Reliving "Googie" Nights In a 1958 Edsel Ranger

Motor Trend

2 days ago

[This story first appeared in the premier issue of MotorTrend Classic in 2005] Elvis still weighted under 200 pounds. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was on its way to becoming the year's top-grossing film, without a single Major Warden or Colonel Nicholson Happy Meal action figurine having been sold. Running around naked in the backyard carried a new risk-Sputnik might be peeking. And the Ford Motor Company, apparently jealous of all the press the Hindenburg had received, was finally selling its all-new Edsel, a car that for two years it had hyped so breathlessly ('More YOU Ideas!'), the public no doubt expected a flying carpet that ran on plutonium.
No American city in 1958 was a more fitting backdrop for a gleaming new example of four-wheeled, Fabulous-O-Rama technology than Los Angeles. The goofy, Tomorrowland optimism of Walt Disney's nearby theme park had spilled right over the monorail and onto the sprawling, auto-worshipping streets of L.A. itself. Want a quick breakfast? Just drive to the store shaped like a giant donut Hoping to start your singing career? Head to the office building resembling a stack of records. Wife needs a new bra? Better find something that looks like a big Bloomingdale's. The rocket-age City of Angels was having a blast, and no savvy business owner could resist taking a big, living-color bite of kitsch.
Drive-through carwashes looked like flying saucers, gas stations became space stations, the average roadside motel blazed with more tiki torches than the entire island of Tahiti-even coffee shops caught the fever. Soon after pioneering architect John Lautner designed a flamboyant, glass-walled, neon-splashed diner called Googies, its roof angling toward the stars from the pop-culture epicenter of L.A. on the Sunset Strip, seemingly every budget eatery in town and across America-was launching meteors from its signs and slapping rocket fins onto its deep fryers. 'Googie' architecture was born.
Very soon, of course, the whiz-bang Edsel went the way of, well, the Edsel. Gushed an ad in 1958: "The Edsel look is here to stay!" -which was true only if you counted very, very slowly. Just one year after the car's debut, Ford revised the dramatic "horse collar" grille, largely because most people thought it looked like...well, if you want us to say what it resembles out loud you'll have to pick up a copy of Motor Trend Hefner. By 1960, Ford had shrunk the pseudo-collar thing into oblivion. Then, just three years after its Geraldo Rivera-grade entrance, the Edsel itself disappeared.
Within the next decade, Googie followed. The Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Susan Sontag novels-America wasn't in such a good mood any more. Across the country, the meteors cratered, the tiki torches flamed out. Undoubtedly due to its iconic status, the original Googies coffee shop managed to survive until 1989, when it was finally bulldozed to make room for a very important Virgin Megastore. By then, though, the Googie life was long dead.
Of course, nobody loves a great second act more than Hollywood. For the fan of Fifties culture, Los Angeles is one of the country's prime public time machines. Thanks to the work of vocal preservationists-and the fact that L.A. remains a leading purveyor of quirkiness-devotees can still find plenty of midcentury lore here: famous 1950s landmarks, period houses, kitsch classics, globules of Googie.
We dusted off a 1958 two-door Ford Edsel Ranger from the Motor Trend vehicle humidor (okay, we rented it from a company that supplies cars to movie studios) and hit the streets in search of that heady, spacey land that restraint forgot.
Kids didn't walk to school in the 1950s because America was a safer place. They walked because damned if Mom was going to wrestle with two tons of Atomic Age steel lacking both power brakes and power steering any more than was absolutely necessary. Our Edsel has neither (they were options on the entry-level Ranger), so performing three-point turns amid the palm trees of Beverly Hills is like trying to drag a five-year-old out of a showing of 'Madagascar.' After a workout like this, you need a hot dog.
That's right: Just look for the gigantic tube steak. Tail O' the Pup is to L.A. what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, and not just because both are full of weenies. Built just after World War II, the Pup is quintessential kitsch and a true Los Angeles landmark-which accounts for its presence in countless movies (among them, "L.A. Story" and "Body Double"). Orson Welles loved to fill up on the Pup's dogs, yet that hasn't scared the customers away. Order a Baseball Special (mustard, relish, onions), then get back in line and order another.
In our first Edsel Ranger road test in October 1957, we measured a 0-to-60-mph time of 10.2 seconds. That feels about right-a modern V-6 Camry would blow the 361-cubic-inch V-8 Edsel into the weeds. The old girl bolts smartly away from stoplights, though, thanks in part to 400 pound-feet of torque. Our Ranger also has the optional Tele-touch automatic transmission, which allows the selection of drive, reverse, etc., via pushbuttons on the steering-wheel hub. Very George Jetson especially considering that it was nearly half a century before Michael Schumacher finally got rid of his shift lever. Another Edsel innovation is its horizontal, "rolling dome" speedometer, which looks like a giant compass ("Come right to a heading of 45 miles per hour, Arthur").
