JP’s A to Z Challenge: B is for Buick

This is Day 2 of my A to Z Challenge, and as everyone knows, B is for Buick. Yes, everyone thinks they know what a Buick is, but let’s just get this straight once and for all: THESE are real, genuine, honest to goodness Buicks. From the 1940’s, when Buicks were the cars everyone wanted. I mean even people under 60.

This was one of my favorite old car finds – I would never have expected that I would find two vintage Buicks slurping up gasoline at a neighborhood filling station, let alone two gorgeous Buick convertibles from the 1940’s.

The black car is a 1941 Buick Super. In its last full year before car production ceased for WWII.  In 1941, Buick had a smashingly successful year. This Super is the middle level of the lineup, above the price-leading Special and under the top dog, the Roadmaster.

The yellow car is a 1948 Buick Roadmaster, equipped with Buick’s version of an early automatic transmission, which it called the Dynaflow.

My favorite part about this photo is the fact that it was taken at a gas station. There was an old joke back in the day that Buick owners told about their stylish and powerful cars with their big 8 cylinder engines – “My Buick can pass anything on the road except a gas station.” I guess it was still true on the day I took these photos.

Photos by the author, taken in Indianapolis, Indiana, August of 2015.

These cars were previously featured at CurbsideClassic.com

31 thoughts on “JP’s A to Z Challenge: B is for Buick”

  2. Buick was always known in my neck of the woods as a “doctors car”. Neighbors of ours in the mid-60’s had a Buick Electra 225, convertible no less, in midnight blue with a white top and light blue interior: whatta car! To this day I still remember riding around in that car! My mother was a dyed in the wool Oldsmobile 98 fan, but gave up in the 80’s and switched to Honda.

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    • Somehow, I was awash on Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs, with Buicks making rare appearances in my world as a kid. But in her youth, my mother had dated a guy who had some family money and he always had a late model Buick convertible.

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  4. What a fun find for you JP! I like those pristine whitewall tires and these cars look like low riders. You know your cars – I was impressed when I once posted a picture of a small portion of my Buick LaCrosse instrument panel to show the outside temperature on a brutal Winter day. You knew it was a Buick and the year based on your mom’s car she won in a contest.

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    • Yes, I may only barely know the difference between a woodchuck and a wood duck, but I have always had an eye for details on cars. Agreed – aren’t those old whitewall tires great?

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      • That you do JP. I like the extra-wide whitewall strips. My father’s 1972 Impala had whitewalls but I don’t remember them being that wide. I remember those whitewalls as he went out with me after I got my learner’s permit to practice and I heard “don’t damage my whitewalls!” I may have told you this story before, so my apologies if I did, but he got gizmos called “curb feelers” so I wouldn’t nick the whitewalls on this Sunday-only car. (He had a VW Fastback he drove to work in Detroit where he parked near a cement factory which spewed dust on all the vehicles in the parking lot. He told me to drive away from the curb more, so when I took my driver’s test, I failed as the instructor asked me why I drove almost in the middle of the road and made wide, right-hand turns! When I took the test over, a friend of the family took me and I aced it. 🙂

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      • Haha, no you never shared that story, and I love it!
        Whitewalls were really wide into the mid 50s, then got progressively narrower until they all but disappeared.

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      • Well, I was so embarrassed, I never told anyone I failed the test for the longest time. The VW Fastback was a stick shift and when he took me to the high school parking lot to practice how to use a stick, he kept shouting “you’re stripping my gears!” So we had to “train” with the Impala. They whitewalls were perfect with the old cars.

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    • Thanks! My favorite sightings are away from shows, where a once-common old car is still out in the wild, doing what it was made to do.

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  6. That photo reminds me of the weekend of the big Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) show held in early October in Hershey.

    For some reason, Buicks weren’t that common in our circle. Perhaps because Buick was the one GM division that did not have a dealer in our small town. In those days (1970s), driving an Electra or a Riviera still meant something.

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    • I was wondering the same thing about my own hometown. I recall only one Buick dealer there – Jim Kelly Buick, which was still located in downtown Fort Wayne all through the 1970’s. Other GM brands had multiple dealerships in widely spread areas of the city, and maybe this is why there just weren’t that many Buicks in my life up through that time.

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  7. While I’ve had only one Buick, a GM A-body cookie cutter car with a Buick nameplate, it was enough for me to understand how people used to pine for Buicks.

    I would love to have another; make mine a ’76 LeSabre with a 455. Go big or go home.

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  8. My Dad worked for General Motors for 14 years so he made sure my brother and I could identify any Cadillacs, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, and Chevrolets (the car he always drove) on the road in the 1950’s.

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  9. The only Buick I can think of is the Regal. It was popular with the rental agencies back in the day, and I remember thinking it was awfully large for a standard sedan, as if four passengers could fit comfortably across the back seat. The older models you show here would suggest any Buick is a large vehicle!

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  10. JP, it looks like I was unsubscribed to you again, so I just subscribed again. This is the second time this has happened. I thought you were doing the twice-weekly posts for 26 weeks … when I saw no Friday post this morning, I came over to your blog. Sigh. I’ll be back later to catch up. We are having storms again … on the heels of last night’s severe weather. (BTW – if you are stumped for the letter “Y” in about six months, did you know they are thinking of bringing the Yugo back?)

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    • Haha, I had actually forgotten about the Yugo – not that I have any photos of one, so it won’t help me in the end.

      I hope the subscription thing isn’t on my end – I will have to look and see if I have subscribers dropping off.

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      • I had forgotten that the Yugo’s fate was sealed when it was blown off the Mackinac Bridge. When I heard the news story I remembered that Yugo story, but Googled to re-read it. In the end it was high wind speeds on the Bridge and excessive speed by the Yugo’s driver, but of course, all anyone remembers is that the Yugo jumped the guard rail and went over. That was in 1989. The Mackinac Bridge often closes in high winds especially for high-profile vehicles, or you can ask for an escort to cross – the Bridge is five miles long. Me – I would stay put. 🙂 I hope you don’t have other subscribers who got unsubscribed … life these days is tough enough without losing faithful readers.

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      • At my last office park, there was another tenant who had been crazy about Yugos, and owned either 2 or 3 of them. She was a little counter-cultural, and claimed that they were great cars if you took decent care of them. She was also a dedicated stick shift driver and had just bought a new smaller Saturn SUV, which was some time in the early 2010s – which she absolutely despised, and said she wished she had her Yugo back. 🙂

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      • Now that woman may get her chance to own one again. I hope you don’t get the bad storms tonight. I heard your state gets them first and then they head here. It was bad here last night but no tornadic activity in my area thankfully.

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    • I just looked and don’t see anything to show that subscribers are getting kicked off from my end. I hope you figure things out. Are you having trouble with other sites?

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      • No, I am not having any problems on other sites that I know of and it is always good when people post on a certain schedule, like you (or me), so when the post doesn’t show up people know to look on the blogger’s actual site. My computer crashed last Sunday from a Microsoft update so I had to fix that, but I missed your last Friday post as well. I was sure you had said you were still going to do your Friday posts. WordPress sometimes … sigh.

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