In a separate fiction, Joe Frank’s Green Cadillac, a character buys a ‘1948 Hudson Club Coupé’ . Wikipedia says there was a Hudson Hornet Club Coupé 1951-4.
Could it have been another car?
Another character falls in love with it, thinks he’ll look like James Dean. Did Dean ever drive a Hudson?
I notice Hudson isn’t on the list of Vehicle Makes one can select. Ever seen one? I don’t think I have, but some must be on the road still.
I was in about 5th grade so I really don’t know what year or model it was that the guy down the street had. I always thought it was a base 1950 or so but looked like the same body style. Don’t know a lot about them.
At any rate, one day I rode my bike past him and there he was in the front yard putting a new coat of black paint on the car WITH A BRUSH. Even at that age I just cringed. What a thing to do. I don’t know what his background was but his wife was full fledged French. Baby sat for me once in a while when I needed lunch made and tried to teach me French. Didn’t take very well.
A friend’s dad had 3 Hudsons. All in rough shape intended to become one nice one. I have seen several at shows/cruise ins.
They had a custom look to them because of the roofline and made nice 50s style customs without chopped tops or other metalworking. Lower them, de-chrome a bit, add lakes pipes, Moon discs, some fuzzy dice and cruise cool!
If James Dean drove anything as normal as a Hudson, it was before he was famous. After he was famous, he drove and raced Porsches. Died in one in a traffic accident.
My next door neighbor who moved into town a couple of years ago (to be closer to hospitals due to failing health) owned a 52 Hudson Hornet. His was bright red. Slick car but I felt the red was out of place and the car would have looked better in a more subdued color. Still; super nice car.
He also owned a 51 Plymouth Cranbrook (?) which he had restored and looked showroom new.
He told me that the biggest problem in restoring the cars was finding the correct 2 tone green Houndstooth material for the Plymouth’s seats.
I don’t know who that is but he looks exactly like my BIL from a little distance. He drove his 40 Ford around town, burgundy.
It’s the cousin who owns the car now, from the article i found.
Thanks. It doesn’t look James Deany to me.
I’m thinking his character drove it in a movie. Is there a site that lists the cars in movies? He was in only 3.
I read that Hudson owned a department store, later merged with Minneapolis’s Dayton to make Dayton-Hudson, owners of Target. His cars were cheaper.
J.L. Hudson provided seed money for the car company that was named after him but he did not run it. Hudson was just an investor.
Hudsons was a big Detroit department store.
If my childhood memory serves me, Dayton’s did not become Dayton-Hudson until the Dayton family had driven it into a less than profitable endeavor. Spun off Target and then poof. I had a Dayton’s credit card that I used for concert tickets and ties at 16 but I cannot recall if it was a Dayton or Dayton-Hudson. I believe just Dayton and was automatically issued a Target card. Dayton used to be the place to buy clothes and Christmas presents.
I drove both my fathers 50 Hudson and my Uncles 53 Hudson Hornet,
I used to go to Olean(NY) Speedway to cheer for the Hudsons in the late model class in the mid 50s.
In the early 60s I acquired a Hudson Pacemaker (a cheaper and lighter car than the Wasp and Hornet) that had the optional 262 cube 6.
I intended to race it at Holland Speedway"s B model stock car class that had a 270 cube limit and had to be either a flathead or inline engine.
Alas, when I went to the track to get a copy of the next year’s rules, they had changed the rules to a B Modified class which meant to be competitive, you had to build a whole new purpose built race car which was beyond my ability in skill, time or money.
The Hudson were great cars, with great road holding and room and unlike any other cars of their time. They certainly developed the flathead engine further than anyone else and beat all sorts of overhead valve V8s in NASCAR with a flathead inline 6 in1951 through 54.
It took the Mercury Outboard sponsered team of 1955 Chrysler 300s to end their reign. It was a strange sight seeing those big white Chryslers with Mercury written on the side with big red letters.
That’s a great site! There was a 1948 Hudson in Giant, but it was just in the background; there were none in his other 2 films. A lot of Europeans can identify old American cars - that they probably never saw. They identify the school buses and tractors, too.
You had a credit card at 16? Minnesotans elected Mark Dayton governor a few years ago. I thought he was still with Dayton-Hudson.
Yep, local department store too. I think the max balance was never over $20. But I had a savings and checking before that. Dayton’s store was gone by the time of the gov. I don’t know what his holdings were at that point but yeah it was family money. Quite a temper too for a guy with money, so I’m told say the wrong thing at lunch and he’d near jump over the table at you. Might be the tumor.
+1
In road racing, Hudson’s big advantage was on the curves, when they would leave everyone else in their dust, due to Hudson’s superior handling, but they were also able to hold their own on the straightaways.
The two things that killed Hudson–IMHO–were the inability to substantively restyle the old step-down body, and they simply didn’t have the funds for a total redesign. Then, instead of using their dwindling resources to design a V-8, Hudson’s management chose instead to build the compact Hudson Jet. It sold moderately well for the first year–until they ran out of customers looking for a compact car–and after 3 years the Jet was dead. Unfortunately, Hudson management didn’t understand that the market for a small car was very limited in those days.
Also, some Hudson maintenance could get pricey. In those days, it wasn’t unusual to have to replace shock absorbers ever couple of years, and replacing the rear shocks on Hudsons required the removal of the rear seat and the upholstered rear passenger side panels, thus adding to the labor costs. And, while they did have a mechanical brake system back-up, the tendency for rust to jam it up meant careful cleaning and lubing of that system on a regular basis.
Neighbors of mine had a '55 Hudson, which they used to drive the whole family (2 adults, 5 kids) to Florida. They made it to FL and back without problems, but when they got to our street–which was on a fairly steep hill–the automatic trans died. A few days later, the father was driving a new six-cylinder, stick shift '59 Chevy which he said was inferior to his old Hudson in every way.
Politicians can have big egos, leading to the reactions you mention.
Hudsons also had chrome-nickel iron blocks, so the cast iron rings wore out, not the blocks. Akso wet clutches on the manual shift models.
