It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were seventeen. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey. They told us these were the best years of our lives, so we had better enjoy them. We all laughed at that, of course, but as I look back, they may have been right, particularly in September of 1954, when the first Thunderbird and the totally new 1955 Chevy V-8 lit up our limited horizons.

More important things happened then—the H-bomb, the Salk polio vaccine, and the rise and fall of Joe McCarthy among them—but I doubt that there is a male my age in the country who does not remember the first time he saw the T-bird or the amazing new Chevrolet and looked under the hood and at that new overhead-valve 162-horsepower V-8. I could give it historical significance by pointing out that putting a big engine in a small car meant that for the first time the poor (or at least the middle class) could drive as fast as the rich. I know I’m not alone on all this. Who do you think are the men buying those “classic” Bel Airs today for upward of thirty thousand dollars?

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