San Francisco Street Sighting - 1955 Chevrolet One-Fifty Handyman

No, it's not a Nomad.

It seems like at car shows, at least, a lot of people don't know the difference between a 1955-1957 Chevy Bel Air Nomad wagon and the standard two-door station wagon. The biggest clue, aside from side trim, is the B-pillar. Nomads have a forward slant to the B- and C- pillars, and the rear hatch is also raked forward more dramatically than the regular wagons. As the Nomad was an offshoot of the fancy Bel Air, it carried special side trim and seven vertical chrome spears on the rear hatch. The One Fifty Handyman was the bottom-rung wagon in the Chevy lineup and typically carried no extra body trim at all except for a "Chevrolet" script badge on the front fenders, hood ornament and large red, white and blue Chevrolet shields on the hood and rear tailgate. Two-Tens had a simplified version of the Bel Air's side trim and more luxurious interiors.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1965 Mercury Park Lane Marauder

The 1965 Mercury full-size line is fascinating to me. Someone at Ford must have thrown away all the French curves and left the drafting staff with yardsticks - both for design and for measurement. Few vehicles approach the sheer military grade right-angle-ness of a '65 Mercury Park Lane.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 Town Sedan

One of my favorite years of the Ford Galaxie is 1963, a model year where everything just looked right somehow. I loved it enough to buy a 1:18 scale model of one (Sun Star makes a fantastic '63 Galaxie 500XL coupe), and to photograph them when I see one on the street.