Late 50s I think...
but not positive.
Lowey designed a beautiful boat.
The barrel tail leaves a lot of folks cold.
But the way he pushed the windshield out toward the bow is something that is starting to be rediscovered, half a century later, as rational among some boat designers.
The car is
probably a 1964 Mercury Montclair. The 389 V8 had 250 HP. I couldn't find towing capacity; the car weighed just under 4000 lb. Price was $3116. Probably adequate for towing that boat -- which isn't as heavy as it looks, is it ?
The forward windshield makes sense if it gives more sheltered but usable interior room -- of course. Yet styling seems to trump everything, as ever -- just at the "long nose/short deck" look characterized the Ford Mustang/Mercury Cougar line, practical or not, at the same time this more conventional car was being built. . .
SDR...
Correct call on the car. My dad had one and it was pretty fun putting the rear window down and trying to climb out through it, when we were kids. It was lousy for ventilation, however, from what I can recall.
Early 60s FoMoCo sedans of this size still had separate frame and chassis construction, if I recall correctly, so they basically had the strength of a pick up truck, with less ground clearance.
Put another way, pick-up trucks back then were car frames with heavier springs and more ground clearance. 🙂
My dad towed boats even bigger than this Dorsett pictured with his Ford Galaxy 500 and a V-8. He just had trailer hitches welded to the frame. "Screw drilling and bolting it," he said, "put it on there right."
In the good old days, there was also very little difference in sturdiness of the construction of the automatic transmissions that were used in cars and trucks with V-8s. Gearing probably differed a bit, but basically you could do pretty much anything with a car that a pick-up truck could do, except what required greater ground clearance, and massively heavier load. The tongue weight of a properly balanced boat trailer was not that big of a deal for a car, even with stock springs.
And as my late father used to say, "Son, ground clearance is way over-rated. Its front and rear overhang and short wheel base that really let a jeep go where it goes; that an four wheel drive." Since he commanded a USMC motor transport battallion in WWII, and had spent nearly 5 years running jeeps, and ten wheelers, and bulldozers on and off-road in Virginia, California, Samoa, Guadalcanal, Bougainville, New Zealand, Guam, and Iwo Jima,I've always felt he had some street cred, if you know what I mean. 🙂
cont.
He used to run quite a few cattle and hire his land farmed, so on the weekends, we would often leave the city to go to the country and keep tabs on the fields and pastures. He drove his big Fords and Mercuries through the pastures with considerable fearlessness. Bottoming out never worried him as "the frame could handle it." 🙂
When I tried to get him to buy a pick up truck with four wheel drive, he just scoffed. "Why the hell would I want a lumber wagon in the city, son? I only drive the pastures on the weekends. Besides, the over hangs on pick'em up trucks make'em useless for going any where really rugged. Gotta have a jeep for that. Putting four-wheel drive on a pick'em up truck just fools people into going places they have too much overhang to go anyway. I've never gotten stuck in a car in a pasture, but I've gotten stuck in plenty of 4-wheel drive vehicles going places I shouldn't have been going."
After the punishment of the pastures, we used his Ford's to tow our boats out to various lakes. Quite a lot of punishment for a car from the city. 🙂
My brother and I always tried to talk him into buying one of GM's sleek unibodies from the mid 60s on. He wouldn't hear of it. "Of course, GM cars look better," he used to say, "that's because they spend all their money on making them look good, so you don't notice how much they are cheapening up the construction of their frames and chassis." He begrudgingly admitted GM's engines were good, but the rest of a GM car was "just plain flimsy." My favorite line of his was, "I can buy one Ford Galaxy 500 and do everything it would take a Chevy Impala and a Chevy pick-up truck to do. Son, what kind of damn fool buys a car and a truck, when he only has to buy a car?"
cont.
GM converted their cars to uni-body construction around this time, or a little after, in order to cut assembly costs, and reduce steel required to make the cars. You really couldn't safely tow a boat even this Dorsett pictured with a uni-body constructed car, even though the GM engines and trannies were strong enough.
Ford followed suit some years later, and my father forecast that the US car companies would come to a bad end, if they didn't "...regain their senses and go back to making real cars." He said, "With out a good strong frame in a Ford, or a Chevy, you just might as well buy a damned Volkswagen, or a Renault Dauphine, or a Toyota Corona. At least those scrap boxes on wheels are cheap on gas."
We told him he had to quit buying these small block engines, so we could have more pick up and more top speed. Or we said he had to buy a Mercedes to get a lighter car with more top end. He scoffed. "Why buy a Mercedes that will go a 130 all day, when we can only go 75mph? And we sure don't need bigger engines, or engines with more than two valves per cylinder. All we need are automatic transmissions with seven, eight, or nine gears. Everything is in the gears, son. I learned that in the Marine Corp the hard way. I'm not forgetting it either." Now, in 2010, all the cool cars have either 6 or 7 speed automatics.
I can hear him now, if he were still alive. "Sure cars are better today. They ought to be. Technology improves. But now you have to buy three cars to do what one car used to do. A small one to save gas. A big gas hog truck the size of a tank to tow a decent boat. And some over-priced, gum drop on wheels to go out to dinner with a woman."
One of his favorite songs was from "Casablanca."
"You must remember this,
a kiss is just a kiss,
a sigh is just a sigh
the fundamental things apply,
as time goes by."
The car and boat manufacturers didn't stick with the fundamentals, as they improved the technologies. They just cut costs and raised prices, marketed to more and more niches, and relied on oligopoly price fixing and Fed bailouts to find still more ways to cut costs and raise prices, and make you buy more than one car, when one could do.
Variety is the spice of capit...
Variety is the spice of capitalism. A buddy inherited a 1964 Montclair in high school from his grandpa. When I saw that photo, the first thing I thought of was that back window (the back window over the trunk slid down, electically, if I remember right). It led to a lot of shenanigans. It had the 390 I think, and was a bit of a dog speedwise but fun. I remember my parents had a Galaxy 500 in the late 60s/early 70s. I drove it out in the pasture once and got in a little trouble.
Hudsonhonu...
Your memory is good. I had forgotten the 390 cubic inch Ford engine.
My brother and I went through a phase of using the back window as a kind of guillotine. We tested severing bananas, and hot dogs, but I believe we damaged the mechanism with an apple. I have still not recouped the lost allowances from that experiment. 🙂
Well, that wouldn't have been...
Well, that wouldn't have been the first time the mechanism was damaged with an apple, but look where it brought us ...
Thanks, dc. My memory is actually fading, but luckily my father had one like a steel trap, and my mother claims I didn't fall far from the tree.
One real annoying schoolmate, I recall, rode several miles screaming on the trunk of the Montclair coming home from a golf tournament in Callaway, Nebraska, circa 1973.
*
LOL!!!!!
Absolutely classic!!! The next nostalgia movie about the 60s has to have that scene in it, no matter what the movie is about!
I always thought FoMoCo's ad agency missed the boat.
"And new for 1964, the Mercury Montclair offers a guillotine rear window! More signs of Mercury doing more for you!"
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