Car Stuff: Random Sighting #37

This week I have another contribution from Just Bud Fox, who finds these vehicles when he's out taking lunchtime walks.

This blue barge is a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 two-door hardtop. Technically it's considered a 1963-1/2 Galaxie 500 "Sports Hardtop" because this model with a steeply angled roofline and rear window was a midyear introduction. (At the beginning of the '63 model year, the Galaxie 500 hardtop looked like this, and Ford continued to offer it alongside this one for the rest of the model year.)

It was curious for Ford to launch a new body style in the middle of the model year, especially since the more formal roofline with large "blind" side panels from the "regular" Galaxie 500 hardtop had originated with Ford back in 1958, with the introduction of the four-passenger Thunderbird. By the next year they had already started applying the roofline to the full-size Galaxie, a new model slotted above the long-running Fairlane. (Starting in 1962 the Fairlane name was transferred to Ford's new midsize cars, but by the end of the decade it had been phased out, supplanted by Torino.)

The formal roofline would return for 1965 on the new top-of-the-line LTD, and though Ford continued to offer a full-size two-door hardtop with a sweeping roofline through 1970, by that point the LTD's perceived luxury had become a much bigger selling point than any vague notion of sportiness, which had been shifted to the Mustang and, to a lesser extent, the Torino GT.

The '63 Fords were pretty attractive cars, perhaps not quite as appealing to me as the '63 Chevys, but close. Notice how the designers' 1950s habit of slathering on all sorts of trim bits is still in effect here: the individual letters on the hood and trunk, the little fin things on the edges of the hood, the full-length, bi-level side trim, the vertical doodads on the rear fender, the decorative panel across the rear that echoes the grille pattern, the attempt to make the roof look like a convertible top, etc.

(Back along the wall you can glimpse the Ranchero that I've featured previously, and that oxidized red thing on the right is a Yugo, a notoriously bad import from the 1980s. It's pretty amazing to see that one has survived.)