1955, ‘56, and ‘57 CHEVROLET BEL AIR NOMAD STATION WAGONS

I was a “late starter” with cars. In my neighborhood of Logan Square in Chicago, where most young car-nut guys already had their first cars lined up by the time they got their driver’s license at 16. Some were driving at 14 or 15.

I was 18. I was into music at that time, and although model cars were a challenge that I had repeatedly met since I was 12, the “real thing” just seemed to me to be too much responsibility.

That is, until I was robbed twice in two weeks travelling the Chicago Transit Authority buses between my house on the NW side to my girlfriend’s house on the SW side. It was a direct 12-mile ride, but it went through one of  the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago for three of those twelve miles, Prior to the Summer of 1967, things were mostly quiet over the same route, but in ’67, small gangs began to take over the buses and rob passengers at knife- and gun-point. I lost meager amounts of cash and a cheap wrist watch, but I grew fearful that the violence could affect me personally.

Conclusion: I needed to buy a car.

I sold all of my musical instruments to my band’s bass player, who was in an apprentice program with AT&T right out of high school, and was taking home a decent pay check for an 18-year-old guy, so he had no problem raising the $500 that I was asking for the whole lot. My own job as a carpenter at a parade float company paid low but steady. I put together enough cash to buy my first car, which my high school, car nut  buddy, Brian D., got me interested in.

BRIAN: Do you know what a Nomad wagon is?

ME: I think so…it’s got two doors, right?

BRIAN: Yep. And I know where there’s one for sale, and it’s cheap!

ME: Where?

BRIAN: At Leo’s Sinclair Service by my house!

So, I paid $300 for a black, hot rodded 1955 Chevy Nomad station wagon. It was complete and running, cosmetically rough with Chicagoland road-salt rust along the bottom sills and the front edge of the rear wheel wells. The engine was a modified Corvette small block with a 3-speed gearbox and a 4.56:1 “Positraction” rear axle. It was geared for drag racing, and indeed held the record in G Stock of 13.89 seconds at our “local” drag strip in Union Grove, Wisconsin, back when it had been fitted with a 4-speed transmission. After driving it back from Leo’s, I immediately got it up on blocks in my aunt’s garage and started working on it to make it more acceptable visually.

It took an entire summer to get the front end squared away, and by the time I got around to the rear, winter had set in, and it became too cold to work in an unheated garage, so I had to quit and continue taking the bus to the SW side. At least there were fewer muggings in the cold. This still got old, though, and when a guy offered to trade “his” ’61 Thunderbird coupe for my Nomad, I agreed.

The pink skip for the T-Bird came back with a big lien on it. I fortunately had kept the Nomad pink slip, so I retrieved the Nomad from the purchaser and put it back on blocks.

I decided to do a “proper” restoration on the Nomad. Frankly, this was my first car, I didn’t have a whole lot of money, and of course the internet and its research and parts sources were decades in the future. I bought magazines, books, and a ’55 Chevrolet Shop Manual from GM’s book division. That shop manual was bathroom and bedtime reading for a long time to come—until 1984, to be exact, when I sold my last ’55.

I got the front end removed and stored, the interior disassembled, and the engine and transmission pulled, and began stripping the paint from the body. You can see the firewall in bare steel in the very poor black and white Polaroid below. If you look closely, you can also see the back seat bottom and other parts stacked on the roof.

(ABOVE) Poor Nomad. My first car, which had a checkered history and was sold on. I realised that I didn’t have the time or expertise to complete it.

I had a dose of realism once I made a list of tasks and priorities, and saw myself buried for the foreseeable future! I decided to sell this first of five Nomads, and ran an ad in the Chicago Sun-Times. It sold in three days.

This time I got $600.00 for it, and bought my first ’60 Chevrolet Biscayne sedan delivery. Six cylinder, 3-speed stick, red paint, no back seat, as it had been a Chesterfield salesman’s cigarette delivery car. I finally had wheels that I could drive!

The ‘60 sedan deliveries (That’s right—I had two, in ’68 and ’75) are another topic, though. Let’s get back to Nomads!