Believe it or not, there's actually some debate as to whether the Capitol Records building was intentionally designed to look like a stack of records. Why sure, and it's pure coincidence that a guy looking very much like Abraham Lincoln ended up inside the Lincoln Memorial. Anyway, Capitol's 13-story headquarters, built in 1954 and just north of the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine, lays claim to being the world's first circular office building. Don't be surprised if the company's next HQ accidentally gets shaped like an iPod.
"She looks just like Lana Turner." "She is Lana Turner." "What?" "She is Lana Turner."" In 1997, director Curtis Hanson shot one of the most memorable scenes of his brilliant 1950s film-noir homage "L.A. Confidential" in the Formosa Café. Built in 1925, by the 1950s the Formosa had become an A List celebrity hangout-as the countless star headshots on the walls attest. The real Lana Turner and her gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato were indeed Formosa regulars-at least until the star's teenage daughter had a hissy fit and stabbed Stompanato to death at their home in 1958. Drop into the Formosa for a drink today, and there's a good chance you'll spot a modern-day celeb-no surprise, given that right across the street is the former Goldwyn Studio (now known as The Lot), filming site for such 1950s classics as "Some Like It Hot" and "West Side Story."
You're hungry again. Barney's Beanery, a funky, memorabilia-filled bar and billiard parlor with a menu as thick as a newspaper, has been in its current location since 1927Ðwhen John "Barney" Anthony served beans to drivers passing via old Route 66 (many of them, arriving in California to start new lives, nailed their old license plates to the wall, where they remain today). By the Fifties, Barney's had become a beatnik hangout. Among them were James Dean and a still unknown Janis Joplin. Some of the patrons at the bar look like they've been there since then, too.
Though it wasn't built until 1965, Jack Colker's Union 76 station in Beverly Hills is one of SoCal's finest existing examples of 1950s-style space-age architecture. The Edsel seems to belong under the station's sweeping canopy roof-at least until that price sign comes into view: $3.11 for a gallon of premium? Surely an extra digit got tacked on there by mistake. What, no free road map? Don't you know what time-space continuum we're from?
It's been a long day of sightseeing and dodging annoying sightseers. The old Edsel has been a peach, though, always starting right up, complex electro-shift transmission working fine, never overheating when idling in the sun. It seems unfair that a car this basically solid and likable has become a synonym for 'Pets.com.'
But, hey, the Edsel sure does look swell pulling up under the winking neon of Norm's Coffee Shop on La Cienega. Designed in 1957 by John Lautner contemporaries Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, Norm's is a bona-fide Googie masterpiece: soaring, jet-wing roof; aquarium-like walls of glass; enough combined candlepower to illuminate the Super Bowl. The hipsters come here now for late-night coffee and pancakes. 'After-bar food' they call it. In the 1950s, it would've been 'Hangover-O-Matic.' What Really Killed Edsel?
Forget the styling, the Eisenhower recession, the poor initial quality, and the untried dealer network: Edsel was dead before the first car was even sold. Edsel was key to an ambitious Ford plan to tackle GM's Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac. The idea was to build three basic bodies small, medium, and large and spread the costs across five divisions: Ford, Edsel, Mercury, Lincoln, and Continental. The Fords and entry-level Edsels would share the small body; the upscale Edsels and standard Mercurys would share the medium body; and a new "super" Mercury would be built off the next-generation Lincoln body. The wheels began to fall off in 1956 when chief engineer Earle MacPherson ordered the 1958 Lincoln be switched to a unibody design to boost volume at the Wixom plant built to manufacture the unibody 1958 Thunderbird, effectively killing the "super" Mercury. Then, the day after the Edsel went on sale in 1957, Ford division chief Robert McNamara, who resented the power of the product planners responsible for the Edsel, was made a group vice-president. Sources insist that McNamara had let slip that the Edsel would be discontinued, and sure enough he began hacking away at the slow-selling Edsel's budget. Within months, he had reduced its future product plans to a different grille for 1960 Fords. In his book, °Disaster in Dearborn,° Thomas E. Bonsall blames the Edsel's demise on the byzantine politics played by warring management factions: "If Ford Motor Company management wasn't willing to invest several years of effort in the Edsel, they didn't deserve to "succeed."