Arthur Bowen, son of schoolteacher Gertrude Bowen, was living in Germany in the early 1950s working for the U.S. government. He wrote postcards home to his mother about wanting to buy a car. Amongst the photos from his estate were a couple of photos of cars. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out what this car is. I already know because he wrote the information on the back.
Any guesses? I think you'll be surprised by this one.
Click on image to see it larger.
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Probably an opportunity to use TinEye, but - I'm guessing a Peugeot.
ReplyDeleteArthur Bowen reminds me a lot of the Scoutmaster I had whilst in Boy Scouts, a Mr. Hartman. Mr. Hartman was a mechanical engineer back in the days where "engineers" were pretty much all of one type (i.e., pre-electrical, electronical, aeronautical and so on). He had a VW Bus, and bought one of the very first Prius hybrids.
ReplyDeletePost WWII Germany was a mess - the automotive industry was nearly totally wiped out - and a lot of it (such as BMW) found their factories behind the "iron curtain". Many of their cars used very dated tooling from England and Italy (amongst other places).
This car looks like an Opel Kapitan to me. Say about 1951-2-3?
It also looks like an early 1950's French Renault or English Bristol (from which BMW bought tooling)
But I am going to go with a 1952-ish Ford Taunus.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/ford_germany/taunus_g73a_g93a_1gen/taunus_g93a_cabriolet/1952.html
Indeed, it is a Ford Taurus. On the back Arthur wrote, "1951 Fort Taurus Wiesdbaden." Wiesdbaden is where the shot was taken. I was stunned when I read Taurus having not known the name was used overseas long before we had them here. I've found Ford to be a fascinating company with their overseas cars. Europe has had a lot of interesting cars we never get here and others that are nearly the same with different names. Why they do this I've never figured out.
ReplyDeleteIt is a Ford Taunus (not Taurus) (n-r).
ReplyDeleteTaunus is a low mountain range in Hesse, Germany that composes part of the Rhenish Slate Mountains. It is bounded by the river valleys of Rhine, Main and Lahn. Weisbaden is located in the Taunus foot hills.
You are right! I looked at the back of the photo and Arthur wrote everything in caps except the letter "n" which ends up looking like a capital "r" because of the way he put a little flip on the end. So Taunus it is!
DeleteThanks for the relevant info about why the name and the area.
I think it's a World War 2 era Ford, Super Deluxe, manufactured for the U.S. Army in two door and four door models for use as staff cars. They were made in Detroit and shipped to Europe. It was too expensive to ship them back to America when they were no longer needed, so they were then sold as military surplus in Europe, many in the American occupation zone in Germany, which included Weisbaden. Go to Google and type in Ford World War 2 staff car, click on images and you'll see lots of them. My father was an Army cryptographer who spent a year in Germany right after the war. He rode a surplus Indian motorcycle. When he got back to the states, he bought another Indian from the Army.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I love the net and the people who are so knowledgeable. It never dawned on me that it was a car built in the US and shipped overseas. I guess I was thinking that Germany retooled from a war machine to commercial industry.
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