After I had owned it for seven months, I sold the sedan delivery, though it was basically reliable and presentable. Why? Well, there was this OTHER ’55 Nomad that came up…

In my day job as a parade float builder, the parade season in Chicago ran from mid-May until Thanksgiving every year. Our company had a dozen floats, and during the season we had parades every weekend, so we were very busy building during the week and working parades on weekends. Our very first parade each Spring was the Harvard (Illinois) Milk Day parade in mid-May. We would rent a motel room for an entire week, and tow four floats the 60 miles to Harvard. We would then take over a Dean’s Milk (a local Chicago brand) garage and build the floats up. We’d work 12 hour days, grab dinner, and collapse into bed. Rinse and repeat for five days and evenings…

One day, as we took a different commuting route between Sleep and Slavery, I chanced to look to the side on our road, and saw, at a local used car lot, a shiny-as-new ’55 Nomad, in Harvest Gold (a pastel yellow) with an India Ivory (off-white) roof. It was really gorgeous and looked like it just rolled off of the showroom floor, though it was then13 years old.

I asked my boss to stop, and went in to talk to the owner of the one-man lot. The asking price was $700.00, and I gave him $100.00 until I could return with the rest of the money the next week, after our Milk Day rush was over.

Picking up that gorgeous Nomad the next Saturday was the happiest day of my life up to that point.

The Summer of ’68 will forever be in my memories. I had a “steady girl”, a decent full-time job during the week building floats, and a good part-time job (at a service ststion) on weekends where, if we were not busy, I could pamper my new acquisition.

Sadly, during the Winter of ’68-’69, the yellow Nomad spun a front wheel bearing, and I could not find the parts needed to rebuild it. I put it up for sale after I had owned it for eight months, and bought my first new car, a ’69 FIAT 850 Sport Coupe in French Blue.

The yellow Nomad was sold to a wealthy car dealer in Indiana, Richard Shaver, who was a well-known vintage car collector. He told me he was going to restore it for a 16th birthday gift for his son. His dealer mechanics and body shop got to work on it. Six months later, I received a letter and some photos in the mail. The Nomad was finished, resplendent in its original color scheme—Gypsy Red with a Shoreline Beige top and matching interior. This was by far the most popular color combination for ’55 Nomads back then (1968). Richard had loaded the car with every tasteful option that he could find--factory air conditioning, a new interior in the correct ”waffle” pattern vinyl, and rare wire wheel covers. The car was absolutely stunning. I’m sure it still exists; whether it’s in his collection, I dson’t know. I do know that I saw it at a few local and national shows, and it took home many trophies, I’m told.

A few years went by. The memory of the yellow Nomad kept haunting me. I had a real attachment for that car. I got married and had a couple of kids. I got out of college and took a succession of design jobs that actually gave me a bit of disposable income.

Then, in the Winter of ’71, a ’55 Nomad project car came up for sale in my neighborhood. Yep, you guessed it.

It was a dead-stock non-runner with bad paint, but untouched, and in a rare color combination of Glacier Blue Metallic bottom and Shoreline Beige top (which, today, I would have kept), and I spent several months rebuilding the engine and another month prepping the body before respraying it in Neptune Green Metallic with a Seafoam (pale) Green top. I installed K-H wire wheels from a ’53 Cadillac Eldorado, which were sandblasted and painted Seafoam Green. I hand-striped pale green “ghost” flames over the hood and front fenders. With its wide whitewalls, it was a real head-turner at my local Burger King, and I drove it on special occasions, while the FIAT 850 accumulated the daily miles. The FIAT got nearly 40 MPG, and the money saved went into the rent for my design firm, Bread and Butter Studios.

Then, in the early Summer of ’73, I saw a ’49 Mercury Woodie wagon (a real bus!) parked on the street in my neighborhood with a FOR SALE sign on it, and a week later the Nomad-for-woodie swap was done.

