American Sports Car Culture in the Early 1950s

Consistently over the past few years my most popular blog post has been one on "Sports Cars." Consequently, after a period of fits and starts with topics, I have settled on post-WWII sports cars as my next scholarly endeavor. In starting out, I have done a search of the periodical literature, and some other textual and film sources. I found one particularly interesting newspaper article that has been both amusing and informative: Gilbert Millstein's "Sports-Car Society: The Ranking Knight of the Road is a Goggled Ad man in a Blower Bentley." I wanted to share some of the contents with you.

Millstein is big on the use of "types" in his analysis, an approach I am not terribly fond of. He breaks down the sports car set into various types, but categories get muddled over the course of this essay.

The sports-car type is one or more of the following:

1) All have wind and rain in their air.
2) They have goshawks in their eyes -- I have no clear idea what that means! -- perhaps the eyes of a raptor or falcon?
3) Stringed driving gloves.
4) A subscription to a British Motoring Magazine.
5) They call a foreign car a bomb of a bolide -- meteor.

These people drove their cars solely for pleasure.

Almost invariably, their residence or locus of activity are in discrete geographical areas:
Fairfield County, CT.
New York-Boston-Philadelphia
San Francisco or LA
Chicago Land or Milwaukee
Texas

Amusingly, Millstein remarks that "Money helps but is no guarantee of status." And "the majority of sports car people spend more than they have."

"They are eager to propagate the true faith; on the other, they are depressed at the prospect of losing coterie standing and complain that the highways are now twelve-deep in MGs and 8 deep in Jags."

This is an interesting photo from the early 1950s. In an attempt to redefine self, not the sports-car conformity that followed!

Millstein went on to write:

"Of the six types to be found in sports car society, the most numerous is the parvenu or arriviste. He is the man who once lived in Greenwich Village but moved to a good address in a bad brownstone on he East side and gave up collecting Dixieland records.... He buys a red MG, which he refers to as a "mill," and either has no idea what the initials stand for, or thinks it means Morris Garage when it actually is a Morris Garages. He wears hairy tweeds, a cap with a narrow peg and button on top, a Tattersall vest and a silk scarf; he keeps his car spectacularly clean...."

And more ....

"The second sports-car type is the advertising executive or art director who lives in Connecticut or on the West Bank of the Hudson. Having graduated from the MG to the Jaguar or Porsche, he has also learned to take lunch at the principal waterhole of the fraternity. This is the Midtown restaurant called the Chanteclair, one whose owners is a slender white-haired man in his forties named Rene Dreyfus, who was the racing champion of France in 1938."

And then finally, concerning who are a part of the sports-car set:

"The position of women in sports-car society is literally uncomfortable. They may not wear slacks. They must wear sports clothes designed by the haute couture in New York, California, or Italy and scarves which trail like Isadora Duncan's. They are also required to polish engines. They be neither bored nor too knowledgeable and must regard mink as something lesser than, say Aston-Martin."