Any Car, Any Color
My family purchased our first television in 1949 when it was the latest novelty. The screen was about the size of an iPad with black and white viewing, but we never considered these as limitations. The initial programming was pretty weak but they at least had the good sense to go off the air when it was time to be in bed. At the end of the broadcast day, the national anthem played as an American flag with forty-eight stars, filled the screen, flapping in the breeze. When the anthem was over, the screen would fill with a test pattern featuring a Native American in full headdress, signaling that the station had signed off. A minute later, the test pattern would disappear as the transmitting engineer cut off all power as required by the FCC.
The ads shown on television at that time contributed to the overall experience. If you watched TV anywhere in Southern California during the 1950s, there were commercials you could not avoid. Easily the most obnoxious was the ad for Troy Upholstery with the following catchy jingle.
Troy,
Troy,
What a joy,
We got our upholstery
done at Troy.
As the jingle repeated ad infinitum, a mastodon-sized man named Charles would gleefully bounce up and down on a couch as though it were a trampoline.
There were iconic TV commercial spokesmen that were as recognizable as Hollywood stars. Mad Man Muntz had an on-screen presence like Crazy Eddie and Cal Worthington rolled into one. He launched several enterprises including a car company that sold the Muntz-Jet. He manufactured and sold TVs with seventeen-inch screens for less than one hundred dollars and in 1952 had sales of $50,000,000. He was bigger than life, married seven times and named his daughter Tee Vee.
Jack Lalanne was an over-the-top spokesman, energetic beyond reason, a gorilla on Benzedrine. He hawked a string of health clubs and carried out countless public feats of strength, such as swimming around Balboa Island towing a Chris Craft by a rope held in his teeth. He began his own TV show in 1953 where he exercised, converted vegetable mulch into health drinks and hyperventilated. When he passed away in 2011, Arnold Schwarzenegger reverently described him as "an apostle for fitness".
Finally we come to Earl Scheib, who claimed his company would paint any car, any color, for $19.95 with one-day service. He started the company in 1937, manufactured his own paint, expanded until there were locations in twenty-three states and a few over seas. The most startling thing about his commercials was his gangster-sounding, gravel road voice.
In 1954, my dad decided to give Earl a try. We owned a 1950 two-door Ford sedan. The car was a dull grey, far from stylish in any way, very box-like, virtually an inverted bathtub on wheels. My mother wanted to pick out the new color and this was fine with my dad, so we rode over to one of Earl's one-day paint centers in Pasadena to look at the color selection. The salesman that waited on us presented a color chart with postage-stamp-size color swatches. There were six swatches. One of the six swatches was white and another was black. I pointed out that earlier that semester, my teacher Mrs. Kelley, had made it clear that neither black nor white, were considered to be a "color". The salesman said he would give us time to think it over and went to check on some other customers. My mother began making those choking noises that usually are the precursor for one of her laughing fits but my dad threw her off stride by saying, "Nowadays, everybody's crooked as a dog's hind leg, let's get out of here".
This upset my mother. She hated our Ford's blah grey color and was going to be hell to live with if we didn't see this through. My mother took a good long time to make a decision and her choice was no surprise. Despite no discussion among the three of us, no pointing, no hints or clues of any kind, she had selected the one color that neither my dad nor I would have picked in a hundred years. One of the reasons my mother was put on this earth was to insure the road less travelled never went untested. Her selection was a color swatch, beneath which were the words "Chevy coral".
Uncle Ray, my dad's brother, picked up my parents and me, and drove us back to Earl Scheib's the next day to get our car. We pulled into the paint center and rode slowly through the parking lot, looking for a 1950 Ford with a Chevy coral paint job. There was a point when I was sure we were all thinking the same thing, "It shouldn't be this tough to find the car, they must still be working on it".
Then my dad said, "Christ on a bicycle". There was among the cars in the parking lot, a single 1950 two-door Ford sedan, but it was not painted Chevy coral. It was painted a bright Pink. Not just pink, this was Liberace pink.
"That can't be it."
"That is NOT Chevy coral!"
"They screwed it up."
"Christ on a bicycle."
"What was wrong with black, you couldn't just go with black?"
"That's gonna turn some heads."
"In a pig's rear end that's coral."
"I can't believe it."
"It's a mistake, go talk to somebody."
"That's not our car, it's somebody else's car."
"Christ on a bicycle."
My dad went into the office to talk to the salesman and a few minutes later returned to my uncle's car. My dad said that the pink car was ours. There was no mistake. That is Chevy coral. According to the salesman, the postage-stamp-size color swatches are accurate. The car is the same color as the swatch. The car may seem a little different simply because it's just a whole lot bigger.
We all mulled this over quietly and then realized that my dad had reported all this information with a big smile on his face. My mother began to snort-laugh and my dad and uncle let loose. I was still very grim. I was not looking forward to being seen riding around in a pink car. To my parents and my uncle, the expression on my face was even more hilarious than the color of the car.
It soon was time for my uncle to take off and for my parents and me to get into our freshly painted car and head home. We took Colorado Boulevard west across the Arroyo Seco by way of the old suicide bridge as the 134 & 210 freeways had yet to be built. The car was a definite crowd pleaser. Along the way, there wasn't a driver, passenger or pedestrian that failed to do a double take. When we got to Eagle Rock and later to our street, we made a u-turn in front of our house. Glen Barfield was standing in his front yard. He was a kid in my class at school and lived directly across the street from us. As we were getting out of the car, Glen ran back to his front porch, where we heard him yell to his parents through the screen door, "Can we paint our car pink like the Gardiols?"