Posts Tagged 1956
Old Cars Weekly – 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk
Posted by rariccardi in Old Cars Weekly on July 11, 2010
Any Golden Hawk is pretty much a show-stopper these days, and Ladroga’s Studebaker is certainly that. In fact, it’s been to plenty of judged shows, and Ladroga has the shiny hardware to prove it. “Oh, I’ve had all kinds of trophies with it and also took a national first in 1997 in the Studebaker national meet in South Bend, Indiana,” he said. “It’s pretty much all authentic, except for the radial tires.”
1956 Ford Parklane Sport Wagon
Posted by rariccardi in Featured, Old Cars Weekly on March 21, 2010
By Brian Earnest
More than five decades ago, the Parklane Sport Wagon was supposed to be Ford’s Nomad fighter. When General Motors launched its hip, sporty two-door Chevrolet wagon in 1955, it was occupying a niche that it pretty much had all to itself — at least for a year.
Ford brought out the Parklane to do battle with the Nomad a year later. Alas, neither wagon really set the world on fire, and Ford pulled the plug on the Parklane experiment after just one model year — and one year before Chevy ended the Nomad’s three-year run as a two-door wagon.
But that one year that Ford was in the sport wagon business was enough to produce some pretty dandy collector cars for guys like Tom Ripplinger of Hammond, Wis. Ripplinger owns one of the 15,186 Parklanes that were made for the 1956 model year. Ripplinger’s car is a beautifully restored example that wears an authentic two-tone Bermuda Blue/Diamond Blue paint scheme. It’s a splendid and very collectible car that almost never got back on the road. In fact, even after Ripplinger picked up the car during a trip to Oklahoma back in 1989, he never planned to even get the car running.
“We didn’t intend to restore it. I bought it for parts,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And then we realized how few they made and decided we had to fix it up. We didn’t know how few they made and how rare a car it was when we got it … I got a Crown Victoria, and this car originally had factory air conditioning and power steering, and I was going to take that stuff out off and put in my Crown and then sell this car for parts.”
That plan quickly went out the window when Ripplinger figured out he had a one-year-only Ford, and within a year the Parklane was back on the road and being regularly driven. In fact, that car hasn’t had much rest in the past 20 summers.
“We’ve put over 60,000 miles on it. It’s been on the road over 20 years now,” says Ripplinger proudly. “This was our driver car until a couple years ago — it was the only (collector car) we had running. We drove it everywhere we went.”