BELOVED ‘53-‘54 CHEVY
Our first collector car was a 1954 Chevrolet Two-Ten four-door sedan that was purchased from a used car dealer near Kenilworth, N.J., for $325. It was originally green with a white roof. We bought it because it reminded us of our first car — a 1955 Chevrolet Two-Ten Delray coupe that was green with a white roof. The ’54 was a very nice, 35,000-mile car that was 100 percent stock except for its set of wider wheels and fat F50 white-letter tires that a previous owner had installed.
This was in 1972 and we soon discovered that, back then, a ’54 Chevy had little respect in the old-car hobby. When we took the Chevy to a car show at the Brooklyn Museum, a man at the gate said, “Where do you think you’re going with that hot rod?” He then pointed to a postwar ’40s Lincoln Continental just inside the gate. “That car belonged to Arthur Godfrey,” he said. “And that’s the kind of car we want at this show.”
When my wife at the time was learning to drive, she had a fender-bender with the ’54. The other driver owned a body shop and offered to fix the damage. We repainted it to look like a Bel Air pictured in the ’54 Chevy sales catalog (yellow with a green top). At the time, we didn’t