The Mercury woodie had a great history. It was owned by Bill Von Esser, proprietor of one of Chicago’s original post-WWII olds school speed shops. Bill campaigned a car at Bonneville every August. He had bought the woodie brand new in ’49 and used it for a tow car, driving it on the 4,200 mile Bonneville round trip every August. When he passed on, his son took over the speed shop and decided that the woodie needed to go. I have always been a woodie lover, so a trade was arranged, and Bill, Jr. got my Nomad in the deal.

I drove the Mercury for nearly a year, until it went up on blocks for a wood restoration and was then sold to a wealthy local entrepreneur who had owned one as a teenager back in New Jersey. (He became my partner in miniWOODIE for its first two years.)

miniWOODIE is yet another thread that I’ll pick up in a future post.

During the Summer of ’75, when I was deeply involved in building the miniWOODIE prototype for the East Coast CCA Hershey meet that October, a friend offered me a ’56 Nomad that I owned for all of a month, flipping it for a nice profit. I was not too fond of the ‘56s due to their styling, though they did have some yummy colors.

In 1977, I folded miniWOODIE out of exhaustion, and took a job at the Playskool toy company as a Toy Designer, and with my boss, Rim T., formed a partnership to attempt to license concepts that Playskool had turned down. We had a friend who was an agent representing toy designers, and we showed him a couple of concepts in model and sketch form. He went on a sales trip, and on his very first day, he sold our first concept to a New York soft toy company.

That was to be Wrist Racers, which sold something like $54 million for three different companies, and delivered a couple of million in royalty earnings over a four-year period from 1980 through 1984. I had moved to California with my second wife in ‘79, and took jobs as a toy designer with two successive consulting firms.

Wait…there’s a point to all this!

I was back in Chicago for a brainstorming weekend with my partner, and while reading Hemmings Motor News (a thick monthly publication carrying nothing but ads for antique and exotic cars for sale), I came across an ad for…

(ABOVE) Last Nomad, 1982, rare Coral and Shadow Gray nitrocellulose lacquer paint with matching interior including Coral headliner!

…a mostly-restored ’55 Nomad, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My partner and I drove four hours to Grand Rapids and I bought the car for $8250.00. Prices had gone up—way up! It was the equivalent of $27,000.00 today, about half the going price for a ’55 Nomad in 2024.  It was complete, restored, with a new interior, replated chrome, and a brand new nitrocellulose lacquer paint job, in its original colours of Coral and Shadow Gray—the rarest ’55 color combination. I saw a potential show winner, once the final assembly was done. It had a rare “Power Pak” V8, a WonderBar radio, power windows, steering, and brakes, and dual exhausts. It was loaded with nearly every option available that year. I took a couple of months to reassemble it, and entered it in a couple of shows, where it took trophies.

Then I found a very rare vehicle—a 1954 Ford Crestline Skyliner “Glasstop” two-door hardtop, in mint condition with only 73,000 miles on it. I bought it on first sight for $5,500.00 from a musician in Laurel Canyon, in August of ’82.

But, that’s another story, and another web page. Stay tuned.

(ABOVE) My Onyx Black ‘57 Nomad station wagon. No options except Fuel Injection and knock-off hubs. Black cloth and solver vinyl interior. only 55K miles, too. Note dual exhausts. It sounded great!

The next year, 1983, I purchased a Black 1957 Nomad—my only ’57—with almost no options, except factory fuel injection. It had a silver vinyl and black cloth factory interior, and went like stink on a skunk. I kept it for a year, waxed it once every week, and enjoyed the heck out of it. I eapecially enjoyed parking the two Nomads next to each other on the street in front of my house in Huntington Beach and watching from the second floor as people on their way to the beach two blocks away gathered around to look, comment, and take photos!

So the total in late ’84 was—four ’55 Nomads, one brief ’56, and one ’57. Total of six Nomads, ranging from a fast Rat Rod to an elegant, award-winning show car.

All were FUN. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

When we relocated from Huntington Beach to Charlottesville, Virginia, our house there, a passive-solar log home based on a 1774 log cabin, had seven acres of second-growth hardwood forest, but no garage, so I did the cars a favor and sold both the Coral/Gray ’55 and Black ’57 Nomads. My then-wife kept her car, and I kept mine.

End of Nomad story!