder engine for the longest and Chevrolet clung to its six-cylinder blue-flame engine until 1955. It was up to Buick and Oldsmobile to showcase the V8 engine and they did so with gusto. Growing up, my next door neighbor had a 1951 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 with glass-pak mufflers and it sounded so sweet when he cranked that jewel up in the mornings.

  
   Oldsmobile was America's oldest car maker for the longest time, but all good things must come to an end, and so it was for Olds just after the turn of the century. General Motors, having eliminated Pontiac and Oldsmobile, is trying to market Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet, and GMC Trucks for the foreseeable future.
   The Olds 98 pictured above looks to be a daily driver and shows some of its 59 years of age on close inspection. I especially like the original 1954 license plate. In Texas if you can find a vintage license plate the same year as your car you don't have to pay a licensing fee,...but you do have to have a yearly safety inspection sticker.
   In this day and age of aerodynamic cars that all look alike...it is good to see a couple of older models to show how cars used to have personalities of their own.