Dagmars

The 1950s were an epoch in American automobile design, a decade of the best designs penned by the best designers in the world.  The cars were unique to America, and were as unique as America was back then.  It was the time when big was better, and even bigger was even better.

The 1950s sat between the war and scarcity induced blandness of the 1940s and the not-yet-imagined muscle car era of the 1960s.  The marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen who fought in World War II had come home, gone to work, started businesses and found economic success.  New communities sprang up, new tract homes built, new families started, and life was good.  A large middle class sprang up - a strata that was rare and small before the Big War.  And the middle class liked to celebrate its success.  It was the era of Sinatra, scotch, steaks, suits and cigs.  And big cars.

General Motors, the most important company in the world, employed Harley Earl, the best automobile designer in the world.  Harley Earl designed big, shiny, shapely cars.  Most prominent and shapely were their front bumpers.  Big chrome bumpers with bullet-like points on each side. The points became known as dagmars, a name given like an imagined female character in a Wagnerian opera.

Cadillacs had dagmars.  Big, curvy, pointy dagmars.  Dagmars, of course, referred to opera singers in polite conversation.  Society was more polite back then, genteel even.  What everyone thought when someone said "nice dagmars" wasn't opera singers, it was (Alert! NSFW) this.

Chevys had dagmars.  My first car was a '57 Chevy.  It was junk by the time I bought it in '67, having survived a decade of hard use in the rustbelt.  The floor sills were rusted through, the quarter-panels were see-through in places, the engine smoked and the transmission slipped.  But it had dagmars.  And to my impoverished high-school senior eyes it was the coolest car on earth.

It had pasties, though, the cheap black rubber replacement for chrome dagmars.  I ordered the chrome pieces from the JC Whitney catalog, but they fell off over bumps.  At least I wasn't stuck driving a cheap Pontiac, a car which looked just sad.  It looked like it been in an accident the day it was built.  Or like some chrome-eating creature had gnawed on the bumper.  It was a church lady car if ever there was one.

Custom cars were the breast implants and facelifts of the dagmar era. Chopped, channeled, stretched, lowered, body seams filled in with lead.  Candy color paint, abundant chrome, and exaggerated grilles.  They were the automotive predecessor of the Orange County woman of today.

In time I grew to admire the rear of the Harley Earl designed cars as well as the front.  I became a fin man.  Finshad the can-do swagger of rockets and spaceships.  They were the automotive embodiment of JFK's promise to put a man, an American man on the moon.  Cars were named after that brash pledge.  The olds Rocket Eighty-Eight, for example.  Fins.  The beautiful butt behind the pointy dagmars.

It's gone now, that era of fabulous design, the era of unlimited promise, of boundless expectation, and big of dreams without worries.  In two brief generations we've gone from this.....

........to this.

A set of blinders put on the era of big dreams, big cars and big Dagmars.  It's like watching Secretariat become a dray mule.